Free Short Stories 2013

by Baen Books

  Jane realized that the monster call was growing faint. She nearly stumbled as she looked over her shoulder and realized that Taggart was running in the opposite direction, still blowing the whistle and leading the river monster away. A muffled roar came from inside the building and screams of something that could have been human.

  "Idiot!" The park was a maze of deep waterways to anyone who didn't know the area. Once he was beyond the corner of the building, he'd be out of sight. Nor was there any guarantee that there weren't oni coming around the other way to cut them off.

  "Hal, get Chesty and the kids to the truck."

  "What?"

  "Truck! Go!" Jane shouted and pointed. "Chesty, follow!"

  She headed for the stairs that one time led to the top of the Dragon's Den ride. "Taggart, you idiot, what the hell do you think you're doing?"

  "Giving you a chance to get to the truck and into it without a horde of monsters on top of you. Five people and one large dog and only three doors."

  He had a point.

  The river monster came crashing out of the building into the back service alley. It looked like a weird cross between a catfish and a crocodile. Its mouth was a snout filled with teeth with long whiskers on either side. It had four stubby legs and a long whiptail. Electricity snarled and leaped from it to every nearby object.

  Taggart whistled and the thing turned and crawled at stunning speed after him.

  "Don't go left at the end of the buildings, Taggart. Swing right!" Jane ran up the steps keeping track of both Hal and Taggart as they both ran in opposite directions. "And stop blowing that stupid whistle. It turned already. Let it go chomp on someone else!"

  Taggart's laugh came across the channel.

  When Jane reached the second floor deck, she saw that a big male was running to block off Hal. She lined him up and only thought about how they'd taken her sister. Twisted her sister's body against her will until she wasn't even human any more. Jane killed him like she'd kill any other monster trying to stop Hal.

  She turned and picked off a male coming across the building, carrying a rifle. A third that she hadn't seen took a shot at her from boardwalk's roof. The bullet whined past her. She didn't miss with her return fire.

  "Jane, we're at the truck," Hal reported.

  "Get out to the street and head toward the mall to pick us up. And be careful, Nessie might be out there with us."

  One of the oni, however, cooperated nicely in drawing the monster's attention. She scrambled over the wall to the city street to join up with Taggart just as Nigel drove up.

  "That was stupid," she said as she scrambled into the backseat with Chesty, Boo and Joey.

  "Yeah, a little." Taggart squeezed into the back from the other side. "I spent three years as a war correspondent. My nightmares are all about sitting and watching people die and doing nothing. I don't think I could stay sane if I'd stood and watched you die."

  "Mine," Hal muttered darkly.

  Whatever she might have said was cut short as Boo snatched up Helga from the dashboard.

  "Look, Joey!" Boo cried. "I told you someone would find Sergeant Helga Teufel Hunden and Jane would come for us."

  "Why didn't you just go home with Grandma Gertie?" Jane asked.

  "I told you!" Boo pulled the little boy into her lap. "Joey's my responsibility. I couldn't leave him. Big sisters take care of their little brothers."

  Jane recognized her father's ghost even though he been dead before Boo could talk. She'd imprinted him into her little sister without meaning to, but this was all kinds of wrong. "Boo, he's not your little brother." The boy wasn't even human.

  "Yes, he is!" Boo tightened her arms around Joey and glared at her with cold hard eyes. Her father's eyes. "You always said that you can't pick your family but still had to do right by them. The oni made us brother and sister. I'm Joey's big sister and I won't let anything bad happen to him."

  From within Boo's protective hold, Joey blinked up at Jane. He looked only five or six but he'd been chained and caged like an animal. The only real difference that she could see between him and her brothers at his age was he had odd feet. But so did Nigel. This might be all kinds of wrong, but it wasn't this little boy's fault. She nodded. "Okay. If he's your little brother, then he's mine too."

  A quiver of Boo's bottom lip was all the warning Jane got before she had her arms full of bawling little girl with poor Joey squashed between them like a teddy bear. Boo cried as if she had her heart torn out.

  "Hey, hey, big girls don't cry," Jane said because in any moment she was going to lose it. If she started, she wouldn't be able to stop, and she knew from experience that her tears would burn like liquid fire. "It's okay. You're safe!"

  "I was so afraid!" Boo wailed. "I prayed and prayed that you come for me, but I thought – I thought when you saw what they did – I thought – you'd say that we weren't s-s-s-sisters anymore!" She had been so scared that she could barely even say it.

  "You are my baby sister." Jane held her tight. "Nothing anyone could do to you, no magic, nothing, could change that. You will always be my baby sister."

  Once Jane got Boo and their new little brother safe, she was going to war. Not with her rifle, although she dearly wanted to, but with her camera. The oni obviously were gearing up for guerrilla warfare because they couldn't stand against the joint forces of humans and elves. The news blackout was their doing; keeping the two allies from uniting. She wasn't going to stand back and let them get away with it. She wasn't going to let them turn her city into a warzone. She was going to find out their every secret and broadcast it across two worlds. They were about to learn the meaning of "no better friend, no worse enemy."

  Wen Spencer is the author of the critically acclaimed and popular Elfhome series of science fiction and fantasy hybrid novels, including Tinker, Wolf Who Rules and latest entry Elfhome. She’s also the author of contemporary fantasy Eight Million Gods.

  Haunts of Guilty Minds

  by John Lambshead

  "Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind; the thief doth fear each bush an officer.”

  —Shakespeare (Henry VI, pt III)

  Blam, blam!

  Concussion slammed Gaston, easily penetrating the ear protectors he wore like a pair of hi-fi headphones. His chest thumped in sympathy with each explosion, and the acrid smell of burnt chemicals stung his nose.—

  Blam, blam!

  He held the gun in two hands at a low chest height using the fast “double tap” pistol technique developed by the SOE, Churchill’s Special Operations Executive. Urban encounters with the SS proved speed and firepower more useful than target-shooting accuracy. Holographic targets flicked in and out around him as he moved through the battle range, an exercise area rigged out like an office suite. The targets weren’t exactly human but he didn’t really look at them. This was a free-fire exercise where everything that moved was hostile.

  Blam, blam!

  It kept coming. He looked at this one, a moving bush whose branches were long tentacles tipped with blades.

  Blam, blam!

  It winked out, and a bell chimed.

  “Exercise over, make your weapon safe,” said the disembodied voice of the range master.

  Gaston turned off the pistol. There were no holes in the furniture because the gun shot blanks. They were supposed to sound and feel like the real thing. They didn’t, of course. The holograms weren’t anything like the real gut wrenching terrors that Gaston hunted. Some people were hell on wheels on a gun range but froze in real combat. Speed and aggression, not theoretical target shooting skills, kept you alive at the sharp end.

  “You’re slowing down, Sergeant. That last one almost had you,” said an English upper class voice behind him.

  “If you say so, Major.”

  Gaston turned to look at Major Jameson leaning casually against the frame of the open door, a man no longer young but not yet old either with the aristocratic Anglo-Norman features that peered down from innumerable portraits
of the great and the powerful throughout English history. People like Jameson had come over to England with old Duke William to win their fortune. Hell, Jameson was probably descended from some of them. Gaston’s ancestry traced straight to the West Indies and a complex mix of slaves, sailors and slave owners. They had both been soldiers in the British Army, but Jameson had been in the Guards, Gaston the Paras.

  Jameson and Gaston now worked for The Commission, an organization that had more in common with the security services, good old MI5 and MI6, than the army, but old habits die hard. NCOs didn’t argue with “Ruperts” officers even when said Ruperts were in jocular mood. There was no percentage in it.

  Jameson detached himself from the frame and walked into the range. Where Jameson went also went his pet monster. The Dark Lady slid in behind him. She bounced lightly across the floor like a tigress and for much the same reason: a muscle power to weight ratio that was way too high for a human being. She looked human, petite even, with jet black hair the same shade as her leather motorbike suit. She was beautiful, but Gaston felt not the slightest attraction. He would have soon as bedded a cobra. Her green eyes gave her away. They turned into metallic emerald chips when she was provoked. She was easily provoked.

  “Karla,” Gaston said inclining his head.

  She smiled at him showing small white teeth. She didn’t fool him for a millisecond. It was the smile on the face of the tiger. He’d led the team that captured her, and he’d lost a trooper doing it.

  “I’d like you to do me a favor if it’s not too much trouble,” Jameson said.

  “Of course not, sir,” Gaston replied, inwardly groaning. It was Friday afternoon and he had plans for the weekend.

  “Shouldn’t take long. I just want you to drop something off at the British Museum on your way home.”

  Gaston relaxed. That was no problem. He would leave a little early and still get home in time.

  Jameson handed over a slim little parcel the size of a packet of twenty king-size fags.

  “Give this to Professor Fairbold personally at the Black Museum.”

  Bloody, sodding Jameson! He should have known there would be more to the favor than appeared. He had envisioned leaving a package at the Museum’s reception but no such luck. The Black Museum was an offshoot of the more familiar British Museum but was a little trickier to access.

  Sir Hans Sloane started his collection of curiosities that became the National Collection of the British Museum while serving as the personal doctor of the Duke of Albemarle, the Governor of Jamaica. One of the curiosities he brought back and introduced to Europe was chocolate, but Jamaica is the home of Obeah so there were other artifacts of a darker nature.

  This hidden collection swelled when the British army expelled the French and took control of Egypt, the center of occidental magic. As Sir Antonio Panizzi, Principal Librarian of the British Museum in the 1860s, put it: “People of weak minds such as children, servants, women and the lower orders generally must not be exposed to dangerous concepts.”

  “They are expecting me?” Gaston asked.

  It was not an idle question. The Commission and the Museum fought a long bureaucratic turf war over the last four centuries and their relationship could best be described as a hostile armistice. The Black Museum was enemy territory for a Commission operative. Contacts between the two organizations were about as common as exchanges across Checkpoint Charlie during the Cold War.

  “Rang them myself. I’ve arranged with Fairbold for you to go in through the back entrance via the old British Museum tube station. That should bypass all the usual rigmarole.”

  That, Gaston thought, was some consolation.

  “I’ve never been there. What does the door look like?”

  “Oh, the usual thing, just show the receptionist your ID. There’s a special Central Line train passing through Mile End station at eighteen seventeen hours. You should just make it if you get a move on. You need the last carriage.”

  Jameson also presented Gaston with a small sprig of heather.

  “Just put this in your buttonhole, Sergeant, and it will get you through the Museum’s aversion spells. One of our Wicca’s from The Coven made it specially.”

  Jameson grinned at Gaston’s expression.

  “Don’t worry about the buttonhole spoiling your manly image, Sergeant. You’ll be fine provided you don’t get off at the Museum of Performing Arts by mistake.”Jameson chortled at his own wit.

  “No, sir,” said Gaston, who saw nothing funny in the business.

  “Have a good weekend and see you Monday.”

  He left with a half wave. Karla gave Gaston a smirk before following, like she knew something he didn’t.

  #

  Gaston caught a Docklands Light Railway train heading north away from The River. The short robot trains ran on an overhead track, giving a good view of East London’s Temples of Mammon, glass concrete towers housing the world’s largest financial center. You can’t serve God and Mammon, as the Bible would have it. The City of London had long since given up any attempt to try. God didn’t stand a chance in competition with the banking bonus culture.

  Bow Church Station let Gaston out onto the Mile End Road at Street level. It was unusually straight, betraying its origins as the Roman Road from London to Colchester. When the legions built a road it went as the crow flies and the Britunculi, the “ghastly little Brits” could stuff their property rights. There was a small deviation circumnavigating what had been the Celtic Chieftain Badvoc’s brothel at Chelmsford but that hadn’t appeared on any official map sent back to Rome for reasons that the Imperial Governor was reticent about.

  A crow scarfing the remains of a takeaway kebab at the kerbside glared at him suspiciously in case he wanted some for himself.

  Once or twice he got the feeling of being watched. It was so pervasive that he pulled the dropped key ring stunt to look behind him and even circumnavigated a block but no one followed him so he decided he was just getting jumpy. By then Gaston was running late so he broke into a jog trot, weaving through the pedestrians.

  “Yay, go boy,” yelled a pretty girl with pink hair and purple leggings who may as well have had “university student” tattooed on her forehead.

  Gaston grinned and waved back, half tempted to stop and try to chat her up but sanity prevailed. He was really pushed. He reached the Mile End Station at six fifteen to be greeted by queues waiting to get through the automatic ticket gates. Without breaking stride he jumped the queue and flashed a Metropolitan Police Warrant Card at the inspector on the luggage point. He vaulted the barrier before the man could open it.

  The warrant card looked completely genuine. It should. The Commission sourced them from the same place at the Met. It’s just that Gaston wasn’t a policeman.

  He pushed his way down holding the ID card held high in the air. People parted to let him through faster than the proverbial fool is separated from his money. Getting in the way of plainclothes London policemen running through the tube is definitely frowned upon by life insurance companies. The Met’s armed units were inclined to shoot first and consider their options when it came to the press release.

  He made the end of the platform by six sixteen. The bloody train was late of course. The damn things were always late, provided you were on time. It was one of the subclauses in Sod’s Law or something.

  The train came. They usually did in the end. It looked fairly packed but not impossible to squeeze into. The platform at the end cleared as people rushed up the line of carriages hoping to find an empty seat, or at least a comfortable place to lean. The end carriage was empty but no one except Gaston moved towards it. When the doors opened he felt a pressure wave at the entrance like invisible surf pushing at him. Then he smelt heather and was through.

  The carriage wasn’t completely empty. A lean figure sat in the far corner. It wore black, black jeans and a black hoodie top pulled over its head. The passenger hunched forward so that its face was lost in shadow. Gaston had a
sense of a long nose. Black pointed slip-on shoes completed the Goth image. He ignored him, or her, or whatever – it was hard to tell which pronoun applied.

  The tube filled up as it ground into the center of London. People had to force their way past the sliding doors against those already on board like a rugby prop forward going for the ball. No one tried to get in the empty end carriage. The aversion spell was highly effective. It would have worked on Gaston were it not for his “lucky” heather.

  “Let the doors close or we won’t be going anywhere,” the driver said over the speakers, the poor fidelity not hiding his Jamaican drawl. Somewhere someone was trapped in a sliding door. Gaston had seen idiots put their briefcase between closing doors in the hope of triggering the safety mechanism so they would open again. If the briefcase wasn’t wide enough the safeties ignored it and the train went off anyway. Losing a briefcase was unfortunate but it was even more awkward if it was chained to your wrist at the time.

  In the West End, the train stopped just outside Holborn station.

  “We’re being held on a red light. Hopefully, we should be moving soon,” said the driver, in a voice that held out no hope at all.

  Only the rear carriage doors slid back and Gaston hopped out onto a platform. Just the rear carriage was level with the platform, the rest of the train being parked down in the tunnel.

  The British Museum stop was one of the “lost” underground stations, supposedly disused and mothballed. Few people remembered its existence. It wasn’t until the train pulled out that Gaston felt uneasy. Why was the station deserted? Where was the Black Museum’s security? Surely you couldn’t just walk in? Bloody Jameson said there would be a receptionist.

  Maybe he had got off at the wrong place but how many disused stations did the special train stop at? He walked along the platform a little way and found a faded sign: British Museum. That settled the matter.