Five Stars: Five Outstanding Tales from the early days of Stupefying Stories (8 page)

A brown beard shot through with gray covered much of the captain’s face, and above it, dark eyes regarded me with a mixture of curiosity and distrust. “Will you come quietly, or will we have to force you to come along?” he asked me.

“That depends on where you plan to take me.” The worm writhed inside me. I fought the urge to grimace, not wanting the captain of the guards to find me weak.

“The witch would like to see you.”

Not the dungeons then. “Very well. I’ll go quietly.”

They kept me in their midst as they led me back to the gates and then through. Hooves clattered against cobblestone streets, and everyone gave us wide berth. I ignored the curious stares as we passed through the strangely quiet market and then entered the narrow lanes between homes.

We came to a road which ran to a dead end, butting up against the stone wall that surrounded Lowshire. Ivy covered most of the wall on this side, but could not hide the drab gray stone altogether. At the far end stood the two-story home from which the servant woman had yelled at me.

The witch’s shop-sign hung from a house near the end of the street. A worm, outlined as if in diamonds, sparkled from the wooden square hanging over the door. Unlike other signs, this one was alive with magic. The worm crawled across the side facing me, then disappeared to the other side only to return again a moment later. The one within me twisted as if in response.

The captain of the guard prodded me with one boot. “Go on.”

They remained at the road’s junction. With each building built against the next, there was no way for me to escape. That suited me fine. I meant to finish my business with the witch.

My heart hammered when I stopped before the witch’s door. I took a deep breath and pushed. It was locked.

Was this some cruel joke on the part of the guards, one final taunt before they hauled me to the dungeons? To come all this way and find her not home loosed the dam inside me. The tears that had not come earlier came now, great sobs arising from deep within me and making me shudder. I sagged against the wall.

“You came,” the witch said behind me. “I wondered if you would.”

And there she stood, in the center of the cobblestone street. Her shorn head made her blue eyes seem wider. Her round face was smooth as glazed pottery, her features perfect in every way, save for the round, raised, ragged scar that marked her right cheek. I had taken her first worm out through that spot. She wore a diaphanous gown over form-fitting clothing that hid little. Her worm shone through her skin and clothes, a silvery being that swirled around one thigh, swimming through her belly to curl around her shoulders like a cloak of fox fur.

I drew my sword and ran towards her. She held up a hand and a wall of magic hit me. The sword fell to the cobblestones with a clang. My legs would not move, no matter how I strained.

Her mouth smiled, but it did not touch her eyes. “I’m glad to see you suffer as I suffered, when you ripped out my first worm.” Her hand rose to her cheek, traced the scar, then fell back to her side. “You won’t take this worm, though.” She cocked her head. “I could remove your crown and ease your suffering, let the plague takes its course within you. But I think I won’t.”

There were no words that could convey the depth of my hatred and anger, and so I remained silent. I struggled against the magic holding me in place, but did not know how to focus my worm’s power against her. The creature thrashed inside me. Fever flushed my face and neck. I shifted, letting the cloak and tunic slip just enough to reveal the worm’s hook.

The witch’s eyes widened at the sight. “I thought you lied.” She raised both hands, her fingers curled into claws. The magic barrier around me shifted and began to press at my arm. She wanted me to pull my worm free. “You were a fool to bring the worm here.”

I fought the magic, not wanting her to guess that she did exactly as I wished. Sweat broke out along my forehead. The force of the witch’s magic moved my hand ever closer to the hook, and then my fingers closed around it.

I pulled, ripping the worm free. It felt as though I ripped out my own entrails from the gaping wound in my shoulder. The worm, bloody, wriggled in my grasp and snapped its teeth, reduced to a deathly gray again.

The witch grabbed my wrist and yanked my hand—and the worm—to her. “No witch has ever had the opportunity to control two worms.” Her pupils dilated as she took in the sight of it, as if watching a lover.

The creature clamped its teeth on the witch’s belly. The magic holding me back was suddenly gone. I let go of the worm and stumbled away.

The witch’s worm uncoiled itself from around her shoulders and shuddered. It darted around her waist, down one leg and up, down to the fingers of one hand.

My worm’s skin, meanwhile, began to shimmer as it burrowed eagerly into the witch’s flesh.

Her face crinkled in pain, and she doubled over. “What is this?” she gasped. She grabbed my worm’s tail and tried to pull, but it flicked itself free. Then it roamed inside her, a shimmering outline marking its passage. “Get it out of me!”

I said, “The plague that rides my blood now rides in you.”

Her eyes rolled back. She fell to her knees and let out a piercing scream.

The guards dismounted, all of them drawing swords. Their horses snorted and pranced away. The guards rushed towards us, then paused, their gazes turning from the witch to me and back to her.

The captain of the guard came to his senses first. He pointed to several men. “Take her to the castle and see that the healer tends to her immediately. The rest of you, we’re taking him,” he said as he pointed his sword at me.

The witch raised a trembling hand. The guards hesitated again. Then my sword jumped from the cobblestones and flew through the air toward her, slicing her head from her body.

She crumpled in a heap as her head rolled, and blood pooled around her.

Both worms emerged from her neck. Covered in her blood, they crawled away.

“Don’t let them touch you,” I said to the guards. “They carry the plague that killed my people, and her.”

The guards scrambled back, letting the worms slither down the cobblestone street, leaving a blood trail behind. One of the men turned and retched.

I spoke to the captain of the guard. “I’m infected as well. Give me a horse and I will leave this place, and let your people be.” He hurried to obey.

It was time to go home.

¤

The sun rose on burnt buildings and ash-covered streets. From one pile of ash, a sharp bone stuck out.

This was my kingdom, this ash, this bone. But a living man cannot rule a kingdom of the dead. I sat in the ash, sending flurries of it dancing in the air. My hands found the crown atop my head, and pulled it free.

Rebecca Roland
 lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she writes primarily fantasy and horror. Her short fiction has appeared in
 Everyday Fiction, Uncle John’s Flush Fiction
 and in 
Stupefying Stories
, and she is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. When she’s not writing, she’s usually spending time with her family, torturing patients as a physical therapist, or eating way too much chocolate.

You can find her
at Spice of Life (rebeccaroland.blogspot.com), at rebeccaroland.net, or follow her on Twitter @rebecca_roland.

Return to Earth

by Ryan M. Jones

Azrial gazed over the field of broken stone,
crouching in the shell of a collapsed building. The only noise was the whisper of her breather, filtering the toxic atmosphere. Her retinal implants cut through the fog, interpreting wavelengths her natural eyes could never have processed.

Her enhanced vision marked her destination in red, vibrant against the miserable grays and browns. She was heading to a badly damaged building across the old city park. From orbit, it looked like the remains of a private medical clinic, but the fragmented records preserved from before the Fall could not confirm it.

That was years ago. In the first weeks after humanity’s desperate escape from Earth, this was one of the few buildings targeted and demolished by the Machines. Most other buildings were either damaged in the initial fighting or else left empty and intact, but this one was leveled after the war was over. No one knew the reason why, so Azrial was sent down to learn what she could. After all, as far as mankind’s future was concerned, she was expendable.

No movement. Good
.

Only the charred trunks of fallen trees gave any cover. She would have to move quickly. A Machine had passed by here in the last few hours, tread tracks still fresh in the dust of crumbling gray grass. It could still be in the area.

She whispered into her comm link, the sound muffled under the breathing apparatus.

“Nothing out here. I’m going in.”

She waited for the response from orbit, counting heartbeats. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand—

Static buzzed in her ear.

“Affirmative. Report when you make contact. Be careful.”

Azrial closed the connection and lifted her pulse rifle. She stepped forward, feeling the hot air on her face where the breather did not cover it. A branch snapped beneath the black boot of her exosuit. She glanced down—no, not a branch. A pale rib, dry and brittle. A few feet away, half-buried in the sterile dust, lay the white dome of a skull.

Damn. We really screwed this place up
.

She slipped from tree to tree, crossing the park, as her ears strained for the hum of a Machine or the creak of a ruined tree trunk crashing to the ground. Her nanocells wordlessly processed chemical aids, boosting her awareness, tuning her reflexes.

The ceiling of the building was completely gone. She stepped through a gap in the wall. Glass crunched into the dirty carpet beneath her boots. Shattered office equipment was half-buried in the rubble. An overturned shelf still held some charred folders. She poked through them, recording what little text was still legible with her memory implants, parsing the data for a lead.

No clues here
.

She moved deeper into the ruin, careful to stay clear of the sections of ceiling that still sagged. A set of elevator doors in a section of intact wall were slightly open, though no elevator car seemed to remain inside.

A flash of light caught her eye. Sticking out of the rubble, a thick cable spat sparks from a frayed end.

Part of this building still has power. A backup generator, maybe
?

Her cochlear implant buzzed with static.

“Orbit to Azzie: your heart rate just shot up. Everything okay?”

“Affirmative. Just excited. It looks like part of the building is still powered. But there’s not much left up here. If there’s anything to find, it’s going to be below ground.”

A long pause.

“Our satellites show no enemy activity near you or the lander. We estimate you have about twenty minutes before the message of your arrival spreads and they begin to converge on you. Expect to lose radio contact once underground.”

“Affirmative. I’ll check my watch. Talk to you when I’m back up.”

¤

Azrial moved to the elevator doors and tried to pull them open, but they did not budge. Maybe part of the mechanism was fused? She subvocalized a command to the nanogland implanted in the base of her skull, felt the surge of power as nanocells throughout her body manufactured stimulants.

This time the doors opened with a grinding noise, as Azrial strained against them. Doubtless she’d injured herself pushing that hard, but the nanocells would already be at work restoring the damage. The shaft was partly choked with rubble, but not impassable. She climbed down to the basement level and forced those doors open as well.

She blinked in the sudden glare of artificial light. The lower level was surprisingly intact. A nurse’s desk, filled with papers and coffee mugs; a row of chairs, and a rack of old magazines. For a moment it seemed as if she had only arrived late for an appointment, and all the terror of the past fifteen years was a dream. No frantic rush to the shuttles and space elevators, coughing blood from the poisoned atmosphere that sterilized and killed. No murder over the reserves of air and food on Luna, as frantic refugees crowded into the domes. No frozen bones bleaching in the dust of Mare Serenitatis.

As she stepped forward, the illusion of normalcy was quickly dispelled. A pair of mummified legs in stained scrubs protruded from behind the counter. She stepped over them, not looking down, and moved silently down the hall. She listened for any sound beyond that of her booming heart and the too-loud rasp of her breathing apparatus; the tread of a wheel, the hum of a photocell. But the hall was as silent as the landscape above.

After several turns and branches of the corridors, Azrial came to a door, slightly ajar. She gently pushed it open the rest of the way with the muzzle of her rifle, looked inside, and froze. A Machine hulked in the room beyond, slouched like a drunk against a pile of smashed steel crates. It looked almost like a massive human, save for the blades and the many eyes. Withered bodies in lab coats were strewn about. Most were in pieces; the blades on the Machine’s arm would have gone through human flesh as if it was made of soft butter.

She held still, watching for signs of activity from the razored steel giant, but it did not move. Hardly daring to hope, she edged into the room. It did not twitch. But what had brought it down?

In a moment she had her answer. Crushed beneath the chrome trunk was a white-coated body, holding a wire-sheathed globe. When she gently lifted it from the corpse’s hand, it suddenly crackled.

The light globe in the ceiling gave a strange buzz and went out. All she could see was the glow of her wrist com and the data imposed on her vision by her retinal implants. Before her eyes had a chance to adjust or switch to night vision, the room burst into white light again, sizzling with weird surges of static, green halos of pale fire dancing all around them. Her cochlear implant shrieked painfully and went dead. The text on her retinal display vanished. A moment later the phosphorescent glow faded, and the darkness returned with a terrible weight—this time unbroken by any source of light at all. Her comm was inert, her weapon dark, and none of the facility’s lights were on.

Some sort of improvised EMP device or something? Crap. Crap crap crap.

She forced herself to calm down, slowing her breathing, letting her heart rate drop. It took a very long time without the assistance of her networked nanocells.

After what seemed an eternity, the facility lights flickered back on. The status indicators on her pulse rifle reactivated. Her breather continued to supply untainted air. But her nanogland remained inert. The stimulants, the boosted reflexes, the continual repairs to her body, all had been shut down. She felt heavy, sluggish, and blind without the retinal display, as if one of her senses had been removed.

I’ll never get clear of the Machines like this. Maybe it just needs a reboot. This was a clinic; they must have a nano diagnostic somewhere. The rifle rebooted, after all. The damage can’t be too bad.

She began to examine the room, struggling to commit each detail to memory, now that her indexed memory implants were no longer recording.

One of her feet crunched over broken glass, stirring up a weirdly pungent smell. Vials. Small glass vials were scattered everywhere. Most were broken.

Some of the waist high metal crates were open, with metal trays hanging out, filled with slivers of glass. Their walls were thick, heavily insulated.

Probably for transporting something frozen.

The glass continued to crunch with each step. Occasionally she had to pick her way over the wreckage of an insulated metal crate. Had the Machines attacked the crates too?

If the vials contained some sort of biological weapon, she was already exposed and probably done for. But biological weapons, while effective against humans, were rather less effective on Machines.

Her fingertips brushed the smooth surface of a warm crate, then the cold twisted surface of the next.

Wait
.

She stepped back, and felt the unbroken surface of the crate. Her probing fingers revealed it was warm on one side, with a sort of vent in the surface.

Not crates. They’re freezers. And this one is still running. Somehow.

Cautiously, she opened the freezer. It was filled with racks of icy vials, thousands of them, all intact. She removed one and read the label:

Fertilized human egg cell, patient 40034.

Amherst Fertility Clinic.

She felt the blood drain from her face. She replaced the vial with trembling fingers and carefully closed the freezer door.

Oh my God. Please let there be more. Not just this one freezer left.

She quickly sifted through the debris, but only this one freezer remained intact, running for years on a dying power cell. This was what the Machines had tried to destroy; an entire generation of unborn humans. This was no accident. They had purposefully tried to exterminate the human race—and with so many survivors like Azrial left totally sterilized, it was possible that the Machines had succeeded. Certainly, those few women still able to bear children were far too important to risk on ground missions. But such women were too few, far too few.

This freezer held the future of mankind.

Azrial struggled to lift the freezer, but was barely able to budge it.

I have to find a nano diagnostic interface.

She reluctantly left the treasures of the freezer room and crept through the maze of sagging halls, until she located a set of diagnostic monitors and sensor apparatus on a wheeled cart. Nearby lay the still form of a second Machine, curled in a fetal position in the thick dust. Azrial raised the pulse rifle and approached, finger feather-light on the trigger. When the heavy chrome body did not stir, she turned to the diagnostic interface, letting out a breath of relief as the screen lit. It still had power.

Azrial attached the interface electrode to the back of her skull and entered the command to access her implants. Soon, the screen was filled with status readouts. It looked as if some implants were burned out, but as long as the nanogland was okay, it could coordinate repairs.

She almost laughed when she saw the query on the monitor’s screen.

Implanted artificial nanohive gland deactivated improperly. Superficial damage detected, core mechanisms intact. Initiate startup and maintenance sequence?

She touched ‘yes.’

An instant later a shock ran through her body, contorting her muscles. She could not scream but fell to the floor, her weight jerking the electrode loose.

Her retinal display came back online.

Azrial painfully climbed to her feet, leaning on her rifle.

What the hell just happened?

She tried to request a status report from the nanogland but got only a “Status unavailable” message. She scanned through her memory log, verified that the system was again recording what she saw. Her systems seemed to be back online, despite the unavailable message. She celebrated by ordering a small hit of sedatives and felt her earlier panic slip away.

As she returned to the room with the broken freezers, she coordinated instructions with her nanogland, which appeared to be accepting commands as normal. Her bones had already been reinforced, thanks to the years of ministration from the nanocells, but bones alone would not be enough to lift the heavy freezer. The nanocells began to spin reinforced nanowire ligaments and to prepare a bolus of stimulants. Her body would be horribly strained by the demands of providing these raw materials so quickly, but she could sort that out later—for the moment, all that mattered was getting the freezer to the lander. The food stores in the lander would feed both her and her nanocells.

By the time she reached the intact freezer, she was able to drag it along the floor. By the time she reached the elevator shaft, she was able to push it up the side of the shaft, to the ground level.

On the surface, it was already dark.

Way past twenty minutes. I hope the lander’s intact.

She tried to hail Orbital command, but instead got only a terrible screech in her ears.

Suddenly, her retinal display glowed.

Sync complete. Instructions updated.