WITH AND WITHOUT CLASS
by
David Wallace Fleming
Copyright © David Wallace Fleming
http://www.davidwallacefleming.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
“An Anniversary Concession”
—Out of the Gutter:
The Hard Times Issue, Spring 2008;
“Perfection of the Mind”
—Escape Velocity, the Anthology, March 2011
Short Stories
Fantasy | Science Fiction | Horror
An Anniversary Concession
The Heat
A Blind Date For Bonkers
Zombie Clown Western
Perfection Of The Mind
The Magic-Fiver
Electric Comedian
Fast Amnesia
Daughter Thieves
Soulmate Divorce
Talent Police
Embarkment
White Daddies
The Natural Celebrity
Novel Sample: Growing up Wired
About the Author
An Anniversary Concession
“You don’t got cop hands,” Ryan said, “You got hands for playing the piano.”
Eric considered his thin fingers. “Are you getting out of the car?”
“When did you first decide to be a cop?” Ryan asked.
“It doesn’t seem like I thought…”
“You’re being sensitive, again,” Ryan said. It was dusk. His full, acne scarred cheeks were backlit by a distant streetlight as he smirked. “Thanks for covering the rest of our shift, rookie.” He pointed to the dispatch radio, “Just listen to this. Do what it tells you.” He looked around with a playfully conspiratorial air, “Now, Eric, if you have to shoot somebody,”—his small eyes twinkled—“it’s draw, point and squeeze. Don’t do any of that snapping and jerking I seen you doing on the target range.”
“Alright, Ryan, but please,” Eric said, “Make sure you return the favor next week—you know I—”
“Pop the trunk then, bitch.” Ryan got out. He carried a duffle bag around the cruiser. The guy was nuts for bowling.
I’m ready, Eric thought. Just remember. Remember all those fucking dispatch codes.
Ryan slammed the trunk, then slammed the passenger door with his ball bag. He had stuffed his button-down navy shirt into his duffle but, as a six-three guy in an undershirt and polyester pants, he still looked a lot like a cop ducking out of the last few hours of his shift.
Eric drove from the curb and continued on Forty-Second. He could hear Charlene’s slightly nagging voice, see her wagging her finger at him. Aren’t you serious about us? How could you forget to take off work for the first anniversary of our wedding? He would never admit to anyone, least of all Ryan, but he knew he absolutely couldn’t let Charlene know he’d forgotten their anniversary. He had to make dinner reservations, be home early with flowers, the whole thing. He was proud of himself, in a way, for fixing his mistake like this. He just had to coast through two more hours on a Tuesday and then Ryan would owe him, and would cover for him next week.
He turned left on Carriage. Streetlights lit cracks of a vacant firehouse’s brown concealment coat. Between shadows, fresh blue paint shimmered with the tag NO HOPE!
The radio issued: “Dispatch to Eight-Tango-Twenty, over.”
Eric stared at the radio, then he unlatched the black-corded transmitter, “This is Eight-Tango-Twenty, over.”
“Code Three. Investigate a three-seventeen at the Thirty-Second and L Smart Mart, over.”
Damn. Eric pulled to the curb. Thirty-Second and L… “Eight-Tango-Twenty to dispatch, that’s affirmative—”
He looked to the empty seat.
“—we’re on our way, over.”
His siren bleeped as he flipped the switch and pulled a U-turn. He pressed the gas. The brake lights of a grey Datsun glowed red. Eric swerved around the car. It shrunk in his rearview. His tires squealed as he turned right on Thirty-Eighth. You’ll call for a supporting unit—but that doesn’t make sense. He pressed the gas. Cars parted in front of his gleaming black hood. You’ll just go. You can handle this. Nine times out of ten it’s nothing, anyway. You know that. Just take care of this and Ryan will owe you big.
He pulled into the Smart Mart’s lot. It was dark. The yellow, backlit banner sign flickered and hummed above big windows. A lone fill-up hose had been left splayed across the grimy cement beneath the gas canopy. His heart hit against his ribs as he parked by the tire inflation hose, away from the glass front.
He opened the glass door. The store’s dusty, outdated merchandise was lit to a white gleam with buzzing fluorescents and muzak hummed softly. What’s that smell, what’s that smell? Hotdogs and… sulfur? …gunpowder? No one was sitting at the beige Formica booths along the windows or walking near the freezers. His right hand rested on his holstered Beretta. His other hand felt empty. What’s wrong with you? Eric looked behind the checkout counter, between shelves of WD-40 and Christmas tree car deodorizers. The black register till lay empty on the tiles.
He drew the Beretta. Nothing. Maybe—
A shuffle of footsteps—his stomach fell faster than gravity—his mouth dried. From between rows of shelves, a lanky man in a brown T-shirt and tattered navy tuxedo pants shoved a short woman. The man had a creased, taxed face like a used-up rock star.
Eric winced and stepped backward. He drew and aimed between the man’s eyes.
Buzzing fluorescent lights lit her face. The thin, creased skin around her eyes revealed the outline of her cheekbones and her short Notre Dame shorts showed-off her tan, toned legs.
The man clutched her straight red hair near the base of her skull and rammed a shotgun against her neck. He repositioned the barrel, exposing a tennis-ball-sized bruise on the inside of his needle-tracked forearm. Rose rings flushed around his eyes and his marble-sized pupils quivered.
A rubber band fought one side of the woman’s braces and she muttered “please” over and over, soft and fast.
Eric yelled, “Drop—!”
The man’s eyes shattered. “I don’t have to explain—” his feminine voice wheezed, “You can’t see the beginning—can’t see the end—only what’s here!”
She cried, “Please!”
Eric’s hands squeezed to align his red dot sights beneath the man’s temple. He blinked to stop the dots from bouncing. It didn’t work. Can he see my hands? The Beretta’s rubber grip slickened. Don’t let him leave. Take a shot if it’s clean.
She trailed a “please” with a gasp.
“Drop the gun, NOW!”
The woman moaned.
The man said, “Listen to me,” he walked her toward the entrance.
Eric stepped back. He cocked. “STOP! Don’t move!”
“NO!” And then he mumbled, “Listen. I’m hold’n it,” his nostrils flared, “I’M CHANG’N! And fix’n and walk’n… talk’n.”
“STOP!”
The man’s eyes begged: “Listen. LISTEN!”
A drawled “please” escaped from the woman’s rubber band latched braces one more time.
Eric tried to steady his aim on the man’s temple. Clean. Clean. Clean. Steady. Clean. His sights bounced.
Eric’s heel struck a raised tile edge. It couldn’t have been any thicker than a quarter. His B
eretta exploded. Bits of the cartilage of the man’s ear scattered behind and he staggered, pulling the barrel backward. Her neck mushroomed crimson, propelling geysers, speckling warm across Eric’s face. Buckshot riddled a plastic cigarette sign by the checkout counter and her grimaced face turned upside-down as her head rolled off to her side. The head bounced against the tiles with a crack before her body fell.
The man’s hand slapped to his ear, “NOBODY!” He thrashed his head, “NOBODY! NOBODY! NOBODY!”
The Beretta exploded three more times. Red mist flashed over the man’s face. He fell onto a shelf, popping and crumpling plastic Doritos and Tostados beneath him as his shotgun clamored and slid.
“Jesus! Shit… God.” The Beretta fell. The handle clinked. His hands searched his chest and stomach for wounds.
The buckshot had hit the cigarette sign.
He collapsed onto the checkout counter and used his arms for support. Then he twisted toward the glass doors and his numb legs followed. The glass door swung silently closed behind him, sealing off the brightly lit store from him with its hot guns and the girl’s lifeless head. Eric staggered on past his police cruiser toward the dim yellow streetlights.
The Heat
The Aheara’s hull groaned and folded. It burst up with licking flames as we escaped in the lifeboat with my thumb dead-stopping the outboard’s throttle. I clutched the flare gun in my other hand. The Aheara’s bow upturned, sinking in a vortex of the midnight Pacific.
Part of the pulsing redness that ringed the research vessel broke off and followed us. It skimmed waves, closing the gap.
“Majaar!” I screamed through the wind and the waves. He huddled and shook in the bouncing bow and clutched his fifth of whisky. “Majaar!”
He didn’t answer.
“Everything cool, Samples?” he asked in some distracted malaise. He shivered with that fishy skin respiring near his horned cheeks. He was losing it. But I was still just Samples to him—still just the human technician.
“I feel sick,” Majaar said. “My memory’s blurry.”
“Part of it broke free,” I said. “It’s following us.”
“It needs heat. It must be some form of virulent wasteform.”
“What?” I yelled. “That’s what this is? Our plastic and your—Veronian-bio-engineering?”
“SK5,”—the lifeboat crested and Majaar clenched the side lip—“I told the chairman we had to monitor the Veronian and the terrestrial waste streams sooner.”
“SK5?” I yelled.
Old memories surfaced.
“SK5,” I mumbled. “The building blocks of your smart plastics? But,”—I aimed the outboard motor away from a breaker—“SK5 is harmless as long as it’s deactivated before it’s released”
The pulsing mass skimmed and broke out behind us, revving like an engine.
Majaar shivered. He cowered in the boat and drank. “On normal scales, sure. On mass scales—here in the Pacific’s gyre with the native plastics… We—we knew this would happen. I told the chairman. It’s not my fault.” He looked over my shoulder at the approaching mass. “It goes haywire when it coalesces at mass scales.”
“This happened before.”
I remembered all the knowing looks I’d seen. Not just Dimension Jumpers—humans also.
“It gets hungry. It turns on us. But we’re so dependent on the technology. We just find new worlds.”
“You colonized other worlds and had your garbage use the native plastics like—like shapeless hermit crabs.”
“A thousand times,” he admitted. “We’re so smart.” He took a drink. “We never learn a thing.”
“How many strains of the fluid-based AIs do you think were floating out there in the gyre?” I asked.
“Hundreds—thousands.” He closed his eyes tight. “We grew them all for backwards-compatibility. The syntho-neurons are viscous—you’ve seen the magnifications of how they flow over each other; right? for greater interconnectivity. The hotter it gets, the smarter it becomes. That thing’s burning up from the heat of the Aheara’s fire! We’re both dead.”
My heart pounded and my thumb was numb against the throttle with the ocean mist blinding me as I searched out the black horizon. The thing couldn’t have been more than two hundred feet back there—
“I’m gonna be sick,” Majaar said.
The red mass surfaced through black waves. It dimmed and sunk beneath.
I slid the satellite transponder across the hull to him. “Call in our position.”
He stared at the transponder and looked dizzy for a moment.
The fuel gauge on the outboard was moving to red. “We didn’t leave the ship with much fuel. We’re running out of time. Call in our position.” I stabbed toward the transponder.
He stared up at me, vomiting milky chunks over himself and the transponder. “Where are we? Where are we?”
The wind died. The outboard bucked and sputtered. We were slowing down. I looked back and let the throttle loose. “I—I lost it.” I turned to him. “Majaar, it isn’t behind us! I lost it. I can’t hear it. Where is it?”
He pulled off his fifth with the vomit all over himself and looked distractedly out toward the distant, flaming Aheara. “Probably diving beneath us. Then it surfaces in a ring, trapping us like it did the Aheara.”
“I don’t know if anyone else had time to call in our position,” I said. “Quick!”
Majaar stood. He picked up the transponder and scraped idiotically across it with the neck of his whisky bottle.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “Call in the position.”
I rubbed my sore hand, unbreached the flare gun and loaded in one of the cartridges from my pocket.
He threw the transponder overboard. He looked over at me:
“What are you doing with that device?”
“It’s a flare gun, Majaar.” I trained it on him. “You know what a flare gun is, don’t you?”
“How did you operate it?”
“You’re becoming one of them; aren’t you? You’re forgetting the little things. Just like the captain before he drank… What’s inside the bottle?”
“What happened to the device in your hand?” he asked. “I need to know. It’s important for me.”
“What’s in the bottle, Majaar?
“That’s how it spreads; isn’t it? The alcohol keeps it sterile before it reaches the bloodstream. The captain drank from Nikolay’s flask. Then they went nuts and torched the engine room.
“Why? Why torch the engine room? For the heat?”
“How did you change it?” Majaar asked. “That thing you hold—how did you change it. It’s important you tell me.”
“Pour out the bottle over the side.”
He looked into me and smiled. “I’ll pour it—”
“No. Wait.”
He turned the fifth upside down. Grey slime oozed onto the floor with plopping sizzles. It flashed in specks before pulsing red. The thing hesitated and fanned out. Then it stopped and coalesced in a blob. It headed toward me.
“Stop, Majaar. Call it back.”
He looked back up and laughed. “It’s been growing inside me. I’ve watched it destroy so many times on so many different worlds. Now, it’s inside me and I know what it feels like to be part of the burning redness. It feels like home.”
“Stop it. Call it back!” I pressed into the aft lip of the lifeboat and thought about jumping overboard. The mass was below us now, waiting to encircle.
The glowing sludge scorched the steel beneath it in a thin, black streak. It burned and slid with stuttering back and forth hesitations like a taunting dog.
“How many cartridges do you have for the device? How many does it take to activate it?”
“The device?” I asked. I held the flare gun overboard. “I’ll drop it.”
“No,” Majaar said. “We need it. Give the heat. Be careful, Samples.”
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The glowing slug stopped, inches from my foot. Its throbbing glow warmed through my steel toed boots.
“That’s why you followed me to the lifeboat—the flare gun?”
“The heat,” he said. “Tells us more of the heat. Tell us: how hot is the device? How long will it keep us warm? How long will it keep us flexible—keep us pliant?”
“Forever,” I blurted. “You’ll be warm and flexible—you’ll be pliant forever. I swear.” I looked down. “Call it back!”
He made clicking noises and it moved toward him. It slid up his leg and over his chest, burning his clothes and charring his smoking flesh on its way. “Come home. Come home,” he said and it turned grey and slipped into his mouth.
“Now,” he edged forward, crouching low. “Give the device.”
I looked at the flare gun, then at the distant, burning Aheara and the black horizon. “Okay.” I pointed it at him.
“No. First—”
The flare imbedded into his chest and his ribs ballooned outward before the grey slime pulled him back together. It seeped out of his skin and his whole body gleamed a blinding red. “It’s magical,” he said, wobbling and struggling to stand. “Each sector I’ve visited—all the pleasures I’ve experienced. This is the center point, Samples. This is what I’ve always been waiting for and what I knew I deserved. It loves me.”
The red ring rose out of the water. It revved and tightened around us.
He turned on me: “Now—you burn for heat.”
I picked up an oar and jabbed him off balance and the oar caught fire.
He wobbled and looked over at the icy black waters.
I jabbed him again and the boat rocked.
“No,” he said. “It’s mine,”—he looked over at the icy waters—“The heat wants to stay with me.” He hunched himself lower in a defensive stance, preparing to lunge. “You can’t hate me; can you, Samples? You can’t hate the spark for wanting to live.”
I jumped on the left lip of the hull just as a wave struck. The lifeboat capsized and I was sucked under into the cold blackness. As the waters swirled and shook me I managed to open my eyes long enough to see a flailing red ember sinking down. It sputtered out in a storm of steam geysers. I groped around and found the edge of the lifeboat and slowly pulled myself out flat over the top of the overturned hull. Up above, the rescue copters lit up the waters and the lifeboat. The red slime oozed up the boat, burning my leg and my clothes. It was a slow burn. It was tired. The size of its catch had been overestimated.
With and Without Class Page 1