Fantasy Scroll Magazine Issue #2

by Iulian Ionescu

  Still slower dipped the song, all but coming to a halt as the steady rhythm of new formed seas washed in and out against unnamed shores. The tune held in it a potential to stay in stasis, a steady erosion of sound, pulsing forth for eternity. Yet Jack opened his eyes now to see the page before him and brought forth the first flutter of life. It was nearly unnoticeable at first, a gentle addition to the whole, yet distinctly different and on a time scale entirely removed from the stately dance of continents. As the newcomer grew into longer pulls of the bow, Jack heard the soft murmur of a living heart, and the starting notes of love.

  He had seen her first in the subway station, a passing pause in the crowd opening to create a perfect window. Jack had seen her face and been struck by a rare moment, in which every fiber of his being cried out to meet her, to hear her speak his name, and then was crushed as she disappeared between doors sliding closed. A day that had been fine turned sour in that moment, and he left lovelorn for a woman who never saw his face. When she had gotten in the same elevator later that afternoon he very nearly died, and departed with a phone number he'd fervently prayed was not fake.

  Their romance flashed before him as the notes climbed to the higher scales' unclaimed territory, rising from a thriving sea. She had been a whirlwind that he merely followed, feeling blessed for every kiss and smile that touched upon him, never daring to believe she'd stay. Jack tumbled through the music, barely keeping pace as it rose in ferocity, sending wild spirals of song out into the room now bathed in vibrant color. Then suddenly, brutally, inevitably, it ceased.

  A single note survived, wavering on without clear direction or purpose. A man who Jack no longer knew stood before two graves, long past when the stars emerged to shine their dispassionate, lifeless light. As notes of hungry cold dripped from his violin, Jack was devoured from within by guilt, still as potent and deadly a year later. He had not been there. He had been away, performing for a young orchestra, consenting to step down from his ivory tower because they'd offered him a lengthy, ego-stroking solo. Jack had been drinking champagne in bed when he had arrived, the man who took his family away. He'd been safe and warm when their eyes went dark. Now his heart stayed locked in bitter ice as the music began to rise, reclaiming some of its lost fierce quality, and he welcomed what came next.

  The disparate notes coalesced into a central theme, a repeating pattern of glorying highs and grotesque lows. These grew in number and strength, dragging down the song into a dirge of broken souls. Jack reveled in the despair, matching it with his own, and could see it begin to work its change. In the corner of his vision the stool began to fall apart, its component atoms disentangling to fall away as barely visible dust. All around him entropy was given free reign, exponentially increasing as fine particles swirled upon the breeze.

  Jack almost missed a note as the wall beside him collapsed inwards, but never stumbled as his violin poured forth all the atrocities of man. Soon the sky was visible between latticed steel, and, though the winter wind cut down upon him, Jack felt none of its sharpened bite, his eyes blazing with the madness of grief. Already the building crumbled as he saw before him bloody fields and poisoned skies, camps of death and clouds of decimation. He would do it, he would end all of the suffering that had occurred or ever would, he would put an end to pain and leave this world as the serene nothing from which it was formed.

  As blood-red rust rained down upon him the roaring wind tore the page away to reveal another. Without a thought Jack leapt into its melody, but did not recognize its tune. It struck him odd, he could not have missed a page. Night after night he had poured over every stanza, every note, there was none of it he did not know as intimately as a lover. Yet here it was before him, and from his strings soared forth its song.

  It was an antithesis to his self-righteous fury, a soothing balm to the pain within. It was hope in the darkness, generosity in need, tender care to the sick and the frightened. In those gentle sounds Jack saw his wife's bright eyes, heard his son's sleeping breath, and they were with him still. These parts of his world that had been torn away were returned by memory, held by thought, and if he had cried before, Jack could hardly see for weeping now. The layered hate around his heart fell away before the onslaught of a love both pure and sweet, casting him to his knees as he reached the page's end.

  In a ring of desolation where once a building stood, a man knelt in the gathered dust. An errant breeze stirred the page before him, and hummed along strings gone silent. The December chill made mist of his breath and froze his tears upon the ground. He'd played The Song To End The World.

  But left the final note unspoken.

  © 2014 by Patrick G. Jameson

  * * *

  Patrick G. Jameson is a writer working out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. He wrote his first Mary Sue story at the age of twelve, with things having improved at least moderately from there. His heros include Malcolm Reynolds and anyone who shares their beer.

  The Reanimators

  J. Kenneth Sargeant

  The three dead guys in my squad kept making too much noise. They shuffled their feet, dragging tattered boots through the underbrush, and every loud rustle, every crunch from their clumsy steps made the rest of us cringe. The living had dark stains growing down the armpits and backs of our shirts despite the cool air. There was a lot of armed resistance in these mountains — people who hated the war, sheltered re-sols, and would consider it a great moral victory to wipe out a Reanimator Squad. I'd briefed everyone before the insertion, but you never knew how much dead men really understood. They didn't blink or nod or grunt. They just stared with eyes as black and empty as the graves we stole them from.

  I held up my fist and brought the column to a halt.

  Johnson, my second-in-command, moved up the column and crouched down at my side with his rifle ready. "What's wrong, Captain?"

  "Not sure, yet," I told him. I nodded toward the trail ahead of us. We were taking a back route to our target, following an old logging road that wound its way higher into the mountains. In front of us the road curved past a rock formation, a field of boulders that had dribbled down from the mountain over the past millennium. I wasn't getting a happy feeling. "Take Travell and scout around those rocks."

  Johnson glared at me. "Send the damned re-sols, Rick. Why do we keep resurrecting the things if we're still taking all the risks?"

  I grabbed Johnson's shirt and pulled him in close. He stank of four days of sweat and fear and proximity to dead things. "I need someone scouting ahead who can actually think. Yours is the closest I've got here to an actual functioning fucking brain, so get moving!"

  Johnson pulled away, angry, but he obeyed orders. He shoved Private Travell out in front of him and crept down the trail, rifle barrel sweeping back and forth.

  I didn't really blame him. We all had the same question. Just what in the hell were the re-sols for? What good were they other than getting good soldiers very dead? They couldn't fight worth shit. The only reason I had them along was that someone with too many stars on their chest thought it hypocritical for a Reanimator Squad to go on a mission without a few reanimated soldiers along for the ride. All I could do was say yessir and shove some of the rotting meat onto the chopper with us. Johnson follows my orders, I follow the General's orders, and the re-sols ignore us all. Makes me wonder sometimes who the real zombies are.

  My unease paid off. Johnson and Travell tripped the ambush. Travell was killed right off, a machine gun burst catching him square in the chest and blowing right through his body armor. The rebels had to move out of cover to engage us or it might have been much worse. As it was, the fight was over in less than a minute. For some reason they stopped firing halfway through the battle. I thought I saw one of them put his hands up, but by the time I thought about telling my men to cease fire, it was over. We don't have much use for live prisoners, anyway.

  In addition to Travell, another one of my squad was blown in half and a re-sol lost its leg. I watched the stupid zombie basta
rd hop around on one foot, carrying its dismembered leg flung over its shoulder. Its rifle was nowhere to be found.

  Great. Just fucking great.

  "Six resistance dead," Johnson reported. "Three are reanimatable."

  "Travell?"

  Johnson made a sick face. "He's one of our own, sir. Can't we let him be?"

  I'd always liked Travell. The thought of having to stick a needle in his ear and watch him shuffle along, gray and vacant-eyed made me a little sick too. "We have our orders."

  "Fucking orders," Johnson scowled and snapped a crisp salute. "Yes sir, Private Travell is reanimatable, sir. He'll make a good rifle-toting reanimated zombie fuck, sir!"

  I sighed and broke open a fresh case of syringes.

  Our mission had two parts. We were supposed to be marching toward an old battlefield, looking for intact corpses. Research said there might be a few thousand buried there, a gold mine of dead bodies. The primary objective, as always for a Reanimator Squad, was to create reanimated soldiers, or re-sols. The brass called it 'recruiting'. Not enough living men to fuel the war machine? Well, fuck it, lets get us some dead ones. They're almost just as good.

  Except, of course, they weren't. I eyeballed the one-legged re-sol. It was trying to put its leg back on like it was pulling up a sock and didn't seem to understand why the leg kept falling back off. It was messy, and the stupid bastard still hadn't found its rifle. Our medic hadn't taken a look yet. If it couldn't be repaired we were down one re-sol. I could make plenty more, but I'd be a lot happier if I didn't have to use a shovel to get them.

  Our secondary objective was to ferret out some of the resistance in these mountains. Lots of hippie, anti-war, "free-the-zombies" dickheads lived out here. If that were all they were, there probably wouldn't be a secondary objective, but more and more of their protests involved car bombs and mountain ambushes to prove the war was really our fault.

  Any resistance we were able to reanimate was a bonus.

  "Leg won't reattach," my medic told me. "Flesh too decayed. It needs a good week to repair itself."

  "Shit."

  Of course we didn't have a week.

  "I can do it if you want," the medic said.

  "No. I'll do it." I walked over to the re-sol. It was leaning against a tree, still fucking with its leg. I pulled my pistol and thumbed the safety. The slug took it right between the eyes and sprayed putrid brain matter all over the tree. Gray chunks, laced with a million nanomachines hidden to the naked eye, dripped down the bark.

  Six months ago, it had been a living creature, one of my most trusted men. He had kids. I think. It was hard to keep them all straight anymore. The other re-sols all stopped what they were doing to stare at me. I wanted to yell at them to fuck off and go back to work, but I didn't want the other men to see a couple of stupid re-sols getting under my skin. They're trained to react to gunshots is all.

  That's all.

  Still creeped the fuck out of me.

  "Let's get moving," I told everyone. "Let's find these graves so we can go home."

  Travell, or the mass of flesh and bone that used to be Travell, picked up its rifle and fell in line. It never took its eyes off the re-sol I'd just shot.

  "How much do you think they feel, Captain?" Johnson asked me.

  That was the endless debate among those lucky few rich enough to have avoided that draft, smart enough not to have enlisted, or wounded enough to escape the reactivations. How much did the re-sols feel? I looked at the spray of brain matter against the tree.

  How much do any of us feel these fucking days?

  We found the graveyard two days later, on the slope of a hill just outside the ruins of an old ski resort town. It was one of the early battles in the war against our 'capitalist empire', perhaps meant as a symbol, something about destroying leisure and decadence or some such shit. No one really remembers anymore. All anyone except the rebels cared about these days was that the front line was far away, and that the government and Reanimator Squads like mine churned out more and more re-sols to make sure it stayed away.

  The graves themselves were nothing more than mounds of earth heaped over the dead, mass pits that had been dug with heavy machinery, the most efficient and impersonal way to deal with lots of dead people. I'd learned to spot a mass grave at a glance over the past couple of years.

  We broke out the shovels and started digging. There were a lot of things that sucked about being on a Reanimator Squad, but digging up bodies deep in the backcountry had to be the worst of the lot. It was hot, muddy, and smelly work with nothing but a shovel and the strength of your back. The re-sols weren't much help here either, managing one good shovelful every hour or so.

  The Travell re-sol stood there and pecked at the ground.

  "Get your ass moving, you stupid hunk of meat," Johnson said, jabbing Travell with the handle of his shovel. Johnson sighed and pulled out a cigarette. When he flicked the lighter, Travell took several steps back, the most it had moved all morning. They were programmed to stay away from open flames. They didn't have enough juice in them, the nanomachines kept them just lubed enough to walk, and they tended to burn like dusty, rot-scented candle wicks.

  "I don't know why they insist on sending them out with us," the medic said. "They aren't made for digging."

  "They aren't made for much of anything," Johnson said. "As far as I can tell, they only have one real job. To remind me I need to see it coming."

  "See what coming?"

  "It. Death. I need to stay sharp enough, stay alive just long enough to put a round through my brainpan," he tapped his head with fingers shaped like the barrel of a pistol. "I don't want to come back as one of them. I'm not spending eternity digging holes in the fucking ground."

  My shovel struck something. I reached down and pulled up an arm. It looked like a blackened stick, with the tatters of a sleeve still attached like flannel colored leaves. I tossed it aside.

  "Got something," another soldier called out. "Couple of legs, looks like. Anyone need a spare?"

  "Looks like you shot our re-sol too soon, Captain," Johnson snorted.

  Finding good bodies was harder than it would seem. The war didn't leave many of them intact. For the next hour we dug up pieces. We created a trash pit for the unwanted bits and started a pile. We kept a heavy supply of phosphorous grenades on hand, good for torching large piles of body parts that can't be used for anything other than breeding diseases, and we popped a few into the pit before we left.

  Around noon the next day we finally stumbled across the motherlode — hundreds of corpses piled on top of each other, all reanimatable. We'd reanimate twenty or thirty of them ourselves, enough labor to help us clear a landing area for the choppers, then call in for reinforcements. With a little luck, the army could have a couple extra battalions within the week. It was a big find and the men were excited. Sometimes we got a few days of leave if we hit it big.

  We laid out the best corpses and I pulled out the reanimator kits. This part bothered me for some reason. I don't mind so much making them dead, but I always get a little queasy just before bringing them back. It's not that I'm convinced there is some special place for people after they die, but every time I get ready to reanimate I have to wonder… what if there was? What if these people were sitting in some paradise, sipping fruity drinks and staring at perky angel tits, and we're yanking them away just to be our zombie soldiers? That sort of shot the whole idea of being good in life so you could be rewarded later all to shit.

  "What do you think happens after you die, Johnson?"

  "You get a needle jammed in your fucking ear and it starts all over again," Johnson said, glaring at me.

  The needle crunched as it penetrated the eardrum and drove into the brain. I pushed the plunger and injected a pale protein that contained millions of nanomachines. The busy little machines would go to work repairing and reprogramming. Johnson and I went down the line. It took about an hour for the first effects to be noticed. A little twitch here
and there. It would be a couple more hours before they were on their feet.

  While we waited, I wandered around the hill, looking for other sites I could direct the diggers toward. There were at least two others that looked promising. Travell followed me, keeping guard like a dutiful soldier. I'd made it just out of sight of the main dig and was marking a site with a yellow dig flag when a rebel burst out of the trees and ran at me, his rifle aimed dead center. My own rifle was still lying back next to my shovel.

  "Shoot him," I yelled at Travell, trying to draw my pistol. "Shoot him! Shoot him!"

  I watched the rebel run toward me, waiting to see the bright muzzle flash that would be the last sensation I ever had… until I'd feel a needle crunch into my ear. But the rebel surprised me. He stopped a few feet away and lowered his rifle. "My God. You really alive?"

  What the fuck?

  "Uh, Captain Richard Fitzpatrick, Third Battalion Reanimators," I told him, trying not to sound unmanned. My knees were shaking. "You almost got yourself shot there, buddy."

  "Didn't mean to frighten you. We just didn't think there was anyone else alive out here," he gave a nervous glance at Travell and moved closer. "We thought the re-sols had finally…" A loud roar drowned out his last word as his brains splattered all over my face. Travell just stared over the smoking barrel of his rifle, unblinking.

  Better late than never, I guess. Fucking re-sols.

  The rebel, or whatever the hell he'd been, seemed to be alone, but I went back to the men and put them on high alert. As soon as the new re-sols were moving around we'd get to clearing a landing zone. I wanted this place under heavy guard by this time tomorrow. I was definitely not getting a happy feeling here.

  I picked up my rifle, went into my tent, and took a few deep breaths.

  I was surprised to find I was still shaking. I'd been shot at many times, but for some reason I couldn't get the image of a needle out of my mind. Would I remember anything? When the squad reanimated me, would I remember that I was once their Captain, or would I just shuffle along until the new Captain splattered my brains all over a tree somewhere? Maybe Johnson had it right after all. A round through my brainpan and a one-way trip to the afterlife.