It’s dark. Through the doorway leading into the shop, I see the brilliant, jagged reds of polluted, ashen aired sunset.
The butcher kid’s a flat puddle of thick fluid, like syrup. Broken bits of bone, black and soft from heat, stick out, and the rising slope of his half-collapsed ribs and ruin of skull are lifeless islands. Empty hole of his grin.
Melted down to their lonely, elemental parts, all people smile empty and in a knowing, painful way.
I give him a wide berth. I taste something sour and acrid, lingering over everything in the room. Sweep my corners. Slow and mechanic. My gaze everywhere in the air. And the kid watches me with no eyes and only one unbroken eye socket.
Early on, when kill teams were first cut to two guys, Samantha and I pulled over along the side of a long, Midwestern highway whose old name was useless and half forgotten. Now it was called Highway 6, because it bisected zone six. A high-density zone. Recently designated. The corn and soybean crops to either side were wilted, but not yet burned down. They shivered in the wind and seemed huddled over themselves by the lack of water. In the distance, a city of a million scattered lives was burning down all at once. Flickers of light and rambling sparks. The heat made the whole thing wave and bend. As if it might not be real.
I walked around the Humvee and sat on the hood.
Samantha got out and stood near me. She held silent for a moment.
“Shouldn’t we be doing something?”
I couldn’t look away from the wavering mirage of our burning history on the horizon. I didn’t want to look at her. I didn’t know how to explain. How little power we had. How small we were, outside the cavernous galaxies of our minds. How there was nothing for us to be doing.
“It’s been burning for a long time,” I said. “Nothing we can do now. Let it burn.”
She climbed onto the hood with me. I took out a slim, hand-rolled cigarette and let the crystal smoke soften the already blurred edges of the world. Tobacco was a luxury, an almost extinct animal paraded out only on special occasions. It made me lightheaded and easy. I passed it to Sam.
She coughed quietly and spoke into her hand, “Your parents alive, David?”
“We don’t talk about the past,” I said, taking the cigarette as she passed it back.
“Why not?”
My last team, three good guys, had been wiped out in the narrow halls of some dirty motel. Pincered in by a stage four with half a mind left who burned down a wall to circle us and pinch us between it and a shuttering crowd of mad men and women with bleeding mouths and eyes. Stage threes. The guys were all hard, like me, but unlucky. Like me. Samantha was a rookie and barely eighteen. We had only been on a few jobs together. But I guessed she was unlucky too.
I didn’t answer her.
“My parents aren’t. Alive,” she said. “I watched them get torn to pieces by a couple stage threes. This was later on. After the second heat wave. At a rest stop along interstate 40. Five of them sprang out when I opened the door to the toilet. And my parents were begging me to run even as they were getting . . . torn apart.” Her voice was as flat as the highway and as beaten down. I looked at her. She had her eyes set on the vague horizon of flame. Hard, unlucky eyes. Reflecting the living red and orange light of our future.
The wind was cool. And the weeping crops around us. Unpicked from now unto eternity.
“We don’t talk about the past because all the parents, and all the kids, and all the lovers, and all the friends, and all the priests, and all grocery store clerks are dead. We don’t talk about our pasts, cause everybody’s got the same one. We’re all from the cemetery, and we’re all orphans.” I said this as tonelessly as possible. Aiming it toward the fire.
The new silences of the world were always filled with the crackling of distant fire. The dry shuffle of corn and short rows of soybean. The empty road from here to there.
“Today,” she said.
“Sorry?” I blew out a cloud of smoke with the word. Passed it back. The cigarette was half gone and the world seemed more alive. I wanted to tell her more. Something not so hard. How some moments can be soft. Small. Between the tired ends of our lives.
“Today, everybody’s got a story. Everybody’s got a whole gallery of dead behind them. But my kids are gonna grow up in a different world. Where they can meet someone, and they don’t have to check their eyes for inflamed veins, and a cough doesn’t mean they’re gonna die painfully.”
And the sure cool in her voice shocked and excited me. I didn’t mean to, but I laughed.
She turned to me. Steady eyes, brown and clear as apple juice. As if she were used to being laughed at.
“You don’t believe me. It’s fine.” She sounded as if she meant it. “Why’d you sign up, David? If not for something better. A better place.”
She watched the pale smoke wafting out of her own mouth as if it might be hiding that imagined place.
I laughed again. I couldn’t help it. Somewhere, God was laughing at us. And we were laughing back, insane and flickering. The breath bouncing painful in our broken chests. “Some monsters,” I said to her while the world burned before us, “have to eat other monsters to survive.”
And at the edge of sight, the echo of my laughter burned like everything else.
I’m on the street. The adult four is nowhere to be seen. I know they have to move often in search of fuel, and have short memories. I see the broken road, abandoned or overturned cars in either direction. Empty streets. The slight haze of smoke always in the air now. Thin in my lungs. The pollution of the burning world gives us, daily, stained glass sunsets, blood red and deep as our secrets. And dark at the edges.
I strain my ears, by which I mean I turn the dial in my ear to maximum to pick out the small sounds in the world. The paper crinkle of trash in the wind. The soft popping of burning far off. My breath, warm and wet. And something moaning, cotton dry and low, from the other side of the Humvee.
The air is sweet as caramel stuck in my teeth after the butcher’s shop, and I breathe it all in as I approach the vehicle. I scan the air right above the Humvee. No heat lines. No smoke. One thing about stage fours, they’re easy to spot. And this isn’t one.
As I approach, I spend a second of attention on the Humvee’s cab. Most of the quick ice has melted, though a few soft-edged lumps hang here and there. Everything is wet and dripping. Samantha’s in there, and she’s alone. The Armbrust’s in her lap, and her head is back. Eyes open and glazed with a blue-white film. Her skin is wet and a sick, cold color.
“Sorry, Sam,” I mutter, still moving slow and leading with my .45. “I’ll pick it up from here. For somebody else’s kids, I guess.”
I circle wide around the Humvee, giving myself space to move. Add Sam’s name to the list in my head. The list of people I’ve killed. As I circle, I spot it. Without its dress of smoke or suit of liquid flame, it seems infinity fragile. Black skin and the hollow bones of a bird. The kid stage four is on its stomach. It’s trying to drag itself toward me, but its movements are as slow and painstaking as the movement of the earth. Whatever powered its wild, ancient fission has run out.
It’s out of heat.
I holster the .45. Take the long way around the vehicle. I don’t look at Samantha again.
I unhook the clasps on the back compartment of the Humvee. I sort the canvas and tempered cloth bags with my good hand until I find my pack. I pull out a small mirror. Examine my face.
It’s a field of ruin. Half of it has melted and it’s a raw, red color. The new plane of my face has a softness, though, and it is ruled by the same kind of feral logic as the dune beaches in my memory. My left eyebrow is gone, and that strikes me funny. I chuckle into the pain.
The first-aid kit is snapped into the sidewall. I pull it out. The dry moaning, as thin as a single sheet of skin, is constant and low. In the air like birdsong. I take out the tin of burn
salve. It’s a thick, clear gel with a hint of blue. I rub it into the barren field of my face. For a moment, it tingles as if it’s alive, then the skin goes ice numb.
I pat down my pack till I find half a cigarette. Press it into my lip, find my lighter. I can hear the thing dragging itself toward me at the speed of time. Inevitable and slow. I peel off my ruined jacket, trade it for a heavy, temper coat. Bite and heat resistant. I’m careful of my hand. It throbs, swollen and tight. I’ll re-wrap it soon.
I take a few puffs. Let it all drift and disappear into the shattered window of sky.
When I’m ready, I walk around the car to the half-live thing, dying in the street. Black strip of dried flesh. The smell that rises from it is surprising and pleasant, like the scent of charred mangoes and exotic spice. There are no features left on its face. It’s naked. Cracked patches of dry skull are exposed to the human wind, in from the north. Filtered through the glass cage of the nearby city.
Every inch of its skin is blackened or gone or melted into its stringy, dry tendons, which spasm weakly, as if it’s shivering. As if a cold is taking it. Its eyes are blind, but it holds them up hopefully, milk film and a dark blue fluid leaking from them like strange tears. Its useless tongue, swollen and bleeding. I know this thing. I recognize it.
And its whispered moaning is a language I almost understand. Rising and falling. Begging. Praying. Cursing. I know all the words. I’ve said them all before.
I crouch down, a few feet from it, and it reaches out to me. Its voice is a burning forest. A smothered infant’s cry. The mangled voice of our generation. Soft, and lost in the sound of fire. But loud in our heads.
It’s so small. It must have been so young. Its life so short and painful. Yet it drags itself toward the last point of warm life on its horizon. The gun weighs as little as the heart in my chest. And I hold it as easily. Aimed right between its sightless eyes.
In the west, the sun is going. Brilliant and sad. I’ll have to hotwire a car in the dark. Drive north. Into the cold. Where the last men and women huddle together for warmth in short, steel domes. I’ll lead another kill team. Come back here and sweep the place with ice. That stage four and any others. I know now, for certain, there are more every day. I’ll go out on my own, if I have to. I’ve done it before. Years ago now. A young killer with a bat, a hunting rifle. Alone on the highway.
Rule: I am relevant as long as I am alive.
Keep telling yourself that, cowboy.
My rules are cardinal truth. Doubt leads to immobility. And immobility is death. The husk of a child before me, all its chaos atoms finally stopped and dying, confirms this.
Then how come you only ever dream about the past?
I push it down. All my memories of Samantha and the rest of the singing dead. Hard and deep in my gut. Clenching it all in the fist of my mind like I’m trying to make a diamond from a fistful of ash.
I tighten my hand around the gun. Thinking of all the people still living somewhere in the world.
And here, on this American street, something, some monster with a hard shell and soft guts, is dying with a strangled moan that no one will ever hear.
The Fine Distinction
Between Cooks and Chefs
by BRANDON SANDERSON
* * *
Brandon Sanderson was born in 1975 in Lincoln, Nebraska. By junior high he had lost interest in the novels suggested to him, and he never cracked a book if he could help it. Then an eighth-grade teacher, Mrs. Reader, gave him Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly.
Brandon was finishing his thirteenth novel when Moshe Feder at Tor Books bought the sixth he had written. In 2005 Brandon held his first published novel, Elantris, in his hands. Tor also published six books in Brandon’s Mistborn series, along with Warbreaker and then The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance, the first two in the planned ten-volume series The Stormlight Archive. Four books in his middle-grade Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians series are being released by Starscape (Tor). Brandon was chosen to complete Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series; the final book, A Memory of Light, was released in 2013. That year also marked the releases of YA novels The Rithmatist from Tor and Steelheart from Delacorte.
Currently living in Utah with his wife and children, Brandon teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University. He also hosts the Hugo Award-winning writing advice podcast Writing Excuses with Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler, and Dan Wells.
The Fine Distinction
Between Cooks and Chefs
A lot of people want to give you writing advice. I’ve felt it—trust me, I’ve been there. During my long years trying to break in as a writer, I felt that I never lacked for someone jumping in to tell me how this writing thing had to be done.
I appreciated most of it. Writing is, in most cases, a solitary art. Every bit of advice helps, in its own way, even if all it does is express solidarity. But in most of the sincere suggestions, I also sensed a kind of worried paternalism. The authors offering advice seemed to be saying, “You poor thing. You have no idea what you’re in for.”
Trouble is, neither did they.
You see, every writer’s path is unique. What works every time for one of us will fail brilliantly for another of us. Each bit of writing advice has to be tempered with this terrible knowledge: that for the writer listening, your advice might be the most spectacularly wrong thing that has ever been suggested to them.
For one of us, an outline is a vital tool. For another, it’s a black hole that sucks the life from our story. For one of us, trimming words in revision is the only path to crisp, evocative prose. For another, cutting leads to a sense of empty, white-room syndrome in scenes. Some authors should never stop midstory to do revisions, lest they get lost in an endless cycle of tweaking, and lose all momentum. For others, this process is an essential step in discovering the voice of their characters.
As a writing instructor, this knowledge is daunting. At the same time, it’s intriguing. Each new writer is at the cusp of a grand journey—a journey we have all taken before, yet one where certain tools that worked for me will be useless for you. And at the end, we all arrive at a different place. That’s what makes writing so grand; each of us has something to add, and each of us has something new to discover that no one else could have found.
All of this leads to a question: If the usefulness of writing advice is so unpredictable, then why bother giving (or listening to) it in the first place? Well, unpredictable does not equate to unusable.
Your job as a writer is not to slavishly take every word uttered by a pro as gospel. Instead, you should envision yourself as an explorer. Or, if you will, as a chef.
There are two basic ways to bake a cake. The first, and the one that most of us use, is to follow a set of instructions. I can make a perfectly acceptable cake by doing this, as can most of us. However, I’m not a chef—just a cook, in this metaphor. You see, I don’t know why adding eggs to a cake is important, or what the real difference between baking soda and baking powder is. (I mean, both look like powders to me.)
If you want to make your way from journeyman writer to one creating professional-quality works, you can’t afford to be a cook. You can’t be the person who looks at a list of story ingredients and says, “Huh. Guess I just add these in the order listed.” I read far too many books (and see even more movies) that seem to have been created this way. Take everything that has been successful before, stick them in, bake at 375. Success, right?
That can’t be good enough for you. I want you to think consciously about the choices you make in writing. That’s how you find your way through the journey, and arrive at your unique destination. Just like a good chef knows what happens when you add a specific seasoning at a specific time, I suggest you start analyzing the fiction you love and ask yourself the hard questions.
Many “hero’s journey”–type stories start with an orphan. Why? What does this do
to the story? Can you get this effect in a different way?
What really makes people turn the pages in a thriller? What creates this sensation of anxiety in the reader, and why do they enjoy it? What kinds of endings satisfy this emotion, and which ones fall flat for you?
Why do some romances work, while others feel contrived? What ingredients lead to a relationship plot that readers gobble up, and which kinds of relationship plots continue to work after the two characters have gotten together?
Every bit of writing advice you get is a tool that worked for someone. It might work for you. However, chances are that even if it does, it will do something slightly different in your stories than it does in mine. You are the chef, you are the master of your own writing. Don’t just follow a list someone tells you, own the process that you use to create.
At least, that’s the best advice I can give. Unfortunately, it might just be the most spectacularly wrong thing that’s ever been suggested to you.
Try it out and see.
The Jade Woman of the Luminous Star
written by
Sean Williams
illustrated by
DANIEL TYKA
* * *
about the author
Sean Williams entered the Writers of the Future Contest ten times before his story “Ghost of the Fall” won third prize in the first quarter of 1992.
He has since become a #1 New York Times bestselling author, with over forty novels and one hundred short stories to his credit, not to mention the odd odd poem.
He has been called many things, including ‘the premier Australian speculative fiction writer of the age’ (Aurealis) and the ‘king of chameleons’ (Australian Book Review) for the diversity of his writing. As well as his original fiction for adults, young adults and children, he has worked in universes created by other people, such as Star Wars and Doctor Who. He also enjoys collaborating, for instance with Garth Nix on their Troubletwisters books. He has a PhD in the literature of matter transmitters, which trope he has used many times, most recently in his acclaimed Twinmaker series.
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