Hero Status

***Without looking up he nudged his coffee cup toward the tender's edge of the bar and Fran, a sometimes friend and fellow member of the local bartending fraternity topped him off to the likely protests of the throngs of kids that always came to the bar at the same time and expected light speed service when there were 9 of them and just one Fran.  The ebb and flow of the kids coming and going buffeted him like rough tides.  It was fine when they all jammed up because they were stationary, and it was great when they were gone because he had space to breath.  The hard part was dealing with the influx and out flow in between high and low tides as they banged shoulders and hissed at each other like drunk penguins all trying to use one fax machine to send the exact same document to the same exact recipient, none of them realizing they had no business being in an office to begin with.***

Halved With Time

***Londa did not notice it back then, so many years ago, but since she had so much more time to simply look around her, she noticed now.  She saw some transporters come in with great holes torn in their bellies, bits of wing missing, or no wing at all.  Some that came straight down and dove right into the Earth in plumes of glittering and molten steel confetti, plastics, wire, and pulverized flesh, billowing in high black smoke.  No matter what direction they came from they always came in a vertical dive from the ceiling until only a few miles above the airspace of Rallypointe.  All around them something was happening, and had been for years. ***

Causeway

***"Roads out. Washed out." He squinted, he couldn't make out her face from where he stood.  His nostrils flared a moment as his lungs nipped into the filter. He spat the butt onto the gray, time slashed, pavement of Route 8 and watched Rawna climb through the empty windshield onto the hood. She formed her small hands into the shape of a megaphone.


"What!?"


He scratched his chin a moment, casting his eyes away from her sweat stretched pink tank top tweed slacks ensemble they'd picked out together at the local flea fair last season and into the cat tails in the ditch by the road side. He turned back to where Yipsbend road was supposed to have been. "The road's out! Causeway's gone."***

Ken Sunrise Dan

***The black eye came loose and rolled onto the wax paper of the dissection tray with a thick thud.  He avoided looking at it directly.  The milky film surrounding the dilated iris was ribbed with deep brown veins, but within the iris was a darkness that reflected the bright white LEDs with a twinkling intensity of intelligence that gripped his stomach with a mercilessness that could hang on for hours after he left for home.  Those expressing the traits of the true psychic were institutionalized and medicated until their deaths.  He read the rumor pulp about the military having plans for developing true psychic soldiers, but he also knew there were already biological and hardware machines that could wage war much better than any man ever could or ever would.  His finger slipped within the orbital cartilage of the red fin's skull and jabbed a lobe of the softball knot of the hard cased brain.  "Jesus," the thing's thick tail twitched hard and slapped his elbow, sending his torch pen to the floor.  He quickly bent to pick it up and returned it to his tray of tools as he tended to his task.  The reason was more primal and closer to every human being's core than fear could ever cut.***

See, Feel, Find Me

***Can we transact." Steven planted the jar, full of glistening dark love firmly in the dirt beside the coffee can mini-hotplate contraption. The smell would have been as fresh as a half buried corpse were it not for the severe overtones of amonia, scorched colon and vaporized bile. "I'm just saying can we please transact. Or," Ron Wynn did not like how Steven's gaze made the skin on his chest attempt to claw away and hide at the small of his back, "you know. Or not. It's up to you." A small storm radio kicked on loud enough to rouse a "fuck, god damn" from Ron's already weak gut, then just as quickly as it started it cut off as the camper ripped the square battery out of it and chucked it across the way with a splash into the duct.***