F3: ‘The Terminal’
Now, I’m not quite sure if this is flash (it’s just over 1000 words), or the opening chapter of something a bit longer. I’ve got some vague ideas of what might happen next.
As ever, crit and comments more than welcome.
THE TERMINAL
Open to the void, the terminal’s absent ceiling is unnerves and unsettles. I’m sitting on the main steps, running my hands over the simulated marble – the texture is right, but the lack of heat data compounds my discomfort.
(20:25:05) RED: Is she there yet? I need another 100 to get the lunchbox into range. At least.
Yanking my attention back from the void, my pupils dart from left to right, picking letters on an invisible keyboard. With a blink, the message is sent.
(20:25:43) Diver: Not yet. Wish you could see this place, Red; it’s bizarre.
In the silence, the clattering of a mechanical departures sign. I turn my head, expecting movement, but there’s nothing. A foolish expectation, particularly taken in the light of the environment’s lack of roof.
“So, what do you think?”
Grace wears a charcoal skirt and matching jacket. Her hair is a mass of tightly wound fronds, the colour of burnt cherry. The only colour in this place, in fact. Grayscale elegance in a haptic mausoleum.
But everyone has their quirks, and my paycheck relies on my willingness to accommodate hers.
(20:27:21) Diver: And I’m on. You ready?
“Stunning.” I say, tipping my trilby. Nice touch; another of Red’s recommendations.
(20:27:40) RED: Think I can see the TV tower. Give me a little longer?
Returning the smile, Grace looks down. “Not me, Perry; the terminal.”
“I know.”
Silence; a window long enough to let my words sink in, but not enough to pass the baton of conversation.
“I was particularly impressed by the-”
(20:29:01) RED: Ha! Think I’ve found the vats.
Red’s comment is the push which topples the tower. Distracted by the floating text, my thoughts dissolve to dust. Grace leans in, touching me gently. The skin texture is real enough, but – as with the marble – the absence of body heat highlights the illusion.
“You okay, Perry?”
I shudder, hoping to dislodge the spectral presence. Or, at the very least, willing Red to stay silent.
“I’m fine.” Standing, I turn to gesture at the monochrome cavern. “Tell me more about this place.”
“Well,” Grace begins, pursing her lips, “Most of the mesh was a favour from this Swedish guy from college. In the year before the crash, he was part of some open source survey of famous sites and spaces. One of those geospatial things.”
I tilt my head sceptically.
“And what about the textures? The sounds? The lighting?”
“Added afterwards. I’ve got a good team working on this. We’re dragging it through beta at the moment – polishing, and plugging the gaps with archive photos and video footage. Right now, there’s a Canadian artist rendering the last of the roof.” Glancing over at the terminal clock, she allows a moment of silence. “Well, perhaps not right now.”
She smiles. Suddenly, I’m extremely aware of the ungrounded artifice of the pinstripe and trilby. I’m not supposed to be here. She’s going to find out, kick me back to the surface, and I’ll watch as the sister’s promises of cash evaporate.
(20:32:15) RED: Keep her talking. I’m trying to kick out the cameras; it shouldn’t take long.
“And what then?” I ask, frowning slightly.
“Well, once testing finishes, we’re hoping to turn it loose on the vintage crowd.”
Her face softens into another smile, triggering a faint pang of guilt. I stand, and walk over to her. Suppressing the niggles of uncertainty, I attempt to inject some amusement into my voice.
“Which explains the clothing.” I say, raising an eyebrow.
“Exactly.” She clasps my hand in hers. “Thanks for coming, Perry. It really means a lot to me.”
(20:34:58) Diver: Shit. Remind me why we’re doing this, Red.
“But you barely know me.” I say, dismissively.
We both listen to the mechanical clattering of the non-existent departures board, giving a dimension to the silence between thoughts.
(20:35:21) RED: A pile of cash? A way of ensuring the long-term mental health of a deeply unstable woman? You tell me.
Rhetorical questions aren’t supposed to have answers, and this revelation is a fist in the stomach.
“A deeply unstable woman?” Red’s words escape my clenched molars. “You didn’t think to tell me that much, did you?”
And then, quiet as a whisper; “She doesn’t seem particularly unstable.”
It takes a couple of moments for my actions to percolate the surface of my monochrome, simulated skull, birthing a moment of pure terror. Her smile hardening, Grace asks who I was talking to. I try to remain nonchalant.
“I didn’t … I mean, I wasn’t-”
She sighs.
“It’s okay, Perry, I think know why you’re here.”
“You do?”
Grace folds her arms.
“And here’s what’s going to happen next; I’m going to ask you to leave.”
“What? Why?”
Back in the vat, my heart and stomach strain against my chest.
(20:37:32) RED: Damnit, Simon, can you hold her a bit longer? I’m almost there.
“You’re going to walk out of that big door over there” – she gestures at the terminal’s main entrance, also opening onto the void, “And, you know what?”
“What?”
(20:37:49) Diver: How? Suggestions would be useful!
“I’ve had enough of your type, Perry – assuming that’s even your real name. You’re going to stay out of my life.”
Anticipating a response from Red, I stay silent. Grace looks at me with determined eyes. Gradually, the initial punch of ventricle-blowing panic dissipates. Screw Red; it’s time for the truth.
“Did you hear-?”
I raise an index finger to my lips, and the question dies in her throat.
“Well, you’re right on one thing, girl; Perry is no more my name than Grace is yours.”
She does a good impression of confusion.
“What the hell do you think you’re talking about?”
“Grace is a pseudonym. What happened to Rosanna Garcia, second in line to the Garcia ethanol fortune? Do me a favour, Rosanna, and look around you-”
I gesture at the gaping darkness.
“How can this be escapism? Without colour, without warmth, this can only be a pale emulation of the real. And the real wants you back, Rosanna. Your sister’s in the real, in Manaus, and she wants you back.”
“Really, I don’t know what you’re talking about-”
On my part, a split-second of doubt.
“… my name is Grace, and-”
(20:39:07) RED: And we’re done. Now, let’s get the hell out of here.
And with Red’s final comments, Grace is expelled from the terminal.
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
F3: ‘Sublime’
They said it couldn’t be done.
Well, I sure showed them … Fools!
*cackles menacingly*
SUBLIME
Finishing the last of her soup, Theresa turns to me and smiles. Her eyes are unnervingly reptilian. I don’t know, perhaps her great-grandfather was a monitor lizard or something. My boyfriend, my former boyfriend, kept a monitor lizard. He was called Coleridge, after the poet. The lizard, that is. Not my boyf-
Not my ex-boyfriend.
Anyway, she’s sitting there; cold eyes, fixed smile.
“Becky” she says, hints of a smirk playing on her lips, “Really dear, that soup was sublime.”
Her voice goes up on the last word. I clench, well, pretty much everything. This is it – showtime.
“Sublime?” I ask, raising both voice and eyebrows; “Really?”
As I continue, her smirk hardens.
“So,” – (I lean in, eyes pitched skyward) – “Would that be the Burkean or Kantian conception of the sublime?”
She turns to Ivan; her man from Minsk. He shrugs, inadvertently concealing what little there is of his neck.
I wait. I’m good at waiting.
“Kantian?” she hazards eventually, staring intently at the table.
“Ah!” I say, getting to my feet, “So the soup shattered your ‘misplaced belief in authentic representation [1]?” I advance on her, menacingly. She shrinks back into her seat.
“Was it” – (anticipating victory, I pause to wet my lips) – “a phenomenon so fundamentally overpowering that it was, to quote Bleiker and Leet, ‘not just awe-invoking, but simply too vast to be comprehended in [its] totality [2]?”
“Did you just manage to incorporate footnotes into your … uh …?”
Ivan trails off as I fix him with one of my stares. Snatching the empty soup bowl from under Theresa’s chin, I’m pretty sure I see her wince. For the rest of the evening, she says nothing, and I later return from a toilet break to find both her and Ivan gone – having slipped, unnoticed, into the neon gloom of the concrete jungle.
- – - – -
[1] Bleiker, R. and M. Leet. 2006. ‘From the Sublime to the Subliminal’, in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 34 (3), p. 723.
[2] Ibid. p. 717.
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
F3: ‘The Crone Tree’
First draft penned in our writing workshop at Eastercon, and finished on the train home. The loose theme – old gods, new technology.
THE CRONE TREE
She wanted answers.
A swab of saliva in a crystal vial, a pre-paid envelope, and thirty-five days. She scanned the small print, expertly woven by chitinous, scurrying lawyers; signed the forms. With that, the trap was sprung, ensnaring her in a gossamer web of sub-clauses and stipulations.
But this trap hadn’t been prepared for those of her origin. She sliced through the fibres like steel through flesh, shrugging off the danger with a blink of her eye.
They were a new outfit, young and fresh-faced. A venture from the valley of silicon dreams, established by biomedical drop-outs in the aftermath of the dot-com crash. A wager placed on life, in the face of mechanical failure.
One or two early successes, and they’d brought in the experts. White coats, shoe polish, and clipboards. Venture capital, lawyers, and marketing gurus. The latter, mounting a full-frontal blitzkrieg on the international media.
They hadn’t expected her to be watching.
An unwinding helix derived from her spittle mounted a trojan attack on the central mainframe. Unable to accommodate the eldritch chemistry, it turned inwards. This was a far cry from its binary universe of light or dark; on or off. The white coats panicked, swarming over the electric brain. The lawyers remained calm, politely requesting clarification, but the faces of polished oblivion only spooked the scientists further. Ignoring the chaos, they focused their energies on the machine – tending to its idiosyncratic accretions, and finally flushing the blockage with a torrent of code.
Or so they thought.
Rather than sluicing the error from the system, their manipulations pushed it further into the computer’s neural capillaries. The data crumbled into noise, dissolving into the system. Externalized as a ticked box on a record of productivity, the incident was filed and hastily forgotten.
Two weeks pass, and she waits by the window. A one-woman audience for the changing seasons. She watches the birds. Burning time. Talking to herself.
Her selves.
Four weeks pass, then five. On the morning of the thirty-sixth day, the mainframe’s ventilation and cooling shuts down; the background hum falls silent. While the technicians are on their lunch break, the mainframe puts forth roots, and – by the time they return – the peripheral servers have been shrouded in a cloak of delicate, heart-shaped leaves. As the daylight fades, the company network bursts into flower, then flame.
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
F3: ‘Non-Perishable’
Not sure how happy I am with this one. Still, semi-true story … and that’s got to count for something.
NON-PERISHABLE
One hundred and seventy pounds worth of organic fruit and veg. Well, not just that. There’s a fair few shrink-wrapped packs of pita in there, too. Some yoghurt, yeah. And a frozen chicken. But, apart from that, it’s definitely all about the fruit and veg.
I do contemplate asking him, but there’s something – something in the way he carries himself, perhaps – that warns me off. The defensive middle-distance gaze of a man who, I don’t know, knows something that we don’t. That I don’t.
Numbers dance in my head. Pre-teen memories of home economics. I mean, a man could probably survive for, say, a fortnight on one hundred and seventy pounds of fruit and veg. Three, four weeks, if managed well. Two people? Week and a half, maybe more, if they’ve got frozen and canned goods at their disposal. Of course, that’s assuming freezers still work. Hmm. Wonder what kind of outfit he’s running.
He flashes a card at the checkout girl. Now the proud owner of his own weight in plant matter, you’d expect him to look … hmm … satisfied, perhaps? Instead, he looks agitated; uneasy. He turns, perhaps looking for someone. I follow his line of sight. It’s about an hour before closing, and there’s hardly anyone here. The remaining customers seem utterly oblivious to anything outside their immediate bubble. A docile herd running on automatic. There’s an older lady behind me, fiddling with her phone. Wonder how much food she’s got in the cupboards. Wonder how long she’d last. The cashier coughs, and – startled – I turn, just in time to catch veg man leaving the shop.
A moment of indecision.
Something deep in the chemical processes of my brain fires. I mutter an apology to nobody in particular, sidestep the queue, and head back into the aisles to stock up on canned goods.
Better safe than sorry, after all.
Right?
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
F3: ‘Celerity’
A slightly shorter one from me this week.
CELERITY
The air hums with a warm static. Quinn can feel the insistent tug of the kite, swooping lazily overhead. The copper flames of Saint Elmo lick at its treated fibres; a chaotic pattern born of the breeze. Tightening the harness, our man permits himself a brief glance behind. The bulge is fast approaching; racing over the horizon, drowning the mudflats, and lapping against the mangroves.
We’ve been waiting for this. Three billion of us, lost – like Quinn – in a single moment. We feel the alien light, dense and oppressive. We feel the kite’s strain, pulling at our arm muscles. We see with his eyes; unblinking, wild with possibility. But where he sees victory, we see the chance of salvation.
A ship and its captain. A point of calm at the front of the tidal swell.
Then celerity.
__________
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
F3: ‘Fatima’s Funeral’
Right. First of all, I’m not dead. Secondly, this story might make a bit more sense if you see it as loosely inspired by this.
FATIMA’S FUNERAL
Nights are the worst. At some base level, the shock threw her fight-or-flight response, flooding her system with wave after wave of adrenaline. Hours spent staring at the apartment ceiling, Etienne snoring contently beside her. She waits for the wide-eyed exhaustion to retreat. And, when she does finally drop off, the occasional burst of distant gunfire seeps into her subconscious, warping her dreams. Brotherhood sympathisers, chanting in broken French. NDP leaders melting into the the glittering blue of pirated photovoltaics. Amidst the hollering and raucous applause, only their inane grimaces linger, outlined in fire against a sky of deep scarlet.
Her mind is still reeling, raw and unanchored. A whole world, snatched from her and hundreds – if not thousands – of others like her. If there had been a warning, they could have prepared. On. Then off. Yanked from the data-streams and thrust, bawling, into the angry reality that she’d spent the last six months trying her hardest to ignore.
Fatima’s funeral marks the fourth day since the emp bomb. Four days without the mesh, and three nights of fragmenting sleep and feverish hallucinations. Sam had never been particularly close to Fatima, but the funeral is bearable enough. The gentle drone of family elders is a welcome respite from the smog of superliminal panic. But a couple of hours is all she gets. Despite data blackout, curfews, and gunfire, the various cousins and hangers-on seem all too eager to return home. Politely avoiding Sam’s speculations about recent developments, they make their excuses and leave; a cloud of pursed lips and pragmatic eyebrows, picking their way through the City of the Dead.
Home in time for dinner.
In their absence, she sits, staring out over the graves of those long dead. The sun is low, hanging ominously against the dark smoke of the western horizon. But with a good few hours before the curfew, and Etienne watching over the boys, she can afford to take some time for herself. A couple of minutes to Be, without having to Do.
“Are you okay, Samira?” With someone’s hand on her shoulder, she freezes. “You look- well, like you haven’t slept in weeks.” The voice is rich, smooth, and unpleasantly familiar. Of course, she had heard the footsteps, she must have. She just hadn’t been listening to them. A subtle difference, but an important one. Warily, she looks up.
“Karim.” she says, flatly. “Wasn’t expecting to see you here, of all places.”
He’s taller than she remembers, and his greasy locks are longer. but he still wears that jacket. That grotty, battered leather jacket – by now, as much a part of him as his limbs or head.
“Well, no,” he admits, shifting uneasily from foot to foot. “And under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have come, but-”
He glances over his shoulder, leaving the comment to hang, unfinished. To Sam, he looks downright furtive.
“But what?” she asks, prompting him to continue.
“I don’t think I’ve got much time,” he says, lowing his voice. “And I need to ask a favour of you. If you’re willing, of course.”
Karim waits, hopefully. Eventually, she nods.
He lends her his wearable to look at the files, as they pick their way between the tombs. Nanofab plans for seventeen items. A statue of a husband and wife, a bust of some historical figure, a large urn, and a bunch of other, smaller artefacts. He claims to have acquired them from a former curator at the national museum; a Brotherhood supporter who’d copied the ‘prints after the bomb, but before the NDP recaptured Tahrir square.
“After the bomb?” Sam glances down at her own wearable, fried by the emp.
“I don’t know,” he admits, scratching at his nose, “He said something about ‘Faraday servers’, if that means anything to you?”
Sam shrugs. It doesn’t.
“And what about your kit?” she asks.
“Must have been out of range. The city mesh is just about hanging together, though the emp blew out the core.”
Satisfied by his answer, Sam nods wearily. So, it was just a matter of bad luck. Wrong place, wrong time. No longer urban tragedy, but personal slight. She frowns.
“And what about the IP regime? Don’t you think this, this whole thing is kind of dangerous?”
“Well,” says Karim, “Apart from the last remnants of the SCA, who is there to enforce the molecular rights? Don’t kid yourself, sis, nobody’s going to care about our ‘national culture’ when the city’s burning.”
She looks down at her feet, as he continues.
“I mean, do you have any idea of the market for these kind of-?”
Silence. She looks up, but he’s already gone, darting left, then right, through the narrow alleyways of the dead. On the other side of the clearing, a glint of light reflected off field glasses. Three men in tan uniforms, scanning the landscape for any sign of movement. Acid nausea in the pit of her stomach, Sam leaps back, throwing herself against the rough wall of a crumbling mausoleum. If the blast took out their kit as well, and if she stays put, there’s a good chance the Egyptologists won’t even see her.
__________
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
F3: ‘Creeping Doubts’
Another Nano extract. It’s going very slowly – at this point, I’ve written just under 14,000 words. I’m supposed to be well past 25,000. I think I may have inadvertently sabotaged myself by getting slightly too attached to the story – taking it a little too seriously. Not a healthy mindset, particularly for Nano. And the lingering presence of university assignments really isn’t helping.
Stupid writer’s block.
CREEPING DOUBTS
BAM! A world of adrenaline and nerve endings comes up to meet her; a wide beam of light leaving nowhere to hide. The penetrating gaze of the predator dissolving into nothingness. Here, she is body alone. And her body aches; a purgatory of pain which smothers the endless now – a thick red rope stretching off into the horizon. Nina grits her teeth, wiping the dried crud from her face, and trying to get some sense of her location. From somewhere above, the irregular patter of raindrops on metal. Clutching desperately at the last remnants of memory – there’s a brief rush of intense nostalgia, cast in sepia tones. But after a moment it too fades, leaving a taste of vomit in the lower reaches of her skull.
Chiram. She needs to find him, before someone else – someone entirely less friendly – finds her. Cognitive dissonance, as she realises that her knowledge of him, as an individual rather than an alias, extends only to that which she’s learned in the last-
She pauses. Time is tricky, here – little more than an illusion, altered on a whim by forces beyond her comprehension, outside of herself. After all, who knows how much of it has passed since-
Another hesitation, as she searches for some kind of mental landmark – for now, conspicuous only in its absence. Did she shoot the leopard, or Sun-wei? The ghost of a memory, stirring somewhere in the limbic depths.
Pulling herself up from the worn mattress, she searches the room for some kind of context. Information about the room’s intended purpose, signs of inhabitation, anything. The room is long and narrow, skylight open to the mountain air, and empty but for Nina’s bedding. The nest of fabric and padding in which she woke, but minutes previous. The only other defining feature is a similar pile of debris on the other side of the room, one of the sheets stained with the dark crimson of blood. Nina suppresses a shudder. Sweeping her hair behind her shoulders and rolls up her sleeve. Slowly tiptoeing over to the door, she pulls it open, and steps – straight into Chiram.
“Wh-?”
A hand claps over Nina’s mouth, and she yelps.
“Shh.” he hisses, “Stay quiet.”
Released, and with fear in her eyes, Nina looks up at Chiram. He gives her an empty grin, clearly intended as a gesture of solidarity. But, unable to sustain the illusion, he flounders, shedding the smile for an anxious grimace.
“Why? What’s going on? Where are we?”
Another smile, enigmatic but equally inappropriate.
“After the fire … did Sun-wei say anything about the fire to you?”
She nods.
“Hmm,” – Chiram raises an eyebrow – “That’s interesting. He must have taken a shine to you.”
“Oh?” asks Nina, the landscape falling away from under her. And what if he hadn’t? Before, she’d taken it on faith that the future would have her in it. Now, all she can sense is a creeping uncertainty.
__________
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
F3: ‘Paper Boats in the Blue Hour’
Another NaNo extract. I’m still woefully behind in terms of word-count, but the plot seems to be progressing; if not consistently, then with erratic ebullience – something that I wasn’t even aware was part of my vocabulary.
Wow. You can really see how this is changing the way in which I write …
PAPER BOATS IN THE BLUE HOUR
The room is cramped, but curiously endearing. Sprawled on the bed, Anna flicks idly through one of those vapid, content-free magazines – glossy, with improbably posed fashion models, and pseudo-articles claiming some special insight about lifestyle perfume. Too tired to read, but not yet buzzing enough to bother moving from the bed, Anna instead stares at letters – a matter of shape, colour and typography – with words continuing to elude her slowly melting brainspace.
There is a knock at the door. She moans half-heartedly in response.
“Anna? Are you okay?”
The voice is Sam’s – tentative and amused. She can’t really be bothered to let him in. The energy expended wouldn’t really be worth the ensuing benefits of his company. Heck, he’d probably demand more of her energy – opinions, ideas, conversation – once he wormed his way in. Best to take a pre-emptive strike, nip it in the bud.
Then the caffeine hits.
Looking back from that which is yet to come, the rest of that night sees Anna and Sam as but crudely folded paper boats, freed from the solid certainties of land. Here, time mimics the weather, forming eddies and channels, and settling in pools. They talk about the first book, and Sam’s script. He has a sketchpad, and she clutches his script to her chest – annotations in red. He tells stories; bawdy, and heavy with tangents, and Anna titters – politely at first, but then with genuine humour, a laughter originating from deep in her belly. With coffee as lubricant, they volley ideas in an evolving game of wits and one-upmanship. The priest dies fifty, a hundred deaths – fragments of glass shattering on flagstones. Murder witnessed from every conceivable vantage point. A plane crashes in slow motion; a sheet of watercolour paper is crumpled into a ball; a leopard leaps. And you’re there, watching as they grease the spokes with a never-ending supply of silty liquid, scalded tongues, and a bloodstream of sugar and caffeine – pumping energy to every forgotten corner of the body. Energy borrowed from their future selves. Steam rises, lazily, from coats draped on radiators and half-full polystyrene cups. They keep powering onwards, afraid of stopping, thinking, in case they lose momentum. Finally, the blue hour arrives, an unwelcome herald of approaching daylight. They try to lock it out, but light begins to seep under the door and through the curtains, forcing the remaining shards of reality into retreat. As the shadows fade, the narrative artisans fall into their own peculiar darkness, into rapid eye movement and muscle spasms. A theatre of dreams, with audition speeches from a never-ending conveyor belt of unemployed actors. Then, a tide of overpowering boredom, as the landscape melts away; their orbit degrading into free-fall where recursive visions of mechanical debris and skeletal cathedrals bloom; a nauseating panorama of noise as they plummet into the void …
_____
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
F3: ‘Traitor!’
For this week’s Flash Fiction, I’m cheating. This is less a short story, and more a segment of metafiction lifted from the opening passages of this year’s contribution for National Novel Writing Month (30 days, 50,000 words, and one of the most entertainingly complicated plots in existence). Over the coming weeks, I’ll hopefully be posting a couple more extracts from the trenches of my ongoing campaign against laziness, procrastination, and writers block.
TRAITOR!
Nina wakes shortly before sunrise. The muffled tones of a heated argument between a woman and a man, as heard through a wall, gently permeating the onion padding of her subconscious. From the sound of it, the argument is in Russian; the exclamations are angular, guttural.
And as the layers peel away, leaving Nina being pulled up and into the light of the waking world, a flood of memories and impressions return. A gunshot in the darkness. A deep crimson seeping into the snow. The cold, uninterested stare of a Chinese official. And now what? A warehouse in the mountains; the sharp, metallic taste of blood; and – she opens her eyes – a man with a gun. Triggering some bestial fight-or-flight reflex buried deep in the far recesses of her skull, Nina winces, and dives into the shadows. Well, she tries to. Hands lashed to the pillar against which she was slumped, her movement is limited.
But at least she’s alive. Head throbbing, and with a clear majority of limbs long since fallen victim to a warm, dull pain, her mouth tastes of blood – sharp, metallic, and all-too-rapidly drying into a crust on her lips.
“She’s awake.”
Not so much an exclamation, as a statement of fact. This from the man with the gun – a call to a colleague; an accomplice, or perhaps an employer. There are others in the building, the argument confirmed that much. But, for now, the request falls on silence, absorbed by the empty recesses of the warehouse. Nina wants to speak, to cry for help, or ask questions. Her throat is dry, and there is something in gunman’s expression which suggests that this would not be a good idea. So she waits. After several minutes, gunman gets up, walks over the door, and repeats his call. Then he returns to his seat. This time, there are footsteps, and Chiram – the Jewish pilot who delivered her to this god-forsaken backwater – comes to the door. Her stomach tenses. She wants him to flee, to run. To take his plane, and leave this place – and all that it entails – as a memory in the dust. But then she sees something in his eyes. Something that, taken with a slight crumpling round the corners of his mouth, hints at a hidden truth. She inhales – a deep, breath of the dry, warehouse air.
“Ah, Nina. I see you’re back. You had us worried for a while, there.”
There’s something different about his voice. Shorn of its soft edges and humour, it’s as if Chiram has been bought into focus. And Nina isn’t entirely sure that she likes what she sees. While Nina starts to piece together the situation, he tilts his head thoughtfully, looks at gunman, and continues.
“Not that it would have mattered in the grand scheme of things, of course.”
“Chiram, what’s-”
Nina’s throat is drier than she’d thought, and her question stumbles briefly, before collapsing into a coughing fit. But it doesn’t matter, because she already knows the answers. He’s betrayed her; delivering them both into the jaws of the very beast that she’d been hunting. But while she’d be swallowed whole, he’d bought himself immunity.
“You turned me over? “
Given form, the question sounds somehow … hollow; faintly ridiculous.
“Girl,” says Chiram, tilting his head, “I was never on your side. Face it, doll, you’re out of your depth.”
“But Chiram-”
“I’m not Chiram,” – he stares down her desperate gaze, melting it to impotence – “Chiram is dead.”
_____
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
F3: ‘Fortune Cookie’
I know it’s been a couple of weeks since I remembered to take part, but here’s a new entry for Friday Flash Fiction.
FORTUNE COOKIE
To Noah, the Chinese restaurant channelled clips from a hundred badly dubbed kung fu movies. There was the tank of exotic fish into which the katana-wielding goons would be thrown; here was the frosted plate glass from which the elderly kingpin would plummet to his death; and there was the door with the ‘no entry’ sign which would inevitably lead to the ill-lit underground headquarters from which the family coordinated their money laundering / prostitution / drug smuggling activities. He tried explaining this to his date, but she seemed less than entirely convinced.
Clearing her throat, she explained how it was more likely that the fish tank was made from shatter-proof plastic, and how it would be impossible for anyone – even an elderly, moustachioed master criminal – to die from injuries sustained in a fall from the ground floor. She was smiling, though. So perhaps, on some level, she understood what he meant?
He told her about the full extent of his Wuxia collection. She told him about her job in publishing. He explained how it was cheaper for him to live in his parents basement, which was actually quite spacious now that he’d moved the boxes. She smiled encouragingly.
But his suspicions about her were properly confirmed when, in a lull in the conversation, she gestured for him to lean in. Glancing sideways at the waitress, who hovered in the background like some kind of vulture, Noah’s date closed her hand on his. She believed him. And If Noah was willing to distract the girl, she’d go and investigate the underground headquarters, allowing him to follow later. Say, in half an hour. Heart thumping, Noah nodded. He ordered another glass of lemonade, and a couple of fortune cookies. The waitress disappeared into the kitchen, and Noah’s date made a beeline for the door. Glancing back over her shoulder, she winked, and the door swung shut behind her.
The fortune cookies came, along with the drink, but Noah’s date was nowhere to be seen. What if she’d been captured? After twenty-two minutes, he could bear it no longer. While the waitress was engaged in argument with a heavy-set gentleman on a table in the far corner, Noah stood up slowly, sidled over the door, took a deep breath, and leapt into the cleaning cupboard.
There was a mop, a bucket, and several bottles of cleaning fluid. The window was open, and someone had stacked a couple of boxes against the wall. Noah sighed, explained to the irate waitress that he’d simply been looking for the toilet, and returned to his table.
So much for the criminal gang. Heck, so much for his date. Momentarily losing himself in the pattern of gas bubbles rising in his glass of lemonade, Noah broke into the larger of the fortune cookies. Now, that was odd – instead of a piece of paper, there was a small ziploc bag, which seemed to contain some kind of … white … powder.
Shit, thought Noah, as he met the less-than-friendly gaze of the guy at the other table, Not again.
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This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
