Schlock! Webzine Vol 2, Issue 24
Page 4
The man shook his head as Bainard translated. “No, but she was convinced she was under the evil eye. When she heard Aggy was having similar difficulties she went to visit her in the hopes they could put aside their differences and fight this new threat together.”
That would explain Aishe’s mysterious visit to the apothecary on the day Aggy died. “What happened next?” I asked.
“The next morning we heard Aggy was dead. Aishe was beside herself. Poor woman cancelled all of her appointments, circled the yurt with salt, and cast protective glyphs on the walls, floor, and ceiling. She even posted two guards outside the door.”
“And no one came in or out?”
The gypsy man shook his head. “Nothing natural,” he said.
“Did Aishe keep a client list?”
The man smiled, flashing a gold tooth, and went to a scroll rack near her bed. After a moment of searching he produced a piece of parchment and handed it to me. I unrolled it and began scanning the names on the list. One in particular caught my eye.
“Who is Clara Banks?” I asked.
The Sheriff stiffened. “My niece. Why?”
“She visited Aggy and Aishe on the days they died.”
He let his hand drift to the hilt of his sword. “What of it?”
“In each case no reason was listed for the visit.”
“I say, Peter, don’t you think that damned peculiar?” I noticed Bainard once again situated himself between me and the Sheriff. The Mayor might be a nervous, jittery little man but he certainly was no coward. “And doesn’t she live near Goosebury? That’s right off the Emperor’s Highway. She must have killed the others on her way here to visit.”
“You must have suspected,” I said.
The Sheriff’s shoulders slumped as he nodded. “I didn’t want to believe it but after the communiqué…,” he let his voice trail off. “What will you do?”
“If she’s an apostate she will be handed over to Lord Hood for trial.”
“And if she isn’t?” The fire was coming back into his eyes.
“I’m sorry, Peter, but the Law is clear. She will have to be purified.”
“I don’t understand your blind faith in an organization that kills little girls!”
“I support an organization that has safely protected mankind from demonic invasion for over two thousand years,” I said. “Unfortunately that doesn’t come without sacrifice.”
“We’ll see about that,” he sneered.
As I watched him storm away Bainard grabbed my shoulder and squeezed. “I say, John, you’re not seriously going to execute a twelve year old girl, are you?”
I turned and stared coldly into his eyes. “This twelve year old girl appears to have the ability to kill people in their dreams,” I said. “Do you have any idea how rare that is? In the history of the Church only two people have ever displayed that kind of power. Both were maleficar druids from the North: Myrddin and his apprentice, Morganna. No one has seen that talent in anyone since. Can you imagine the kind of havoc she could wreak if left unchecked?” I shook my head. “No, she must be stopped.”
“She’s just a girl…”
“She’s a killer.” I spoke more harshly than I intended to. When I saw the fear in Bainard’s eyes I softened a bit. “When a person feels the taint or has a desire to become an apostate, their moral conscience begins to erode,” I said. “They cease to be the person they were in favor of their new power.”
“Absolute power corrupting absolutely?”
“It’s more than that,” I said. “You have to remember they have demon blood coursing through their veins. It speaks to them, driving them ever forward, making them do things they would never have contemplated before they turned. Mothers will kill their children, husbands their wives, and fathers will abandon their sons to the mercy of the streets.” With that last comment I grit my teeth and turned away to compose myself.
“Is that what happened to you? Do your family have the taint?”
I whirled on him in black rage. “Tell the gypsy to burn his goddamn gate board or I will come back and purify his entire clan,” I said, ignoring the question.
The gypsy man barked something in his guttural tongue, spat at my feet, and made the sign of the horns.
Bainard’s eyes widened. “He says-,”
“I don’t need a translation. I know what he said. Just make sure he does it.”
CONTINUES NEXT WEEK
ARCHITECTURE AND MORALITY by Gavin Chappell
Fallout lay upon the abandoned city like snow. They were both sat in the ruins of Probe Records, Rob tinkering with a CD player, trying to attach it to the rusty car battery he’d salvaged the previous day.
‘Funny it should all end like this, mate,’ he remarked.
Doug looked at his old friend critically. The guy was in a bad way; hair falling out, skin flaking… Being middle aged was a bastard, but the aftermath of full-scale nuclear war was even worse.
‘Hilarious,’ he said to fill an eerie silence otherwise broken only by the soughing of the wind that stirred radioactive dust into lethal eddies. ‘Whatcha doing with that CD?’
‘Remember when these first came out, mate?’ Rob asked. ‘Back when we were kids? They said you could smear jam on them and they’d still play. Bollocks, mate.’ He’d tried! God, his dad had given him shit for it. He stabbed at the eject button on the CD player. It still wasn’t working. He went back to checking the connections.
‘Why are you wasting your time with that when it’s the end of the world as we know it?’ Doug wanted to know.
Rob shrugged. ‘I feel fine.’ Ignoring the suppurating sores on his cheeks and forehead, he tinkered with the machine a bit more. ‘Who would have known, eh?’
‘Who would have known what?’ Doug asked. He was intensely nervous. This deep into Liverpool they were on the very edge of the lands of the subhuman clans; he wanted to get moving quick. Him and Rob had rifled the derelict supermarket and now they had everything they needed for the rest of their short, doomed lives. But if they didn’t get back to safety smartish they’d either fall prey to cannibal Scousers or else their rad-count would climb so high that the other cellar-dwellers wouldn’t let them back in. But Rob seemed obsessed.
‘This was what they always predicted when we were kids, remember?’ Rob asked. ‘Nuclear holocaust, atomic Armageddon, mate. That all ended at the end of the eighties. Remember all the terrors they dreamed up to replace it? Just like our parents, we grew up in the shadow of the Bomb. Then, wham! Bam! 1989! Glasnost, perestroika, breakup of the Eastern Bloc. Fall of the Soviet Union; the Free World triumphed. But we still needed the big bad wolf to keep us quiet.’
Doug remembered. ‘There was that cult who said the Book of Revelations predicted the end of the world in 1990! The members gave away all their worldly possessions to the cult and there was serious egg on their faces when everything carried on business-as-usual. Oh, and David Koresh! He got the Armageddon that was coming to him.’
‘Aum Shirinkyo,’ Rob mused. ‘And Y2K! Remember the Y2K virus, mate?’
‘Shit, yeah!’ Doug laughed, embarrassed, as if Rob had reminded him of some reckless teenage amour. He’d shat himself about that one, but then he’d got so pissed at the Millennium party that when he woke up and the world was still there, he’d tried to forget the whole thing. And he’d succeeded: it had entirely slipped his mind. Until now.
‘What about the Greenhouse Effect, mate?’ Rob added, tinkering some more with the CD player. ‘And the hole in the ozone layer? We had to stop using aerosols unless they were ozone friendly.’
‘There was a smaller chance of getting knocked over by a car than of a killer asteroid colliding with the Earth,’ Doug said bitterly, remembering the time some pillock had run him over. But the terrors of yesteryear were strangely comforting now that the end had been and gone.
‘Then there was global warming,’ Rob muttered, still crouched intently over the CD player. ‘That was the biggie. They kep
t banging on and on about that until some standup comedian said, hey, wouldn’t it be great if the planet got hotter, because there might be a few summers where it didn’t piss down. So the humourless wankers rebranded it as climate change because that sounded scarier.’
‘Then “climate chaos”,’ Doug mused, ‘and they tried to make out that every tsunami and hurricane was the fault of carbon emissions. But people were genuinely scared - if you believed the papers. Then there was the Mayan Apocalypse… but I don’t know if anyone took that seriously, even the Mayans…’
He broke off as Rob whooped. Finally, they had power! The CD player hummed and slowly the CD began to spin.
‘Who would have thought,’ he added as the song began, ‘that it would have been the old threat? Who would’ve thought that some rogue state in Central Asia no one had ever heard of would’ve finally got its fucking act together, pressed the big red button and brought about World War fucking Three? Who would have thought that finally, when we were in our forties, it would have come? The three-minute warning. Panic in the streets. The call to take to the shelters before the Bomb fell... Pity most of them had been decommissioned... Half an hour of utter insanity and two thousand years of Western civilisation were one with Nineveh and Tyre.’
Doug rubbed at a malignant lesion on his arm. He was dying, he knew it; sterile, too. No hope of propagating the species, and who cared? The human race had scrawled its own semi-literate suicide note. Absently, he listened to the eighties pop song that Rob seemed to think so appropriate. He failed to see the relevance.
‘Who was Enola Gay, anyway?’ he asked dismissively.
Rob sighed. He climbed out of the broken-down shop and started walking across the rubble. He didn’t look back.
END
AYAME’S LOVE by Thomas C Hewitt
12.
The old man’s son liked doing nothing
but nothing needed the contrast of work
else the sweetness of idleness grew dim,
the irritation of energy stirred,
ruining the softness of grass for him.
Everything was provided for him there:
shelter and food were given him as gifts
and nothing was ever asked in return.
He felt unworthy of the villagers
whose generosity was without care.
All of the villagers had their own means
for finding nourishment had they the need,
yet bread and meat came to the three guests’ doors
at each evening’s close and at every dawn.
“Where is it coming from?” he asked Arliss.
“Tell me so I can pay it back in kind.”
Arliss’ fingers waved a quick dismiss.
“All of the generosity is mine.
That’s how I treat everyone that visits
and my habit won’t change to ease your mind.”
The teacup he held was then gently sipped.
“I am sorry if that offends your pride.”
The old man’s son explained himself better,
explaining his pride was much the lesser
of his complaints next to his restlessness.
The reason he was there was to suggest
a solution for himself that he felt
required Arliss’ word to go ahead.
He wished to make his home in the village
so that Arliss need no longer feed him
and to take some land and build upon it,
both a house for himself and a garden
wishing to stay for the view and Arliss
who both his mind and body had fed;
the person who most often spoke with wit
and whom he now considered a close friend.
“This land is not mine to permit your stay
and you may build your garden anyplace.
I absolve you from generosity
and will no longer bring you food to eat.
Visit as often as the mood takes you
and consider that as paying your dues.”
The old man’s son was relieved by the words
and sat drinking tea with Arliss a while.
The quiet of the house was undisturbed.
Ranzo and Anton were often inspired
to see the girl of whom he often heard
and whom he himself had stalwartly tried
to avoid as she seemed to go nowhere
without the two idiots by her side.
He was deeply surprised that they had not
burst into the talking to interrupt
and ask Arliss where Ayame had gone,
following after like dogs on a fox.
Perhaps he was more relieved than surprised.
He told Arliss as much and Arliss smiled.
CONTINUES NEXT WEEK
THE NAME OF THE DOSE by Sergio “ente per ente” Palumbo. Edited by Michele Dutcher
The path was narrow and the air became more suffocating by the minute, but the Ground Breaker kept going on, he knew he had to. His various reaction times were extraordinarily fast and self-confident, all his neurological processes were focused far ahead on the object of his present research. The animal had been very capable so far and had briskly traversed the complicated galleries and all the underground paths leading to the colonies in under two hours. He had never even broken his stride during the descent, always selecting the correct route while consistently avoiding blind, dead-end or inappropriate alleys. Seemingly, he was in such a goddamn hurry to complete his duty that no obstacles were capable of momentarily confusing him.
The animal possessed two wide attentive pupils (around 3.9 inches long overall); a slender body with a scaled tail; pointed snouts with prominent feelers; and eight elongated legs and feet allowing him to move with a clever motion. The Ground Breaker’s excellent sense of hearing and smell allowed him to easily master this territory that reflected his usual habitats in the wastelands of Desert World 5972. Other than that, his peculiar build made him capable of surviving there for a very long time with a minimal daily water supply.
After another turn, the animal stopped at once, wary and throbbing with impatience at the same time. He knew he didn’t want to ruin everything he had done so far to get down there, but there was no time for pausing anyway.
A small cavern opened wide before his eyes, a natural underground space large enough for a pack of Ground Breakers to enter. Such an unusual place had been formed by various geologic processes, involving a combination of erosion from water, atmospheric influences and so on. To be precise, that was a so-called solutional cavern, frequently occurring in rocks which were soluble, such as limestone, that were dissolved by natural acid in groundwater seeping through faults. Over geological times cracks expanded to become a system. But the Ground Breaker didn’t care about that sort of thing, he simply had to pay attention to being discovered and to watch attentively in everything he had to. After a while, he chose the right way and continued his course along some deep wackestone layers, a very common sedimentary rock down there, mixed with some epidosite formations. The final run was completed with ease.
Now a row of earthen structures stood ahead of him, too big to be inhabited only by a single pack. Actually, they looked like a sort of twin colonies, the ones which usually arose when two groups of close relatives decided to build their burrows tied to each other for better surveillance of the territory and collaboration for surviving somehow.
Inside these structures, most likely, lived more than two hundred Ground Breakers like him. So, he knew he had to pay attention, indeed, as there might be some sentry guards around, in charge of the security of the dwellers.
His eyes gazed silently again at the coarse constructions representing the dark brown burrows the colonies were used to finding shelter in. He knew he had completed his duty, there was nothing else left to do. As for himself, the animal mapped out in his mind the course to go back and reach the surface again. Then he left in a hurry.
/> After a very long distance, the Ground Breaker came into the light again, squeezing out of a narrow passage in the ground, and stood tall looking forward. The animal’s wriggling, wide eyes stared at the giant bipedal creature towering over his body, as if waiting for something…