Pearl
Jeffe Kennedy

THE DISCOVERY OF SCHNELL, the natural man, rang through our small world like an ancient gunpowder shot. The kind the books said made the ears ring and heart pound. So, yes, my heart thumped, pumping hot blood to my ears; my fingers trembled, weak and burning; and I definitely heard some kind of high whine when Casidy and Tomas first pulled Schnell out of the cubby, deep in the machine bowels.

We were on the routine maintenance checks assigned to the younger people, those of us no longer children, but who aren’t full Techs. That day, we had descended to Level 137, which is the lowest that remains accessible. I understood even then, before Schnell taught me my own history, that there were levels built beneath that, but as far as any of us were concerned, our dungeon—Tomas and I favored the books with castles and prisoners in need of rescue—was the bottom of the world and anything below that might as well be mantle and magma. Actually, all of Obidion should be called the dungeon, since that’s the ancient word for an underground holding facility for criminals, but that’s a fine point.

Tomas and I always volunteered for lower level duty, ever since the day when we were ten and found the secret compartment off an old chamber. Tomas had been showing off for me, kicking the old metal walls to make bigger and bigger dents. With a soft whoomp, one dent became a hole and old air sifted out. Inside we found stories, more and better than any we had made up.

One Avatar, Hold the Anchovies
S. Hutson Blount

I’M AN OLD MAN in this business. It’s all kids now. My co-workers are ten years younger than me and not noticeably inclined to do any work. Delivering pizza isn’t a good job, but it is a job. The mysterious relationship between effort and reward seems to have escaped the notice of the pimple-cream classes. This is the heart of how I wound up delivering a medium deep-dish with sausage and mushrooms to a major mythological figure.

I was working goalie at Sunshine the night of the lunar eclipse. “Goalie” is the driver we had to reserve to make emergency deliveries when the kids got lost, forgot, wrecked their riced-up econoboxes, or just plain decided to eat the pie themselves. Old Lady Januzaj had about zero tolerance for that shit. It didn’t play back in Albania, and she wasn’t about to bend the rules for any snot-nose American kids. The Old Lady had no great love for me, either—I think she caught me eyeballing her daughter Rina once. Rina’s in community college, and Januzaj treats her like a treasure, and in imminent peril from every Y-chromosome on the planet. She doesn’t seem to have much affection left over for her sons, or any other human being that I could tell, but she grudgingly allowed me to keep working for her since I actually did the job. In return, she kept me in rent money with a little left over for beer.

And so it came to pass that my long-suffering Mazda pickup shuddered to a halt in front of a dingy one-bedroom crackerbox in Lake Highlands. It was the sort of house they were building here in the Fifties, brick in hospital pastel colors and fake shutters attached to the outside of the windows. This one looked like it hadn’t been kept up since fear of Sputnik had chased the original owner indoors. The corpse of what had been a boat poked out from the covered carport. Whoever Eric Aten was, he must run up a fortune in electric bills. It looked like Klieg lights were on in every room.

The Dam
Daniel Marcus

IN ONE BEAKER, prepare a solution of seventy-six percent sulfuric acid, twenty-three percent nitric acid and one percent water. In another beaker, prepare a solution of fifty-seven percent nitric acid and forty-three percent sulfuric acid. Percentages are given by weight, not volume.

I was standing on the causeway that runs across the top of the dam, looking out over the reservoir. It had been raining for days and the water was the color of milky tea.

“It’s good,” a voice behind me said.

I whirled around, nearly jumping out of my skin.

“Jesus, Oscar, you scared the daylights out of me.”

“It’s good when it’s like this,” he said, his eyes grey and empty as the sky. A small rivulet of drool escaped from the corner of his mouth.

“What’s good?” I asked.

“The Dragon cannot live in water that is too pure,” he said.

Hit
Bruce McAllister

I’M GIVEN THE ASSIGNMENT by an angel—I mean that, an angel—one wearing a high-end Armani suit with an Ermenegildo Zegna tie. A loud red one. Why red? To project confidence? Hell, I don’t know. I’m having lunch at Parlami’s, a mediocre bistro on Melrose where I met my first ex, when in he walks with what looks like a musical instrument case—French horn or tiny tuba, I’m thinking—and sits down. We do the usual disbelief dialogue from the movies: He announces he’s an angel. I say, “You’re kidding.” He says, “No. Really.” I ask for proof. He says, “Look at my eyes,” and I do. His pupils are missing. “So?” I say. “That’s easy with contacts.” So he makes the butter melt on the plate just by looking at it, and I say, “Any demon could do that.” He says, “Sure, but let’s cut the bullshit, Anthony. God’s got something He wants you to do, and if you’ll take the job, He’ll forgive everything.” I shrug and tell him, “Okay, okay. I believe. Now what?” Everyone wants to be forgiven, and it’s already sounding like any other contract.

He reaches for the case, opens it right there (no one’s watching—;not even the two undercover narcs—the angel makes sure of that) and hands it to me. It’s got a brand-new crossbow in it. Then he tells me what I need to do to be forgiven.

“God wants you to kill the oldest vampire.”

Little Moon, Too, Goes Round
David Dumitru

KC MOSS PROPPED HER SHOVEL against the gate and scanned the horizon beyond the fence. A dust devil skipped for a moment across the prairie and then vanished, gone to nothing almost before she could pin a word on it. She bent and reached into the hole she’d been digging. Having lived most of her sixteen years on a farm a good deal past the end of the road where nowhere stops and turns around again, KC knew a thing or two about digging holes. Things died and the dead things got themselves eaten and whatever was left over started smelling pretty bad pretty quick, so it was important to get the leftovers in the ground lickety-split. On the other hand, all that digging wasn’t so bad once you got used to it. You never knew what you might find. KC lifted a skull out of the hole and turned it in her hand.

She brought it to her nose and sniffed. It had a wet smell, like a potato just out of the ground—which it was, she reminded herself, just out of the ground. She sniffed again. There was another smell, too. She thought it was the smell of things someone might be looking for. She looked deep into the eye sockets. She was reminded a little of Eddie Johnson, not because it looked like him, which, now that she thought about it, it kind of did, but because Eddie Johnson had played Hamlet in the inter-district drama club last year. He was seventeen and thin as a whistle and he thought he was a hottie. He wanted everyone to call him Edward, but KC still called him Eddie, even to his face. People said he was going with a girl in the next district, but that was just a rumor.

KC held the skull at arm’s length. She struck a pose and spoke in a deep, theatrical voice. “Alas, dear Yorkie, I knew thee swell.” Or was it Warwick? And was that actually from the play? She didn’t know. She settled on Yorwick and let it go.

Swimming Back From Hell by Moonlight
Marissa K. Lingen

WHAT WILL YOU LOSE IF YOU LOOK BACK?

I didn’t want to ask myself. Asking was almost a way of looking. When the gods promise you that your love will be behind you, if only you don’t look back, you know that you can’t look.

But the road out of hell is long, so I had plenty of time to think. What will you lose? It had not seemed like such a long road on the way down, and I thought I knew what I had to lose, and I thought it was nothing, not any more.

Nobody said we were the perfect couple, because we didn’t have the kind of friends who are given to that kind of idiotic pronouncement. But Jon and I were happy, truly and deeply happy. We’d each dated a few people before, nothing that worked out, nothing serious. Neither of us came from great heartbreak. We were just waiting, passing time. We met when my best friend married his best friend. It wasn’t love at first sight. I don’t believe in love at first sight. But it was something special.

Misery Loves
Craig D.B. Patton

MISERY DIDN’T LOVE COMPANY. She despised it. People bustling up to her crooked, rotted door? Crowding into her gloomy, dust-filled living room and perching on the torn sofa cushions? Inquiring whether the rusted kettle was on and whether she might have anything besides that dreadfully stale Earl Grey?

Horrid. All of it.

Misery wanted only solitude in the shadowy confines of her sagging house so that she could focus wholly and deeply on just how alone she was. Observe the spiders building fantastic webs in her unused shower. Meditate on the mottled shades of light coming through the dingy, cracked windows.

But life has a way of pushing us out of our shells, like a parent nudging a child into a roomful of barely known relatives. In Misery’s case, life (in the form of a massive thunderstorm) caused the roof to cave in one night.

She rather liked it at first. Investigating what had made such a loud, rending noise, she stood in her attic looking up through the jagged hole that had formerly been a third of the ceiling. Snapped beams were jutting skyward like broken ribs. Moss-covered shingles were flapping in the wind. Rain was soaking the jumbled piles of boxes that contained memories she did not care to remember. Bits of wood and shingle were everywhere. It was spectacularly awful. Added a whole new dimension of dreariness, really. She wondered why she had not thought to do it herself long ago.