Dark Tomorrows, Second Edition

by Amanda Hocking; Joel Arnold; J. L. Bryan; Michael Crane; S. W. Benefiel; Daniel Pyle; Robert J. Duperre; Vicki Keire

  They were swimming naked in a pool at the bottom of a thundering waterfall. Finn tried to catch her, but she wiggled away like a fish every time. "There are other clinics, other doctors here on Earth, Elena. You would have to go to a larger city. Perhaps Rio or Mexico City." He swam towards her, serious now. She let him catch her, treading water while he gripped her shoulders. "It would be safer for you there. War is coming here soon."

  It was something they did not speak of, what he did with his nights. She knew he was a special kind of soldier, but that was all. She did not ask for information and he did not give it. This was the closest he had ever come, and she had better sense than to ignore it. "I want to be with you," she whispered, fear making her stiff in the water against him. "Why can't we be with you?"

  He held her so that she couldn't look away from his hard, serious eyes. "I want you to be with me. But what if something happens? I still want you safe, Elena." She whimpered against him, eyes wide. "Promise me. No matter what, you will go to Mexico City, or Rio, or someplace larger, where it is safer and Paulo can get help."

  "If you promise me," she whispered back. "Promise me you will do your best to stay alive, no matter what."

  "I promise," he whispered against her chilled lips, already carrying her from the water, laying her down in the soft emerald grass. Her skin was pale where her clothes hid it from the sun. He wanted to tell her he’d never promised to stay alive for anyone before. It was a hard vow, for someone like him. Someone who preferred beast sounds.

  ***

  "Remember," Hale had said. "If things go to hell, we regroup at the church just after dark. This informant is in to some bad shit, some of the worst I've ever seen, and even if he is just playing along like a good double agent, I don't trust him. Drugs, slavery, illegal weapons. I can't believe U.F.’s agreed to even touch this. If the rebels act strangely, if their patterns deviate in any way, regroup at the church and we'll re-evaluate how best to extract this bastard. Got it?"

  They'd gotten it. They'd all gotten it.

  Of course, things had all gone to hell anyway.

  Finn found himself leaning up against the side of a tree, heavy with a kind of fruit that was good to cook with, bleeding from a deep gash in his thigh. He wondered how his unit could possibly be dead, gunned down from their hidden positions or dragged out into the middle of the rebel camp and shot, execution-style.

  Breadfruit, he remembered. A breadfruit tree. It smelled wonderful, like everything else here.

  What saved me? Why didn't they find me? Maybe there were survivors. Maybe the Red Hands would ride again. The informant was nowhere to be found. Finn's brain spun as fast as the blood leaking down his thigh.

  Breadfruit.

  Why not me?

  Stay alive for me, Finn. Promise.

  Elena and Paulo, on their way to Rio in the morning. "Only fools and monsters travel at night in this country," she’d argued, exasperated and frightened for him. "I'll stay someplace very safe tonight, I swear it, and we'll leave at first light." She'd started crying then, and he'd spent precious minutes telling her how important she was to him, that he'd decided this mission was to be his last. He wanted a life with her, a future. He thought it would make her feel better, but she'd only cried harder.

  Women. Who could understand them? Paulo gave him a look that said he agreed completely, and then Finn was gone. He was already late.

  Late. He was late. He had to change positions at the last minute. Hale was pissed. But that's what saved him. He deviated. Elena saved his life.

  He'd go to the church, carefully, in case anyone else had managed to get away. Then he'd go find the right someone from U.F. and explain how fucked things had gotten. It would take a long time. They'd ask a lot of questions. He hated questions. But he would be free, finally, to join Elena in Rio and take her even further away. He wondered if Africa was colorful enough for her.

  That’s when he stumbled over the bodies.

  Locals, not military. An older man and woman, judging by their gray hair. Their bodies looked as if they had been chewed on by wild animals. Throats ripped out, chunks of flesh missing, clothing in shreds. He sent a suspicious look towards the jungle. He didn’t trust it; it was too green, too alive. He felt the silent veil of murder descending and let it come. Tonight was dark business, some of the worst he’d ever seen.

  Stay alive, no matter what. He’d promised.

  The church loomed in front of him, a blot of light stone against the landscape. Candles danced within. He'd assumed it would be abandoned. Perhaps one of his teammates, half-dead from blood loss, had lit one as a signal. Maybe some careless person left a candle burning. Or maybe it was an ambush. Finn crept quietly around to the back. The stained glass made it difficult, but he thought he saw a figure near the altar. He cursed. Part of him wanted to walk away, badly, but what if it was Anders or Hale in there, injured? He found a side door and slid it open, inch by slow inch.

  What he saw had him running, his universe narrowing into the cold white killing rage he so desperately needed if any of them were to have a chance.

  Elena knelt before the altar, a basket of flowers at her side. Paulo took them from her, laying them in artful piles on the gold altar cloth. She looked up, saw Finn coming. Her son dropped the last flower and ran to his mother. Elena couldn't process everything: the blood, his weapons, the sheer horror on his face, or even his presence in her church. That was the only explanation for the confusion he saw there. Surely she wasn’t afraid of him. He was here to protect her. "Finn?" she said slowly. "What are you doing here? My family has used this church for years. My parents went out just a little while ago. You wanted us safe and I thought, what could be safer than... church... Finn?"

  As she talked, men with guns advanced down the aisle on silent predator's feet. The informant Finn and his team had spent weeks attempting to extract was at the head of the group, weapons primed and ready.

  Things changed after that. Everything was slow and smoky, as if he fought two battles. One was visceral, summoning teeth and bone and claws. It had real targets, like the informant and his men. The other was inchoate but no less desperate, like trying to sift the smoke from wind, as he fought for the first time ever against the killing cold. He felt it descend and he raged against it.

  It was a small life they’d built together, so small it took only seconds to die. But I only just found you, he managed to think. And then he was moving.

  The killing rage had him, and he didn’t have another clear thought for forever and a heartbeat.

  The informant was trying to talk, to explain something, but Finn had no sound. There were four men coming at him down the aisle. All of them had weapons. Finn had weapons, too, but he wanted to use his hands as much as possible.

  He shot only to disarm, taking bullets and laser blasts when he didn't have to. After that, it was fists, hands, knives. It was tearing, ripping, snapping. It was cries and pleas he did not hear. It might have been teeth and the gulp of metal and salt on his tongue. A pulse, quick and delicate under the skin. Later he would think it had been the jungle, sending forth justice at last, to chew on the flesh of the fallen and howl and tear hair and clothes.

  Animals. Animals had gotten into the church after he left it and savaged the bodies. That was the only explanation. He would remember if it had happened otherwise.

  When he was done, he sat in a pew and watched the blood-slicked floor grow even bloodier as his breath returned and he remembered his own wounds. He remembered to use his belt around the gash on his thigh. He wiped at the shallow, fingernail-shaped scratches all over his face and arms. Bite marks, bullets gone straight through flesh hardly mattered. He knelt by the altar, by what was left of her, and talked to her for a while. He talked and talked. The words came so easily, when spilled to the dead.

  "You were right, Elena. I come from a pale country, and there is nothing but ice inside me now. Maybe that’s all there ever was."

  ***

  The Uni
ted Forces of the Republic didn't know what to do with him. He stuck to the same story no matter how many times they asked him. He'd been shot at. He shot back. Kill or be killed. Self-defense. Yet they seemed incapable of understanding, running scenarios again and again. Eventually, Finn retreated into silence. They left him alone soon after. His silence made people nervous.

  It wasn't so much the bodies as the way they'd been killed. It was the kind of brutality the U.F. wanted to distance themselves from, and quickly. The Republic would have to admit to double-dealings with drug dealers, weapons smugglers, and all kinds of unpleasantness they'd much rather just went away. But it wouldn't, as long as Finn was there, staring them in the face with his cold, dead eyes.

  In the end, they just suspended him while they tried to figure out what to do with him. With pay. It was like being sent to his room when he'd been bad as a kid, except that his room had a vidscreen with the newest game console.

  He wound up in San Francisco, in an antiseptic, generic apartment within walking distance of what used to be called the City Lights bookstore in the twentieth century. It was now the Central Book Depository of North America, daytime hangout of dust addicts and the homeless. At night it called for heavy armament and a certain disregard for human life. Finn had both in abundance.

  It was full of actual books instead of data tabs. His current favorite was The Catcher in the Rye. He had his nose buried in it when he heard unmistakable U.F. footsteps creeping through the stacks towards him. They never quite lost the lockstep drill formation beaten into them at the Academy.

  He didn't bother looking up from his book. There were two of them, and they were armed. He thought they were probably here from headquarters to deliver his fate, but he doubted they would shoot him in the library. That was just wrong, somehow, like farting in church. Then he sobered and put the book down.

  Much worse had been done in churches.

  "Just tell me, and then get the hell out," he said tonelessly.

  The smaller man blinked and took an involuntary step backwards. The big man pulled out a chair and sat down without invitation. Finn scowled some more. The big man reached out a finger, caressing the spine of his book. Finn jerked it away.

  His action met with a chuckle. "I'm Hawkins. This is...well, nevermind." The little man bobbed his head. "So. Finn Iverson, currently on indefinite leave while U.F. decides what to do with you." Hawkins leaned forward. His eyes were dark, his features rugged. “How did it feel to kill your girlfriend?”

  He moved without thinking. He had Hawkins on his back with a copy of Heart of Darkness jammed spine-first across his throat. It was a hard backed copy, leather-bound, currently cutting off the man’s sir supply. “I always… hated… that book,” Hawkins choked out, making no move to fight back.

  “I found her killers,” he said softly. “All four of them. I made sure they’re extra dead. I wasn’t one of them.”

  “The U.F. says you are,” Hawkins rasped. His face was an interesting shade of dark purple Finn had never seen before. “They’re…coming…” The man gagged.

  “Mr. Iverson.” The littler man’s voice knifed through Finn’s anger. “My colleague is trying to tell you that U.F. headquarters have decided you are unstable at best, the sole killer behind all those bodies in the church at worst. They are coming to assign you to a psychiatric unit for intensive evaluation and what they benignly call retraining. Their words, not mine. Nor would it be a voluntary assignment.”

  “They’re using me as a scapegoat?” Finn slammed Heart of Darkness down next to Hawkins’ head.

  “Perhaps,” the smaller man temporized. Finn didn’t like his tone.

  Hawkins’ hand descended on his shoulder like a lead weight. “Those are your choices, soldier. Go get all better,” Hawkins favored him with a sneer. “Or listen to another offer.”

  The little man produced a pair of gold wire glasses. Finn had only read about them; he couldn’t help staring. Gunfire echoed through a distant wing of the library. “What a charming city. One wonders how you could bear to leave.” He sat at the nearest battered table and looked at them expectantly. “I’m Verres,” he added helpfully. “Sit, Finn.”

  Finn didn’t move.

  The two men shared a glance. Verres adjusted his glasses with a sigh. “Do you know of a planet named Glass?”

  Finn just stared.

  “We’re recruiting a small group for an extended assignment there. A group with an extremely selective skill set.” Verres looked distinctly uncomfortable. “You seem to fit the profile.”

  “Even though U.F. thinks I’m a killer? Worse than their usual, I mean?” He stood in shadow, poised for…something. He didn’t know what. That was the trouble. He didn’t know any more. Finn didn’t like waiting, and he didn’t like an undefined life. Since the church, there had been nothing but.

  “Precisely because U.F. thinks so,” Verres said softly.

  “Look at it this way,” Hawkins said, in his booming, nearly-cheerful voice. “You’re a trained killer, no matter what happened down south. The entire planet’s a goddamn hellhole. Needs fighters more than food, and it needs food pretty damn bad. Been at war for as long as you’ve been alive. The whole goddamned planet razed down to the ground. Executed their parliament and the whole ruling family, except for one snotty little girl.” Hawkins actually looked happy. “Drove their whole population underground. Most of ‘em have never seen their own sunrise. You’ll love it.”

  Verres looked pained. “You have good reason to seek psychiatric help, Mr. Iverson. But what if you were to look upon your affliction as a badly needed skill?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Finn snapped from his shadows. “I really don’t think you even know what you’re talking about.”

  Verres produced two sets of files. Again, Finn found himself staring. No one used paper for recordkeeping anymore. Verres tapped the one closest to him. “This is all the information we’ve collected on what happened in Central America, Mr. Iverson.” He pulled out a set of photographs. Real photographs, not images. “Pay particular attention to the bite marks and the tearing of the victim’s…”

  “I’ve seen them,” Finn said flatly. He felt the barest stirrings of cold rage. Hawkins slipped next to him, a restraining presence.

  Verres bowed his head. He pushed the last file towards him. “I’ll ask you again to sit, Mr. Iverson. Please compare the two files. We’ll leave you alone to do so. This contains information compiled about your childhood.” Verres had strange eyes; clear, like quartz, they narrowed at Finn through the glasses. “From Skrael.”

  Finn barely heard him after that. Chairs scraped; footsteps echoed. Pages rustled under his fingers. No one had ever shown him images of what happened in Skrael. He saw them now. They bore an eerie resemblance to the bodies from the church. But that wasn’t what disturbed him.

  The Skraelings hadn’t come into his room. That was how he’d survived, he was certain. All that death stayed apart from him, separated by bedroom walls. That was why he’d never heard anything and the night seemed so peaceful.

  But in these pictures, it was his bedroom that was the bloodiest. His blanket was black with it, shredded in places and littered with chunks and blobs. A clear trail of blood led to the space beneath his bed. Bloody footprints were everywhere.

  Some of them were his.

  Shock, they’d said. Trauma. The cold blank way he reacted that scared them all so badly. His grandfather. “I’ll never let them take you.” The same cold blank way he reacted ever after in the face of death and fear.

  What was wrong with him?

  Promise me. Live.

  Never let them take you.

  Promise.

  He could let them take him, or he could go someplace where beasts had a purpose. Where they were more important than food. Where sometimes, he could shed his people skin along with its speech. Or he could let them take him back to sterile white rooms.

  Finn paused long enough to sel
ect a single book before following Hawkins and Verres.

  The Long Night

  by JL Bryan

  "You are at peace," the recorded voice informed Rawles. "You suffer no cravings. You are happy to work. The more you work, the happier you feel." On the six-inch screen mounted over his bunk, a cartoon smiling sun floated against a slow, shifting pattern of light pastels, meant to lull his brain into contentment. It didn't work well, but three sessions a day, minimum, was mandated by the Human Resource Division. All part of the probation package.

  Last year, a supervisor had found six black gelform pills in his locker. Just typical arcadia. Illegal, according to company policy, but everyone who worked the long night needed some kind of diversion. Half of TranStel's workers probably did arcadia now and then. Highly addictive because it was the perfect escape into a lush and intensely hallucinated world, especially when paired with certain music and video, plus online networks of millions of other users sharing the experience in realtime.

  "You are getting happier." The gently smiling sun faded into a pair of kittens curled around each other on a pillow, floating against the hypnotic pastel background.

  Six pills. No big deal, but his supervisor had been a Gater of the most pious and puritanical stripe. There had been an HR hearing, then a ruling of two years' probation with drug testing plus mandatory counseling, administered via automated software.

  For the hundredth time this wake period, Rawles looked at the rectangular Dispenserito attached to the wall of his tiny cabin. It looked like a condom machine from a nightclub bathroom. Every twenty-four hours, it made one deposit into its tray. It was almost time.