Stories on the Go: 101 Very Short Stories by 101 Authors

by Hugh Howey

  I moisten my finger, and push spittle into the door lock. I whisper a Celtic spell beneath my breath, and it clicks open. The lock is used to turnover — a different master every quarter, so it doesn’t take much to convince it to bow to me.

  I smell death the moment I open the door, and pull my undershirt over my nose. A few steps in I see a blood spatter in the tub — gunshot, by the look of it. The body is still lying in the tub. There’s just the one bedroom. I push the door open, and step inside. It’s empty. I check inside the closet and under the bed, to be sure.

  Then I look at the body. About the same age as the first corpse. He ate a bullet, and is still holding the gun. Which leaves the why.

  Spread across the kitchenette table are the pieces to a mana bomb, which would have housed the buttrock battery. There’s a phone, and its background is both corpses kissing. Beneath everything is flyers and maps centered around the Portland Republican National Committee office.

  I take a little leap. Oregon wouldn’t let them get hitched, so they hatched a plot to hit the political opposition. When one of them had doubts, about the plot or maybe the marriage, it turned violent. Then the killer realized what he’d done — that he lost the love he was fighting for — and shot himself.

  I‘ll work my end a little longer, but I’m convinced that’s the tale. I wipe my prints, and tell the super to call the police, on my way out.

  Nicolas Wilson

  is a published journalist, graphic novelist, and novelist. He lives in the rainy wastes of Portland, Oregon with his wife, four cats and a dog.

  Nic‘s work spans a variety of genres, from political thriller to science fiction and urban fantasy. He has several novels currently available, and many more due for release in the next year. Nic‘s stories are characterized by his eye for the absurd, the off-color, and the bombastic.

  Nicolas Wilson‘s Website

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  Romance

  Grace and the Green Card

  Jennifer Lewis

  “Will you marry me?”

  Proposal number three and he had no idea she died a little each time.

  He was joking, of course.

  “You’re terrible.” She took the folder of receipts from him and shoved it in her in-box, as if she could care less what those scraps of paper revealed about his activities.

  “I know, but you love me anyway, don’t you?”

  Yes. She avoided his magnetic gaze. “Did you fill out the expense report?”

  He shrugged. Dario never bothered with paperwork. Why, when he could glide through life on charm as Art Director for the hottest boutique ad agency in New York.

  Grace had seen men like Dario come and go during her rise to Senior Accountant. None had ever asked her to marry them before, so that gave Dario a special place in her heart, even if he didn’t mean it.

  He stood over her desk, casting a shadow across her mug of pencils. She wished he’d leave. She felt hot and self-conscious with him so close, as if he could see right through her Ann Taylor blouse and read what was written in her heart.

  “Grace, I mean it.” He glanced over his shoulder. “I have a proposal.”

  Heat rushed up her neck. Was this a joke? A dare? “I have work to do.” She tapped her keyboard and summoned a spreadsheet.

  “I’m serious. It’s awkward, but I…” He leaned so close she could smell his expensive soap. “I need a green card. I’m having trouble getting my visa renewed. If I was married…”

  Her heart thumped. She could say yes and become Dario Benedetti’s wife.

  She managed to shake her head. If he cared at all he’d have asked her over lunch, or at least coffee, not here in her cubicle within earshot of the water cooler.

  “I’d pay you. Ten thousand dollars.”

  Her lips shook as she tried to act like she wasn’t about to pass out. “Have you tried a lawyer?”

  He sighed and nodded. “I’m sorry to embarrass you. It’s just that you’re the most trustworthy and reliable person I know.”

  She nodded, shriveling a little more inside. “Sorry I can’t help.”

  He held her gaze for another breath-stealing moment before he turned and strode for the elevators.

  She sagged in her chair as the steel doors hid the view of his broad back. Still stunned, she realized she’d been leaning on the 9 key and accidentally created a tab the size of Texas in her accounts receivable column. She deleted the 9s carefully, wondering what her life would be like if she was more of a risk taker.

  Three days later panic made her reckless.

  Grace hurried along Lexington Avenue, wool scarf growing damp against her mouth in the icy wind. Dario had been missing from work, unreachable. Was he deported? She’d decided that being the most reliable and trustworthy person he knew gave her a right to investigate. Luckily his building had no doorman. She took the elevator up to the sixth floor and knocked on his door, fear and embarrassment quashed by her sense of purpose.

  “Come in.” That unmistakable baritone.

  She froze. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might simply be here. She glanced back at the elevator.

  His door opened and she gaped as confusion wrinkled his majestic brow. “Grace?”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Vermont.”

  “Vermont?”

  “And lost my phone. Long story.”

  “I’ll do it.” The words rushed out of her mouth before she could stop them. She’d sat up all night Googling and picturing him in INS detention. Or worse, back in Italy, where she’d never see him again. “I’ll marry you. And I don’t want the money.” She’d repeated the words so many times in her head that they felt like lines from a script.

  He stared at her for a moment, taking in her words while she questioned her own sanity for the millionth time. Maybe he just married someone in Vermont! “If you still want to, that is.”

  “I do.” He blinked. “You’d better come in.”

  She inhaled deeply as she stepped into his spacious apartment, all gleaming wood floors and distressed brown leather. Five years. That’s how long it took before he could apply for a green card after marriage.

  “Will you kiss me?” This was the final test. If he didn’t kiss her she could still back out. She needed romance to be part of the deal.

  His eyes widened in surprise.

  Her heart clenched. He wanted it all business. “Maybe I’ve made a mistake.” She contemplated ways to kill herself that would keep her name out of the tabloids.

  Dario looked at her for a moment, dark eyes shining, and a smile tugged at one corner of his mouth. Then he stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her heavy coat. First his hot breath brushed her cheek. She lifted her chin above her scarf, bracing herself. Would he peck, gag, and jump back? Would she have to quit her job and move back to Michigan?

  Then his mouth claimed hers. Heat crept through her, banishing the outdoor chill. His kiss grew more daring and greedy, and emotion filled her chest: fear and excitement and anticipation and who knows what. A peek revealed that his eyes were closed, and her skin tingled where his hands now explored her curves through her outdoor layers.

  Oh yes. This was good.

  “Dio Mio, Grace. I had no idea.” Desire dilated his pupils, unmistakable and reassuring. “I think my regrettably crude proposal will turn out to be the smartest thing I ever did.”

  A smile crept over her well-kissed mouth. “I hope so.”

  Warmth rose through her as she watched the same smile cross his lips, too, sparking the most adorable dimple in his right cheek.

  Yes!

  She had at least five years with the man of her dreams. And she planned to enjoy them.

  Jennifer Lewis

  fled chilly New York for steamy South Florida, where she spends her time ogling manatees from her kayak and trying not to get struck by lightning. She is a USA Today bestselling author of more than twenty books and she loves ge
tting paid to make stuff up.

  Jennifer Lewis‘ Website

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  Mystery

  The Green Stones

  Toni Dwiggins

  The third time the mysterious young man disappeared, the director of Albuquerque’s Gateway Mental Health Facility called us in.

  She’d heard that we were the best—and we were in town for a conference. Sometimes things just come together.

  We showed up at the charming tumbledown hacienda and introduced ourselves. Cassie Oldfield, 29, more seasoned than I appeared. Walter Shaws, 63, just as seasoned as he appeared. We run a geoforensics lab and what we do for a living is read earth evidence at scenes of crimes and crises.

  “This is going to sound crazy…” the director said.

  I glanced at the Gateway Mental Health Facility certificate on the wall.

  “No, really,” she said. “But hear me out.”

  Walter said, “We’re all ears.”

  “We have a dear resident named … Ken.” She said the name like you’d say a word you weren’t quite sure of. “He showed up here a number of years ago. Amnesiac. Suffering delusions. But kind and helpful, a friend to everyone here. Even brave at times. He broke the fall of one of our oldsters who fell down the stairs. You see, Ken is very strong, muscular. As a matter of fact very good looking, in a vigorous sort of way.” She blushed. “But the last two times he disappeared he returned ill. Weakened. This time, I searched his room and found these.”

  She set a dish on the worn oak table. It contained green glassy shards. “You know what these are?”

  Walter and I moved in for a closer look.

  Walter grunted, the sound he makes when intrigued. “We’ll ID them when we get them under the microscope.”

  The director was a tall thin woman, wiry. She said, voice strung tight, “Surely you have an idea.”

  I suddenly did. I got a wild-ass idea, the kind of idea my partner Walter calls an onageristic estimate. An onager is a wild ass. Well, the director had said this was going to sound crazy. Her description of Ken, and then these green shards—this evidence—planted a thought in my head that was as wild-ass as any I’d ever had.

  The director caught my reaction. “Miss Oldfield, you have an idea?”

  I glanced at Walter. Twice my age but surely he grew up, as I had, on stories like this.

  He returned my look. Blue eyes sharp as quartz. Nary a wink.

  I shrugged and turned back to the director. “Delusional, you said?”

  “That’s what I thought. Until I found Kryptonite in Ken’s room.”

  Walter and I are scientists and we assured each another that we did not believe in the woo-woo stuff.

  We borrowed the lab of a colleague at the Albuquerque conference and when he asked what we were examining I winked and said, “Kryptonite.”

  He laughed and left us to it.

  We put one of the green shards under the stereoscopic microscope. It was glassy, fused by the heat of a tremendous explosion. We identified quartz crystals but the remainder of the material had been melted. To create an element map of the glassy stuff, we used the scanning electron microscope.

  At the end of the session we knew what the stuff was made of.

  “Holy crap,” I said.

  “Indeed,” Walter said.

  It wasn’t often that a mineral ID immediately led us to a site, but this one did.

  This stuff came from one particular place, and no other.

  We hit the road in our rented Jeep and drove the two hours through the desert. Along the way, I thought about Ken. The amnesiac hunting for hints of his origins. The strong young man who was uniformly kind and helpful. Who saved an oldster from a bad fall.

  Who wouldn’t want to believe in a man like that?

  Who wouldn’t want to believe in heroes?

  It was late in the day when we reached the site where the crater had been. The low-angle sun turned the feldspar-rich sand a golden green. This sand was the protolith of our green shards. This was the sand that had been fused into stone.

  We found Ken slumped on the ground. Strong and muscular and, yes, very good looking with curly black hair and sky-blue eyes. But he was pale and weak and disoriented now, his eyes dimmed. We gave him water and energy bars.

  “Who am I?” he asked.

  “A kind and helpful man,” Walter answered. “A good man.”

  “From what I’ve been told,” I said, “you are quite the super man.”

  “Where am I?” he asked.

  “Alamagordo, New Mexico,” Walter told him. “At a site known as Trinity.”

  “We’ll take you back home,” I said. “Your friends are waiting.”

  Ken started to scoop up a handful of the green stones but we explained that they were mildly radioactive, and that he should not hunt them anymore.

  “Yes,” he said. “Kryptonite.”

  Walter’s eyebrows lifted.

  Ken squinted against the low-angle sun, as if he were hunting the far horizon. “Made by nuclear fusion,” he whispered, voice an ache. “When an explosion destroyed the planet Krypton.”

  Walter said, gently, “Or so the story goes.”

  I toed a couple of stones. “Actually, they’re Trinitite.”

  Ken turned to me, eyes wide as the sky.

  I said, gently, “Created by nuclear fission in the explosion that launched the atomic age on the planet Earth.”

  Toni Dwiggins

  is an Amazon bestselling author and a third-generation Californian who migrated from southern Cal to northern Cal. What she likes most about her state is that one can go from the ocean to the mountains in one day, with a lunch stop in the desert. She likes it so much she has chosen those settings for her forensic geology books.

  Toni Dwiggins’ Website

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  Mystery — Thriller

  Oz

  Derek Neville

  From his seat on the stool, Laurence watched the odd man walk past his shop’s main window twice before finally coming in. Normally, he would have thought the man lost, but the man had been engaged in the same routine for the better part of the last week.

  “Afternoon,” Laurence said, rising from his stool.

  The Odd Man hung by the doorway, put a hand to his mouth as if another thought occurred to him, then he gave a polite nod. He took a careful step forward like the floor was sharp and tried to pretend he was interested in the guns by the glass case closest to the door.

  “Help you find something?” Laurence asked as he made his way down the counter. He stopped for a moment to turn off the radio. ‘She Loves You’ by The Beatles was playing and he didn’t quite care for it.

  “Just killing time,” the man said softly. “Only looking.”

  “Well, be my guest,” Laurence replied. “Don’t be afraid to ask questions.”

  He started back to his stool and got settled in with his newspaper again. Thanksgiving was in a few days and like during most major holidays Laurence thought about telephoning his daughter in Michigan. Assuming, Laurence thought, he could find where he last wrote down her number.

  “Can I see that?”

  The voice was so soft that Laurence thought maybe he had only heard it in his head. Odd Man was at the counter now, patiently drumming his fingers on the glass. Laurence followed the other man’s gaze to the bolt-action rifle that hung on the wall. He left the stool with a grunt and moved to the counter.

  “She’s pretty, huh? You know anything ‘bout rifles?”

  Odd Man nodded his head. “You could say I’m something of an enthusiast.”

  Laurence leaned down on the counter, pushing his sizable gut beneath him. Enthusiasts were his least favorite customers to deal with, but it was already Wednesday, and his sales had been nonexistent so far.

  “You got a little bit of a bayou accent, huh son? How long you been in Dallas?”

&nb
sp; Odd Man frowned like the question perplexed him. For the first time Laurence noticed how the man’s clothes looked too big for him.

  “Uh, since uh… October.”

  “I hope you’re not like one of these poor saps out on the corner with their signs trying to find work.”

  “No sir. I got me a job. Book depository.”

  “Good for you, son.”

  Laurence leaned now to the side so that he could admire the rifle. This was part one of demoing the product. Let the anticipation mount. Place the seed of want in the customer’s mind.

  “She sure is a beaut. Let’s take a look shall we?”

  He crossed to the wall and lifted the rifle off its mount, of course making sure to pause momentarily to hand the rifle, like a newborn, over to the Odd Man.

  “Got a good weight to her doesn’t she?”

  “Yes sir,” Odd Man said quietly. “It’s very nice.”

  Laurence studied the other man for a moment. Before he even walked in the store, when he had just seen him passing by the display window, the easy observation was that the man was probably a loner. Probably found it hard to make friends or talk to girls, but yet, there was a strange confidence that fell over him when he took that gun in his hands. It was all in how he held it, how he positioned it like he was already sizing up his shot.

  “You got experienced hands there,” Laurence said.

  “That’s just the training in me,” Odd Man replied. “Did a brief stint in the Marine Corps, not really much of a marksman per se, got me a two-twelve on my test, but like I said, I’m more of an enthusiast.”

  “Right,” Laurence said. “Well, I got bad news then if you’re thinking about using that to scare up some turkeys.”

  He tried to force a laugh, but his throat had gone dry. Maybe it was the air in the shop or maybe it was how Odd Man’s face never changed beyond that sad stare of his.