Acceptable Losses

By Simon Wood

The place was different but the story was the same. The Japs had won at the expense of the British. They’d been particularly ruthless on this occasion. Besides the bullet-riddled and grenade-ravaged corpses, he recognized the hallmarks of ritual decapitation and disembowelment. The battle over, they’d set about the wounded with their samurai swords.

Blood from hundreds saturated the beach. Clelland hadn’t realized until he became a Bucket Boy that blood had an odor. It wasn’t unpleasant, just overpowering, suffocating, like being trapped in a room filled with stale air.

The soldiers had been dead some time. Twelve to fourteen hours, by Clelland’s estimates. The blazing sun had had a chance to cook the flesh. What should have been pink had blanched and turned beige. Instead of just the usual stench of shit and rotting flesh, a human barbecue was in progress.

Wearing the Dead

by Alan Smale

Trixie’s dead claws scrabbled faintly against the wooden stairs. The hairs on my arm came alive. It was clear Robbie hadn’t heard a thing.

What the heck could I say next? “I see you have tattoos.”

“Yep,” he said, and pushed up the sleeve on his right arm. “Check this out.”

They were hard to figure; dark shadows against his black skin. Against my better judgment, I was intrigued. I stepped forward.

It was a Celtic knot in a thick swirly pattern that went all around his bicep. He pushed up his left sleeve to show the silhouette of a heart with a long dagger thrust through it, ornamented with scrollwork.

“Neat,” I said. “Got any more?”

Robbie hesitated, and I realized what a potentially stupid question that had been.

Gretel

by Camille Alexa

He was tall and quiet, and thinner even than Gretel. Cigarette burn scars covered one cheek, and he was blind in his left eye from an especially bad night with his father. Gretel thought he was beautiful.

You’re beautiful, he told her later that night, after her stepmother had driven away and Brykerwoods orderlies had taken Gretel’s leather jacket and the contents of her pockets… but not the lipstick tube they hadn’t found in her bra. After she’d found him, like an uncharted territory, or an undiscovered planet, sitting on the dirty white linoleum next to a vacant chair in an empty TV room without a television. After she’d had handed him one hit of acid and placed the other under her tongue. You’re beautiful.

I’m not, she said. My front teeth jut like fallen tombstones. My nose is the size of a bus and my hair is like strips of rotting bacon and my eyes are small and brown as rabbit turds. You must be tripping.

And he said, I am, but that’s not why I like you.

The Dark Level

by John F.D. Taff

Monday morning came, and Jim wondered at the fact that no other cars followed or preceded him into the garage. And yet, as his car swirled down the ramps, he noticed that almost every parking space was filled.

He’d gone slowly down three levels looking for space “1103” before it became so dark he was forced to turn on the headlights. He barely made out a “321” in dirty yellow numbers on an empty space to his left, between a Thunderbird and a Stanza.

As he wound deeper into the building, his eyes became adjusted to the dim light. Still, he did not see a single person; no one pulling into a space, climbing out of a car, filing toward the bank of elevators.

Motes of dust sparkled in his headlights as his car swept through the aisles. The parked cars wore the dust like sequined dresses.

His car curled around the last corner, and he barely saw the numerals painted onto the dingy wall as his headlights raked across them.

Level 11.

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.