Oded the Merciless

by Tina Starr

The voice jarred her again.

“Meluna. Your scars are not unattractive. Your missing ears are no detraction from your beauty. Your sunken left cheekbone allows an aesthetic break from symmetry as does your partially amputated nose. Your lips have been sewn into small grooves and peaks that provide sensual variety in color and texture. Your body…”

“Shut up!” She shouted the words, putting her hands over the holes where her ears had been. The movement made her tilt, off balance. She collapsed with a moan. The voice coming from everywhere like a god’s voice, saying such things to her. Obscene.

If there was a god, he’d abandoned her months ago.

Ankor Sabat

by C. Deskin Rink

But less than a year later, when Lord Galen returned home from a hunting trip, he discovered four of his guards torn limb-from-limb, his bedroom window broken in from the outside, monstrous claw marks on the second floor balcony and, of his beloved, no trace. Most disturbing of all was what he beheld graven into the wall above her bed: a monstrous blue sigil in the form of a six-lobed eye. No earthly implement could have rendered the perfectly aligned delineations of that unmentionable shape; nor could any earthly ink have provided its hateful color which glimmered balefully even in total darkness.

Terrible was Lord Galen’s grief, but even more terrible was the thing which grew by degrees within him: his wrath.

Charlie Harmer Looks Back

by Brendan Detzner

The boss is coming. She graciously gives me time to collect myself. We’re in some kind of a lounge; everything is upholstered with vertical stripes and there are flaming torches on the walls. The boss is not big on context, sometimes. I don’t hold it against her, she’s a busy lady.

It’s really warm in here.

The smell of sulfur fills the air and vanishes, and she’s sitting in front of me. She’s wearing a red dress. She has long, sumptuous brown hair; you want to go swimming in it, you imagine it cool against your skin like water.

“You’re staring, Charlie,” she says.

“I’m sorry, I can’t help myself. I didn’t think I’d have the chance to see you again.”

I had a regular job not too long ago but I did something I shouldn’t have and lost it. She fired me, but never got upset. She’s never all that surprised when people do things they shouldn’t.

The Identifier

by Mark Patrick Morehead

I clear a space toward the back of my sorting table, by the auto parts bin. It’s as far back as I can reach and enough other crap is piled there that the bottle will probably go unnoticed.

My hands start sweating and claustrophobia about overwhelms me when I pick up the bottle again–it’s like my wheelchair is a big mousetrap and I’m pinned by the refrigerator with the lights on and the man of the house stomping toward me with stick.

Smoothly, and I hope nonchalantly, I move the bottle to the table and push some old rags against it. Still no one looking. Leaning back, I relax a little even though this was the easy part.

“This is the day,” I tell myself. “After all this time, this is my day.”

Two years. That’s how long I’ve been here. They caught me a couple weeks after the war started. Damn it happened fast. They just appeared, everywhere, all across the world. One day the price of oil and some brush war were the big news; the next day, the world broke and they invaded what was left. Maorg, Hoods and a half-dozen other kinds appeared out of nowhere, hitting every continent at once.

Learning to Fly

by Garth Upshaw

I set my feet and reached for the next rung of the ladder. The wind snatched at my clothes, whipping my bomber jacket against my thighs, and then pulling it outwards in a billow, tugging me sideways towards the scary drop.

I muttered three short Words, voice cracking on the last, and the wind’s grip slackened, leaving me in a fragile bubble of calm. I sagged against the wet, rusty ladder. Spots flickered at the edge of my vision, and I tried to catch my breath. The preparation for tonight had taken months, and electric anticipation warred with the exhaustion in my body.

I’d snared the rats with generous dollops of peanut butter in long rectangular, live-catch traps. Their fur was sleek and glossy. They were greedy, bright-eyed pests, always wanting more than they needed. Never satisfied.

Spirit of Nationalism

by Richard Marsden

The wind bit into his skin like daggers into flesh. The cold was like no other he had felt, and he knew it was only going to get worse, day by day. Never mind the night; even people such as himself had to find shelter by night or end up a victim of his own trade by dawn. Gregorie’s eyes panned out across the vast, empty, bleak Russian landscape. It reminded him of looking out to sea from the docks at Cherbourg, with its long piers and obstacle strewn harbor to keep His enemies at bay. The steppes of Russia, much like the waters outside the port city.

Here and there he could spy a single tree, or what looked to be a hill or solitary steeple. White land, white skies, and cold wind made Gregorie curse Him again. Why had they marched so far? What was the point of Borodino and the thousands dead they had to leave unburied, and only a week ago had to trample upon as they retreated? There was no point, beyond the vainglory visions of a man. Of Him!

A groan redirected Gregorie’s thoughts. He looked at the makeshift path the Grand Army had carved through the snow. While Russia might be near-featureless, His army was leaving behind plenty of markers.

The Getalong Gang

by Barrie Darke

It occurred to me later that week that maybe, just perhaps, it was happening to the other family men in the office, that they were also noticing these things about their families –- Thomas Malone, only in his early 20s but with two young boys, looked harried a lot of the time, and I thought about taking him out for a drink after work one day. But how do you go about broaching that subject? How many drinks would you need in you to mention you thought your family had been…? And what would happen to you if you got back looks that moved from the merely quizzical to the horribly worried? The whole idea of it happening elsewhere to other people was still hazy at that point anyway, so I thought I’d better let him come to me. I was an approachable boss, after all.

At home, it was how I imagine living in a haunted house must be. You moved in dread of every little awry sign, trying to convince yourself that the gaps between them were widening rather than shortening, accelerating. And that if the signs were there, then they really weren’t growing any more significant, they really weren’t becoming bone-rattlingly critical.