Brega met the attack with a lunging chop that split the hand clear down to the wrist. She tried to pull the axe free for a second swing. The Titan howled with horror and pulled back, whipping the axe from Brega's grip. The weapon was lodged in the knob of bone at the end of the Titan's forearm.
Overhead, the lamp cracked again. This time it was accompanied by a gushing hiss.
Brega grabbed the safety rail around the central shaft with both hands and pulled herself over. The Titan's uninjured hand snatched at her heels as she dropped into the shaft. As she fell, she heard the old god snarl in frustration.
The shaft was pitch dark. Brega had no time to prepare for the impact as she crashed into the surface of the water. It beat the breath from her body and all sensation from her skin. She plunged deep enough that the roiling wake of the tide-pumped ram blades below turned her upside down. They were set too far down in the sunken chamber to present any danger, but the churn they created hampered her effort to orient herself. She twisted, frantic to right herself and locate the surface.
A flash of green light directly above her was followed by a cacophonous thunderclap that stabbed at the insides of her ears. The great lamp had burst, flooding the upper lighthouse with a phosphorescent admixture that vapourised as it mingled with the air.
Now that she knew which way up was, Brega struck out for the nearest wall. She surfaced, gasping and turning her face away as shards of crystal plummeted into the turbine chamber, trailing green wisps of glowing chemicals behind them.
The Titan's voice rumbled "No corner of the earth you can run to, small one." The threat trailed off in a quizzical rising pitch, followed by a series of hacking coughs.
Brega sucked in a deep breath and dived for the narrow rock tunnel that channelled the sea water into the turbine chamber. The current was against her but she knew it was not far. She pushed with every ounce of strength in her and emerged, coughing, in the churning surf off the rocky headland.
She looked up at the peak of the lighthouse, where a gaseous green cloud billowed and clung like algae to the old stonework. Inside, she knew, the same gas would be pumping down, flooding her sleeping chamber, spilling into her kitchen and the workshop and down into the drive room.
The Titan's final shrieking scream was muffled by the dense poison clouds and the impervious stone blocks of the lighthouse.
"Take the oar if you can," called Captain Cerradi's voice. The ghosts' dinghy bobbed in the surf; a sailor extended an oak paddle longer than she was tall. Brega closed her hand around it and allowed herself to be hauled aboard.
"Thank you," she said, coughing salt from her lungs. Worse than salt, most likely.
She didn't look up at the fresh rumbling from the lighthouse. "Row hard," she instructed the captain. "The gas is corrosive. The lighthouse will not last long." The sailors put their backs into it, and as the longboat picked up speed Brega dismissed all thought that she was being rescued by dead men in a dead boat.
"We can't go beyond the beach," observed Captain Cerradi.
"Then take me to the beach."
The lighthouse collapsed in on itself in a rising plume of glowing dust as Brega splashed ashore. Assent was waiting for her there, bleeding freely from cuts on his head and neck. He was paler than ever and swayed, not quite fixing his eyes upon her. He held a rope. The mule tethered to it sneezed and shook dust and stone chips from its mane.
"Professor?"
"When the wall came down I fell through to the stable," said Assent. "My friend here led me to safety."
Brega shook her head. "Sensitive to the Ministry's expectations." She swept past him. "I'm glad you're alive."
Assent followed as she strode toward the dunes. Captain Cerradi fell in beside her. "There are more bones along this coast, aren't there?"
The captain nodded. "We hunt for them by day and we always find more. When our bodies come back at night, we collect them and bury them in separate holes. Every night for two hundred years. Three hundred. Who knows really?"
"Can you keep it up for one more year?"
"Why?" The captain looked back at his men, unwearied by the centuries of mindless labour. "What are you going to do?"
Brega looked along the empty sand at the collapsing dunes and the rocky promontory, wave-worn and crumbling. Out to sea, beyond the headland, the first beams of dawn were cutting through thunderheads of another storm brewing afresh.
She put a hand on Assent's shoulder.
"We're going to the Ministry. I'm coming back with an army."
Some stories begin with a vivid image, or a distinct character, or sometimes of memorable line of dialogue. This one began when I sat down in a café, opened a story-prompt app on my phone, and began writing about the first set of images it produced: a skull-and-bones, a lighthouse and a ghost. All the other details emerged from that opening scene.
Grumpy veteran Brega remains one of my favourite characters I've written. I've considered the idea of writing a novel about her military career, but I don't have the nerve for the job. She'd fight me all the way, and I think we all know who'd win that battle.
'The Lighthouse at Cape Defeat' was first published in Aurealis Issue 89 (Chimaera Publications, April 2016), edited by Dirk Strasser. It was a finalist in the Best Fantasy Short Story category for the 2017 Aurealis Awards.
Industrial Disease
Kenny Hallam did the reading, so he knew wind turbines were killers.
He sent his oldies all the links: this article from a science skeptic journal; that survey run by a leading national newspaper; the other ebook by a recovering survivor entitled "Tremors: The Renewable Killer". When he called home every Saturday morning, he explained what he'd learned by digging deep into the online forums keeping a weather eye on the Warmists, Feminazis and Social Justice Mercenaries.
His Mum listened carefully to his arguments, except one time while he was laying out how Big Pharma was colluding with the Neo-Luddite Left, he caught her putting down the phone to make a cup of tea.
None of it did any good. One weekend his Mum messaged him a collection of photos of the windfarm – tall, white giants rising up over the ridge above the family farm like an invading army.
"It's a great investment," his Dad told him. "Besides, I like the sound of them."
The photos never showed the base of the windmills. Kenny wondered how many dead birds and vomiting kangaroos his Mum had cropped out of the pictures.
Kenny fretted. "Low frequency subsonics," they called it. The turning blades vibrated on a wavelength undetectable to people but deadly to animal tissue over prolonged periods. Everyone knew they would rattle your brains if you got too close for too long.
He opened up about his concerns online; one by one his forum mates confirmed what he suspected.
"They rattle your brains," said one.
"If your heart beats at the wrong rate," said another, "you'll fibrillate and arrest on the spot."
When his Dad called to say Mum had collapsed and been rushed to hospital, Kenny knew he'd waited too long to act. "Nothing on the x-rays," said Dad. "The doctors are baffled."
Not Kenny though. He knew.
The wind turbines couldn't be cut down or burned out; everyone knew they were made of Chinese military alloys. Grandad's old .303 rifle would go through armour plating, but Dad kept it locked up and besides Kenny didn't know what ammunition to use.
Besides, that was just attacking the symptoms. Kenny wanted to make sure what happened to his Mum couldn't happen to anyone else.
He went back online to form an agile research posse. He asked questions and called in favours.
One forum user sent him a map of the local manufacturing plant of PowerZephyr International, along with security guard schedules and an electronic access card. Another gave him a list of ingredients, most of which were freely available in his Dad's unlocked agricultural shed. A third agreed to mail him a custom-made remote activation device in exchange for a promise to livestream his covert operation.
For the lulz, they solemnly agreed.
A couple of nights later, Kenny muttered at a handheld sports camera as he backed a truck up to the loading dock of the PowerZephyr factory. "This is only Stage One," he said, framing his face in shot so that a tall white forest of swooping turbine blades filled the background. They spun out implacable waves of invisible death, sending shivers up Kenny's spine.
"After I'm done here, I'm going straight to the board's annual meeting at the golf club. Thanks to forum user FreedomBallz's generous donation, I've got two jerry cans of premium unleaded that are dying to meet some rich bastards' Audis and BMWs in the carpark."
The passcode opened up a roller door. Kenny pushed his craft project in on a trolley jack and settled it between two complicated-looking factory robots. "Okay, that's set," he told the watching world which, according to his monitoring app, was a jaw-dropping 47 live viewers. He held up the remote detonator. "This murder-blade manufactory is going up in smoke. Once I'm clear of the blast radius, I'm going to trigger this switch here and –"
Kenny's Mum, still suffering the after-effects of septic poisoning from a tick lodged between her toes, was discharged from hospital in time for the closed casket funeral.
She and Kenny's Dad delivered a short, apologetic eulogy on the topic of their son's passion for hidden truths and his loyalty to his online friends.
They didn't mention their conversation with the coroner about her preliminary findings. "The explosive device's premature detonation was the result of shoddy assembly. Two loose contacts accidentally touched, closing the trigger circuit."
Kenny's parents, relieved to hear his death was unintentional, said, "But in his video he was being so careful?"
"Yes, the contact was probably caused by some external tremor or vibration. Mostly likely your son never heard it at all."
This story was one of the earliest entries in my weekly Friday flash fiction project. It was also one of the first stories I wrote in a subgenre I now call Dumb Crime, in which criminals with below average risk assessment skills make bad choices. Fun for me; less so for the characters involved.
The idea for it comes from the unscientific belief, ludicrously advanced by certain public figures in Australian politics and media who should know better, that wind turbines generate health-threatening infrasound waves. Strangely there doesn't seem to be a lot of medical evidence to support this theory.
'Industrial Disease' was first published in August 2017 as a Friday Flash Fiction post at DavidVersace.com.
Breakdown
Steam spat out of the CD player as the Mitsubishi's engine blew. Brendan's copy of the Spin Doctors' 'Pocket Full of Kryptonite' died with a crackle He launched into a hacking cough as he stamped on the brakes.
The car had settled into a flat cruise at one hundred and forty kilometres an hour on its dead-straight trajectory; now it locked up and began a smoking skid. Brendan's beer ricocheted from the centre console under the passenger seat.
Stephen bounced against the passenger seatbelt, shaken out of a doze, limbs flailing. He exclaimed, "What the fuck is that?" at a blur on the spinning horizon before steam filled the cabin.
Brendan wrestled with the steering wheel, rocking it like he was cleaning a kid's Etch-a-sketch. The Mitsubishi slid along the layer of fine sand spread across the flat highway tarmac like flour on a baker's bench. The screaming tyres became blue streaks in black smoke.
Finally the slide ended with a shuddering bump. The smoke caught up with them just as Brendan threw open his door to vent the steam. The two clouds mixed into a black, toxic vapour.
Brendan tumbled out onto the baking bitumen. He vomited between his feet; the chunky remnants of muddy coffee and yesterday's lamb and gravy roll sizzled dry in an instant. He coughed until there was nothing left to clear, then staggered away from the gas cloud. The rough shoulder of the highway transformed into searing white sand. Something shimmered at the edge of his vision as he blinked tears from his aching eyes.
"You all right?" From inside the Mitsubishi sweat lodge, Stephen's voice sounded like he was being smothered with a fire blanket.
"Swallowed my durrie," Brendan gasped. "Burned the back of my tongue."
"I could use a hand." Stephen's eyes were closed and his jaw clenched. His headrest creaked with pressure.
Brendan opened the passenger door and sucked in a breath. A bloody patch was spreading around Stephen's knee. "I banged it a bit," he gasped.
Brendan ducked into the back seat and unhooked the occy strap holding the fridge door in place. He intercepted an avalanche of beer cans as they tumbled free. He cracked the top of one and dropped another in Stephen's lap. "Get one of these in you."
With his free hand, Brendan unzipped a first aid kit and fumbled out a bandage and some scissors.
"It's not even midday yet. What's that, your third beer?"
Brendan held up a finger while he guzzled the beer in a single draught. He made a fist, crunched the empty can, and dropped it with a rattle on the bitumen. "Third and not final." Again he dipped into the fridge, this time reaffixing the strap.
"What's the hurry?"
Brendan gestured with his fresh beer toward the bonnet, which was leaking steam and making frantic clicking noises. "Well, something tells me the radiator might have overheated."
"What's that got to do with the beer?" Stephen hadn't touched his. He regarded it with the same wary suspicion he would a nest of scorpions.
"No power to the fridge. They'll go off. Now drink up because I'm gonna have a look at that leg."
Any number of arguments leaped to Stephen's mind but a dull pain was expanding in his head, crowding thoughts out. He swung his legs out and let Brendan cut his pants leg in half.
"Ah, it's not bad," Brendan announced. "Just split the skin. Your kneecap might have a small crack but I reckon you'll walk again."
"Is that your medical opinion, Doctor Bong?" asked Stephen.
Brendan shrugged, taking a quick drink before expertly applying the bandage to Stephen's wounded knee. "You do enough surfing, you learn the difference between a scrape and a medevac."
"Just as well," Stephen sighed. "We're a long way from anywhere out here." He put aside the beer in favour of a water bottle he'd collected at the last service station, about two hours back up the highway. He twisted the top off and raised it to his lips.
"I'd go easy on that if I were you," said Brendan, wiping foam off the ginger patch below his bottom lip. Another empty can clattered on the road.
"Why's that?" gasped Stephen between deep pulls from the bottle.
"That's the only water left in the car." He held up the shattered plastic corpse of a ten-litre bottle. "Your guitar fell off the seat and nailed it good."
"Oh," said Stephen, rubbing his fingers against his temples. He tried to picture where he'd put the half-packet of paracetamol after breakfast. "How's the guitar?"
"Wet."
Stephen re-screwed the lid of the half-empty bottle. He stood up and looked around. The calligraphy of swooping, criss-crossed tyre marks behind them caught his eye. "How did we end up in a spin? Why didn't you just brake?"
"Thought I saw something coming towards us," said Brendan.
They were surrounded by desert sand, broken only by the grey stripe of the highway. "What, a truck?"
"Dunno. Just heat haze, probably," said Brendan. "Forget it. Let's have a look at this radiator."
Wrapping his hands with loose clothing, he popped the bonnet and propped it at shoulder height. Steam flooded into the parched Simpson Desert air. It dissipated instantly. "Still a bit warm," he observed. He sprayed a mouthful of beery saliva at the radiator, where it sizzled into vapour. "I might leave that for a bit."
"What's that?"
"What?"
"That." Stephen pointed into the hazy distance.
"What?"
"There's something on the horizon."
"It's probably a mirage."
"I know what a mirage looks like. It's
not a – hey, is that my Powderfinger t-shirt?"
Brendan shook off his hand-wraps and examined them as they fluttered free. "My Happiness Tour 2008?"
"You arsewipe, I got that at the first concert I went to. It's got sentimental value."
Brendan shrugged and draped the shirts across the front lip of the engine well. The other shirt was one of his, but you didn't hear him complaining about it. "Sentimental value? What are you, twelve years old? Piss off."
Stephen squinted to block out the sun, but it squeezed in at the margins and down into the back of his skull. He thought about the last place he saw his sunglasses, on a pub bar in Birdsville. They left them behind in their hasty departure, after Brendan's indiscreet comments about cheap prison tattoos provoked a motorcycle gang.
Stephen looked to the horizon, now not so sure that Brendan hadn't been right about him seeing a mirage. He circled to the rear hatch and rummaged through his backpack. It was the last place he remembered seeing his painkillers. "How long until the radiator cools?"
"In this heat? Half hour at least."
With the contents of his pack spread across the top of a bootful of suitcases and obsolete chemistry textbooks, Stephen gave up the search. "Have you seen my Panadols?"
"I finished them off at breakfast. No better hangover cure known to man. Better remember that if you're going to be an engineer."
Brendan never missed an opportunity to drop one of the pearls of wisdom he'd accumulated in his gap year. While Stephen was repeating his senior college year to elevate his academic achievements up to the heights demanded by scholarship boards, Brendan had hit the northern New South Wales coast with a surfboard, a packet of condoms and a ravening appetite for bongs and booze.
Every few hours for an entire year, while Stephen pored over textbooks and wrote and rewrote essay after essay, Brendan's Facebook page updated with new evidence of debauchery or reckless indifference to life and limb, from car surfing along the beach to heavily-filtered between-session shots of drug paraphernalia and semi-naked selfies with the day's new friends.
Mnemo's Memory Page 3