The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  The brass was equally enthralled, but Dr. Savic was looking at the floor, rubbing his jaw.

  O roared. His veins were throbbing in his neck. He thrust himself forward, straining against the bonds.

  The effects took place instantaneously. The O test subject began to buck and try to free himself from his bonds. The A test subject began to blister up. Subjects B and AB, however, showed no signs.

  And that was the problem.

  Of course B would show no signs. But AB, well, Massey had hoped to see some outward demonstration of his inward distress.

  AB should be feeling intense paranoia and be suffering hallucinations. Instead he seemed frozen in fear—not unlike how he had looked before the demonstration had begun.

  Seven seconds now and O was rocking the bed back and forth, driven to a furious despair—bloodlust was coursing through him and he was unable to kill anyone.

  A was blistering too quickly. He wasn’t going to last thirty seconds. No way. The blisters were popping now, tiny dots of blood appearing all over his body and him screaming.

  “Dr. Massey?” James asked. “Now?”

  “Hey!” Ceglowski yelled. “That’s enough! You’re killing him!”

  Savic’s head shot up and he stepped towards the glass.

  “Massey—” Savic warned.

  “Wait for it,” Massey said, holding her hand out. She was focused on AB. Waiting for him to break.

  At approx. 9 seconds into the presentation, I asked Dr. Massey for permission to press the kill switch and end the demonstration by releasing the gel.

  A was starting to writhe and beg.

  O had snapped a leg restraint.

  “Dr. Massey!” Dr. Savic repeated.

  “Wait!” Massey said, raptly focused on AB.

  AB finally screamed—a high-pitched scream utterly shot through with terror and hysteria and pure madness.

  “Now!” she shouted and James pressed the button.

  But the gel didn’t trigger.

  At approx. 11 seconds, Private Victor Gruin (the type O subject) burst free from his restraining bonds. I repeatedly pressed the trigger for the gel. The mechanism had failed.

  “It’s not working!” James shouted, pressing the button again and again. Savic grabbed the tablet from him and pressed the button himself.

  A was slippery with blood now, thrashing wildly against his bonds.

  “Get us out of here!” Ceglowski shouted.

  Everyone in the audience chamber was standing, watching through the glass.

  With a roar, O snapped the chest bond and kicked the testing bed back away from him.

  Shots were fired by the guard approximately 13 seconds into the demonstration, in an attempt to kill Private Gruin. The shots were unsuccessful.

  O was on the guard in two steps. With a cry of joy, O began to beat the guard to death with his own rifle.

  “Somebody do something!” Montez shouted in the observation chamber.

  “Cha!” Massey shouted over the intercom. “Can you trigger the gel from in the room?”

  Cha was cowering in the corner.

  O had finished with the guard and turned toward Cha.

  Blood type A was hemorrhaging freely now, more pulp than man, but still screaming. A horrible, wet cry.

  “Hey!” Ceglowski yelled from his bed, seeing O headed towards Cha. “Hey you son of a bitch! Gruin! Over here!”

  Eighteen seconds.

  Private Ceglowski called Private Gruin to him, trying to distract him from Dr. Cha.

  But O had Cha in his arms and crushed his rib cage with his bare hands, throwing the young doctor down on the floor like an old doll.

  In the viewing room, Montez shouted to his aide. “That’s it! Give me your gun!”

  “You can’t shoot through the glass!” James warned. The bullet would bounce back—it would ricochet.

  “I know that,” Montez spat. He pushed through them all to the door. “I’ll kill him myself.”

  “Wait!” Dr. Savic begged.

  The clock read thirty-two seconds.

  General Montez took the firearm from his aide and exited the viewing room. There was a guard in front of the entrance to the testing room, however I assume General Montez ordered him to stand aside. Montez must have also ordered the safety attendant to admit him through the isolation chamber and into the testing room. The door sealed and locked behind Montez, according to protocol.

  Then Montez was in the test room, the gun extending naturally, like it was a part of his arm.

  His first shot was not for O, but for A, who was bubbling now, his blood boiling like lava as it ran down the black testing bed.

  His second shot caught O in the back. His third went through the neck, and by then O had turned and crossed the space between Ceglowski and Montez in one giant stride and had his hands around Montez’s throat.

  Four and five went into O’s belly. Only then, with four bullet holes in him, did he die. He slid over to the side with a heavy, sludging sound.

  For a moment, the only sound James heard was AB, who was reciting the Lord’s Prayer under his breath at top speed.

  “He shot them,” Massey said, as if stating it for the record. “He shot them!”

  Then Ceglowski said, “General Montez?!”

  After shooting Private Sands (type A) and Private Gruin, General Montez began to show signs of exposure (approx. 45 seconds into demonstration).

  Montez had sunk to the floor, covered with Gruin’s blood.

  “A general who shoots his own men, Ceglowski. Don’t you see, this is all I am? In the end, I’m just a killer. This uniform—” He started scratching at his lapels. “These medals!” He started removing the medals.

  “They are for killing. For killing. What was it for, what we went through? It was so I could kill more and more men. One by one. By the dozens, hundreds, thousands? What does it matter? I’m a killer. And so are they!”

  He turned and pointed into the viewing room.

  “Blood type AB,” Dr. Massey said, fascinated. “Paranoid delusions. There they are.”

  “Killers, killers, killers. Murderers, all of us. Cannibals. Flesh eaters. And we did it to you, Ceglowski. A good boy like you and now we killed you.”

  General Montez brought the gun up.

  “General, don’t!” Ceglowski cried.

  But Montez brought the gun up to his own face and placed the barrel in between his teeth and blew the back of his head off.

  “Dear God,” said Dr. Savic. Tears were coursing down his face.

  Then, the godforsaken gel showered down.

  One minute, thirty-two seconds.

  Whatever jam, whatever glitch there had been had resolved itself and now the gel fell, trapping MORS to the floor where it lay quietly along with the bodies of General Montez, the guard, the O, and Dr. Cha.

  The gel turned into foam and bubbled up over the type A, whose bloody corpse was still bound to the tilted test bed, and the AB, who was quietly and steadily muttering, raving, and maybe even laughing.

  Ceglowski sagged forward against his bonds, weeping as the material rained down on him.

  “Get me out of here!” he railed.

  And Dr. Massey had her face and hands pressed against the glass, like the bloodbath inside was a Christmas window at Macy’s.

  James rose to pour himself a scotch. There was dust in the glass. He blew into it but the dust didn’t come out. Not all of it. So what?

  His neighbor had lost eighty pounds with the help of that girl hypnotist from YouTube, and there was no reason why he shouldn’t see her. If Susan found out, she would mock him, saying that he was a man of science. Brayden would mock him too, if he could be bothered. But there had to be a way to blot out the memories. Dull them. Throw a veil over them.

  Now the hardest part. The conclusion.

  The music from below was back up again, so loud, and the kids were singing. Were they drunk? They sounded drunk. Four forty-five on a school day and his son had a
party going in the rec room.

  Your kinda love is gutting me, they were all singing/shouting together. Gutting, gutting. Your kinda love is gutting me to the bone.

  James sipped his scotch at the window, looking out at the yard. There stood the trampoline. Brayden had broken it back in June when he threw a party and it just sat there on two legs. Dead leaves had collected underneath and half the netting had torn off and fluttered helplessly in the wind.

  James vowed to take it down. It was going to happen that very weekend and Brayden was going to help him do it, if it meant taking away every privilege his son had. They were going to take down the trampoline and Brayden was going to haul it to the dump in his Lariat and that was that.

  James sat down and straightened the tablet on its stand and placed his shaking fingers back on the wireless keyboard.

  The malfunction in the gel-dispersal unit had tragic consequences.

  True.

  I believe that if Dr. Massey had anticipated the outcome of the demonstration, she never would have proceeded.

  Lie. The look in her eye…She loved seeing MORS work. And the reason she had pushed so hard for a human trial was not to honor the memory of her dead husband. Far from it. It was because she wanted to watch it work on people. Plain and simple.

  If the demonstration had gone according to plan, the efficacy and deadliness of MORS would have been proved conclusively.

  True.

  Despite the fact that the demonstration did not go according to plan, I believe the same outcome was achieved.

  True. MORS was deadly and efficient. Point oh-oh-five milliliters had caused the deaths of four people within two minutes, and that was within one sealed-off room. Dr. Massey wanted to produce ten liters. Enough to level the population of India.

  I believe that MORS is…

  James tilted the remainder of the scotch into his mouth. Lukewarm scotch on a Thursday afternoon. What a life.

  He typed:

  murder in powdered form.

  Then deleted it. Then:

  the triumphant creation of a criminally insane scientist.

  Then backspaced it away. Then:

  stable enough for mass production, as long as stringent safety measures are upheld.

  And he blew his nose in a napkin that had come with his coffee and he sent the damn thing.

  Copyright (C) 2011 by Emmy Laybourne

  Art copyright (C) 2011 by Gregory Manchess

  From

  Emmy Laybourne

  DEBUT AUTHOR

  Read on for a preview of

  Monument 14

  On Sale May 2012 from Feiwel & Friends

  Chapter One

  Tinks

  YOUR MOTHER HOLLERS THAT YOU’RE GOING TO MISS THE BUS. She can see it coming down the street. You don’t stop and hug her and tell her you love her. You don’t thank her for being a good, kind, patient mother. Of course not—you hurdle down the stairs and make a run for the corner.

  Only, if it’s the last time you’ll ever see your mother, you sort of start to wish you’d stopped and did those things. Maybe even missed the bus.

  But the bus was barreling down our street so I ran.

  As I raced down the driveway I heard my mom yell for my brother, Alex. His bus was coming down Park Trail Drive, right behind mine. His bus came at 7:09 on the dot. Mine was supposed to come at 6:57 but was almost always late, as if the driver agreed it wasn’t fair to pick me up before 7:00.

  Alex ran out behind me and our feet pounded the sidewalk in a dual sneaker-slap rhythm.

  “Don’t forget,” he called. “We’re going to the Salvation Army after school.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said.

  My bus driver laid on the horn.

  Sometimes we went over to rummage for old electronics after school. I used to drive him before the gas shortage. But now we took our bikes.

  I used to drive him to school, too. But since the shortage every one in our school, everyone, even the seniors, took the bus. It was the law, actually.

  I vaulted up the bus steps.

  Behind me I heard Mrs. Wooly, who has been driving the elementary–middle school bus since forever, thank Alex sarcastically for gracing them with his presence.

  Mrs. Wooly, she was an institution in our town. A grizzled, wiry-haired, ashtray-scented, tough-talking institution. Notorious and totally devoted to bus driving, which you can’t say about everyone.

  On the other hand, the driver of my bus, the high school bus, was morbidly obese and entirely forgettable. Mr. Reed. The only thing he was known for was that he drank his morning coffee out of an old jelly jar.

  Even though it was early in the route, Jake Simonsen, football hero and all-around champion of the popular, was already holding court in the back. Jake had moved to our school from Texas a year ago. He was a real big shot back in Texas, where football is king, and upon transfer to our school had retained and perhaps even increased his stature.

  “I’m telling y’all—concessions!” Jake said. “At my old high school a bunch of girls sold pop and cookies and these baked potatoes they used to cook on a grill. Every game. They made, like, a million dollars.”

  “A million dollars?” Astrid said.

  Astrid Heyman, champion diver on the swim team, scornful goddess, girl of my dreams.

  “Even if I could make a million dollars, I wouldn’t give up playing my own sport to be a booster for the football team,” she said.

  Jake flashed her one of his golden smiles.

  “Not a booster, baby, an entrepreneur!”

  Astrid punched Jake on the arm.

  “Ow!” he complained, grinning. “God, you’re strong. You should box.”

  “I have four younger brothers,” she answered. “I do.”

  I hunkered down in my seat and tried to get my breath back. The backs of the forest green pleather seats were tall enough that if you slouched, you could sort of disappear for a moment.

  I ducked down. I was hoping no one would comment on my sprint to catch the bus. Astrid hadn’t noticed me get on the bus at all, which was both good and bad.

  Behind me, Josie Miller and Trish Greenstein were going over plans for some kind of animal rights demonstration. They were kind of hippie-activists. I wouldn’t really know them at all, except once in sixth grade I’d volunteered to go door to door with them campaigning for Cory Booker. We’d had a pretty fun time, actually, but now we didn’t even say hi to each other.

  I don’t know why. High school seemed to do that to people.

  The only person who acknowledged my arrival at all was Niko Mills. He leaned over and pointed to my shoe—like, “I’m too cool to talk”—he just points. And I looked down, and of course, it was untied. I tied it. Said thanks. But then I immediately put in my earbuds and focused on my minitab. I didn’t have anything to say to Niko, and judging from his pointing at my shoe, he didn’t have anything to say to me either.

  From what I’d heard, Niko lived in a cabin with his grandfather, up in the foothills near Mount Herman, and they hunted for their own food and had no electricity and used wild mushrooms for toilet paper. That kind of thing. People called Niko “Brave Hunter Man,” a nickname that fit him just right with his perfect posture, his thin, wiry frame, and his whole brown-skin-brown-eyes-brown-hair combo. He carried himself with that kind of stiff pride you get when no one will talk to you.

  So I ignored Brave Hunter Man and tried to power up my minitab. It was dead and that was really weird because I’d just grabbed it off the charging plate before I left the house.

  Then came this little tink, tink, tink sound. I took out my buds to hear better. The tinks were like rain, only metallic.

  And the tinks turned to TINKS and the TINKS turned to Mr. Reed’s screaming “Holy Christ!” And suddenly the roof of the bus started denting—BAM, BAM, BAM—and a cobweb crack spread over the windshield. With each BAM the windshield changed like a slide show, growing more and more white as the cracks shot through the surfa
ce.

  I looked out the side window next to me.

  Hail in all different sizes from little to that-can’t-be-hail was pelting the street.

  Cars swerved all over the road. Mr. Reed, always a lead foot, slammed on the gas instead of the brake, which is what the other cars seemed to be doing.

  Our bus hurdled through an intersection, over the median, and into the parking lot of our local Greenway superstore. It was fairly deserted because it was maybe 7:15 by this point.

  I turned around to look back in the bus toward Astrid, and everything went in slow motion and fast motion at the same time as our bus slid on the ice, swerving into a spin. We went faster and faster, and my stomach was in my mouth. My back was pressed to the window, like in some carnival ride, for maybe three seconds and then we hit a lamppost and there was a sick metallic shriek.

  I grabbed on to the back of the seat in front of me but then I was jumbling through the air. Other kids went flying, too. There was no screaming, just grunts and impact sounds.

  I flew sideways but hit, somehow, the roof of the bus. Then I understood that our bus had turned onto its side. It was screaming along the asphalt on its side. It shuddered to a stop.

  The hail, which had merely been denting the hell out of our roof, started denting the hell out of us.

  Now that the bus was on its side, hail was hammering down through the row of windows above us. Some of my classmates were getting clobbered by the hail and the window glass that was raining down.

  I was lucky. A seat near me had come loose, and I pulled it over me. I had a little roof.

  The rocks of ice were all different sizes. Some little round marbles and some big knotty lumps with gray parts and gravel stuck inside them.

  There were screams and shouts as everyone scrambled to get under any loose seats or to stand up, pressed to the roof, which was now the wall.