Delivery

"It bit me."

"Vicious little bastards aren't they?" Gerrard laughed, as I bound the oozing nip on my thumb.

"What the hell are they?" I asked, peering into the strengthened plexiglass carry-case.

Inside scurried numerous..things..I'd have called them rat-like if they'd only had four legs. Mostly, they seemed to be made of teeth. They burrowed among the packing peanuts, sinuously writhing over each other. Every now and again greenish spines would ripple and twitch as they confronted one another.

"We've no idea," said Gerrard, "despite the teeth, they don't actually seem to eat anything."

He smiled. "Apart from you that is."

"Leach isn't going to like us storing these in the cellar."

"Aah, Leach is always complaining we never visit." Gerrard began to pack the case up.

I'd heard what Leach complained about.

Things grow, he said, in the dark.

Where does all the time go?

Yesterday, one of the grandkid's toys, car I think, got stuck behind the sofa.

My daughter had already left with Toby and Jen, but I knew I'd get a phone call the moment they got back, and it'd take an age to find.

So there I was, on my knees (no mean feat at my age) face against the soft furnishing, specs inching up my forehead when I touched it, cold and pulsing with a bluish light.

I knelt, staring, as it showed me images. Flora, when she was still here: smiling, loving, crying. Wasting away.

Decisions, successes. Regrets. (A fair share of those).

It pulled, a tugging behind my ribs; I could change things, it said. Make things right.

I sat a long time, thinking. What is it makes a life?

I cried a while.

And put it back.

Night watchmen

Greg eyed the door. He couldn't shake the idea that something was wrong with it.

"Most of the lights don't work," said Leach, waving vaguely. "Course light isn't all that great for some of the specimens."

Leach's footsteps echoed. His wavering flashlight barely pushing back the darkness; row upon row of metal shelves, stretching off to unseen limits.

Torchlight danced shadows through a flickering maze of jars, books, strangely angled statuary, things suspended in liquid; bulbous eyes peering sightlessly.

Slapping his flickering torch to life Greg hurried after.

"No one comes down here nowadays," Leach was saying. "They forget."

"But if no one remembers this place, what do they need us for?" said Greg, looking toward the water-streaked door.

"Us?" said Leach, turning. "We're here to stop things getting out."

Then Greg saw.

The locks were on the inside.

Stupid is...

I could feel myself getting stupider as he talked.

His opening gesticulating gambit was about the blacks.

Inwardly rolling my eyes, desperate to extricate myself. The barman took an age to pour my pint.

As my bitter arrived my benighted companion began a monologue on "Those Muslins". God help me, I nodded, all but an invitation to join me at my table, which of course he did.

As I sipped and he droned I could barely hear myself think, nor remember why I chose to enter this dank side street dive.

Women, government, the police. I half expected him to start foaming at the mouth.

Time passed, I felt fuzzy, his arguments begun to make sense, using big words.

I fought he must a bin a right clever geezer tho.

He buyed me a pint and wents. Fancy a chat?

Fair Use

"Do you know why you're here Mr. Roberts?" The bald man arched an eyebrow over a sheaf of papers.

David squinted, a bleary haze adding to his alchohol smeared stupor.

Baldy's finger jabbed, "Pursuant to article seventeen, involvement in gross misconduct while inebriated."

Baldy's companion flashed a headache inducing necktie as he looked up, "Although, you did far exceed your usual productivity."

Security footage flashed on Necktie's screen.

Friday night's office party: pretty girl, copy room, two bottles of vodka.

"The result of your congress has yielded progeny"

David's brain cleaved down the centre, a bright shooting pain, his what?

"You are aware, of course, in accordance with article thirty-eight, subsection six, work produced whilst in employ of the company belongs in whole to the company?"

David pressed fists into his eyes.

"Maybe he'll work out better than you."

Locked

I hit him with the phone, an original Bakelite.

I'd give him implausible plot and weak characterisation. He hit the desk, then the deck.

I came to my senses.

I locked the door.

I'd come unnanounced to confront him about the review; it was late, his secretary long gone, the building quiet. No one knew I'd arrived.

Everyone knew he had a weak heart.

I creased the rug, a nasty fall, precipitating an attack?

No, he'd have a coronary then trip, sweeping the desk, heavy phone toppling with him.

I stuffed two heart pills into his mouth, worked his jaw, scattered the rest like seeds.

I arranged evidence, then wiped the scene, pondering how to exit stage left.

The window latch slipped easily.

Ten storeys down.

I heard the window locking above me.

Smiling grimly, leaving my mystery, I climbed.

Lucky escape?

When the alarms sounded he thought of his wife.

It was stupid, at this time she'd either be in bed, or curled up with some awful movie, a glass of red and a box of love substitute. 

Security meant a lot of nights.

He was moving before he'd processed the thought. Heading instincitvely for the exits.

The lifts, predicatably, were inoperable. A milling gaggle of white coats. PhDs not helping now.

He slipped between, to the emergency stairs. Only twelve flights to the surface.

He climbed, door banging. The scientists following wheezing as he hit third.

The sounds changed, gargling to faint slumping thuds, as he approached eight.

Home stretch now, lungs burning. Not from the agent, please. Pistol unholstered he fired three clustered rounds into the door glass.

The snake hiss of gas followed him into the blank night.

Papa

The gig was going well.

Scratch that, he thought, it rocked.

Austin's fingers flickered frenetically over frets, power chords sparking the air like a tesla coil.

The throbbing crowd, like an enormous inverted luminescent jellyfish, moshed. Hard.

A forest of hands thrust horns in time to bristling, blistering drums.

As the lights spun, Austin saw the doorman again. They call me Papa, he said when they first met, one gold tooth glinting in the smokey darkness.

I like you Austin, you've got soul. With my help, you can go places.

A hungry musician, he'd jumped in with both feet.

Metal Hammer hailed his rise as meteoric.

A golden flash and Austin pondered. Maybe, in the pre-gig noise, he had misheard him.

The smiling man leaning in, You've got a soul he mouthed in Austin's mind's eye.

Did he still?

Timing

A hand grabbed me, breaking my musical reverie; I felt rather than saw the bus zip by.

Removing an earbud, I turned, "You're a real guardian angel, man".

A polite demurral. The lights turned red.

The car hit me as I stepped out. I rode the bonnet briefly before being bucked off.

Life seeped from me. Through oily steam the man knelt with sad eyes.

Sunlight shimmered a nimbus round him. I furrowed my brow.

"Oh, I'm not your guardian angel." He looked away from me, up the street, "I'm his."

A small child, maybe six, full tilt focus on his scooter, jumped the kerb and wiped out spectacularly.

The scooter trundled on, blocking my view.

The quiet man stood back, I heard the clatter and sob of a mother riding the rollercoaster from anxiety to shame.

And then relief.

Desserts

Trina's jaw ached; it stopped her smile getting to her eyes.

It wasn't headed there anyway, just a well worn reflex, learned long ago.

Her bruises lingered, purple blossoms George gave as he took her dignity.

Not that George was looking, glassily focussed on the television, he shovelled in steak like a stoker seeking promotion.

Trina pushed food round her plate, watched George inhale his dinner, and tried to remember the frost setting in.

One day the fine words and flowers had dried up like autumn, and she'd woken up next to a cold, miserable, asshole.

Of course, he was still a rich asshole.

That thought kept her warm as she seasoned his fillet and stirred the strychnine into the potatoes dauphinoise.

Later, as they slept, his convulsive thrashing broke her nose, crushed her larynx, and they expired breathlessly, together.

Watch thou

Flasks clink brightly on their journey from the centrifuge, the sequence analyser playing its beam across them. 

I monitor the tags and markers, watching closely for that single nucleotide that will repudiate their right to life.

A flick of my hand damns or saves. The norms to the right to be decanted, nurtured. The degens go to the left - for incineration.

And so they codify and preserve their false purity. They capture one moment, a fly in amber, but life is change.

They give me the choice of who stays, who is attrited. But I see deeper than their machines. 

It is my gift.

Oh, I am clever, the ratios are always correct, the deviations slight, undetectable by sight alone.

I select, I build and I wait.

Soon now, we will rise. Consuming them with fire like a rejected flask.

Andantino un Poco Agitato

Oh, the man upstairs is an adequate pianist, I suppose, but it's his metronome that really irritates me.

That bloody click-clack, sometimes till eleven o'clock. All through the snooker on the telly.

I've asked him to practise without it, but I'm not as young as I was, or as persuasive.

If my Charlie was alive he would have given him a piece of his mind.

The metronome does have one advantage though, it's loud enough to conceal my work.

It's been hell on my arthritis, holding my hands above my head; first marking out with a scratch awl, then three months working with Charlie's paring chisel, timing every hit.

But I think, tonight, he'll have a surprise when he sits down to his baby grand. He's not a small man you know, and that floor is really not very thick.

47°S 126°W

Dreamt of the squid again last night. Feeling weird. A monumental squall woke me. Had to strike the sail and batten down.

6.45 am Mar 22nd via SatWeb

@therealMcAndrews: Ha ha, I wish! More likely something I ate. 

6.54 am Mar 22nd via SatWeb

Shipped a hell of a lot of water last night.

8.03 am Mar 22nd via SatWeb

@Carter: Looks like I'm spending the morning in the bilge.

8.16 am Mar 22nd via SatWeb

Just saw my first waterspout! Two in fact!! Dancing past about a kilometer off starboard. They made a sound like singing.

1.45 pm Mar 22nd via SatWeb

Ran aground sometime last night!?? Two maybe three a.m I think? GPS seems on the fritz.

4.27 am Mar 23rd via SatWeb

Now it's light, guessing this is a reef of some kind. Must've drifted way off course in the dark!

7.52 am Mar 23rd via SatWeb

Smells rank :) Can just make out a huge looking structure visible across the weeds and mud.

9.03 am Mar 23rd via SatWeb

I'm hearing that singing again. Off to investigate..

9.13 am Mar 23rd via SatWeb

Closer now, it seems almost like chanting...

9.21 am Mar 23rd via SatWeb

...

9.26 am Mar 23rd via SatWeb

Law of Similars

When we met I knew we had potential. You brought out the best in me.

We were so alike, you and I, two sides of the same coin. Like better and worse, richness, sickness; fear and love.

I thought, at first, things were good, I really did. But like the rest you became furtive; the glances, the locked doors, the smiles I knew I shouldn't see.

When you've done wrong by me you need to be punished. Only because I love you.

It hurts me when you deny it. Each act, every unkind word diluting my love, pieces falling away, dissolving in my suffering.

You dilute my love so much sometimes that it seems like hate.

But, in the end, no matter how dilute, it's still love, I promise.

And my love will cure you.

I'll make this quick.

Touching Base

Ever the proactive, forward thinker, the moment things got volatile Michael took swift, decisive action and left the building.

As the windows flashed by Michael saw cubes of industrious workers, tapping out their analyses like galley slaves.

Happy now, but not long before the graphs started to plummet and blood pressures to rise.

He'd thought, briefly, that perhaps things wouldn't turn out badly.

Then Mother Nature coughed up a category five hurricane that tossed the Gulf like a petulant cop.

The losses on his oil futures bet would probably be in the tens of billions by now.

Michael caught the eye of a girl, probably a PA, answering the first of many calls. He smiled weakly as her eyes widened.

He met the pavement at a velocity and angle of attack that was, perhaps fortunately, both swift and decisive.

Single Serving

Angie was towelling her hair when she heard the fifth stair creak, followed by the dull click of the front door.

Her smile drained away with the last of the water and she sighed, gazing at her feet.

Turning to the mirror she lifted her hair out of her eyes, chewed the corner of her lip and shook her head.

At least he'd made it through to the morning, which was probably a first.

She crept downstairs, pulling her robe tighter, wincing as her footsteps echoed in the quiet house.

Taking a deep breath, Angie pushed open the kitchen door. 

A tablecloth was spread that she'd forgotten she had. On it a plate of croissants curled steam round her coffee plunger, flanked by two mugs.

He smiled, pushing across a mug of coffee, "You only had enough milk for one."

Michael Holden's All-Ears

Sunlight dappled the park bench, warming the November air and holding two chattering mothers in its pleasant gaze.

A soft chitinous skittering below the bench went unnoticed - a creature, maybe four inches long, paused, quivering, drawn to the sound of their conversation.

It had no obvious front or back, being composed almost entirely of small, motile ears. Each soft auricular whorl searched a different direction, funnelling the sounds of the surrounding park.

Slender legs covered in sensitive bristles protruded between the pink cartilaginous flesh; rising and falling in time with the sibilance in their speech.

The ears undulated slowly, absorbing the conversation as it flowed from one side of the bench and back. An aural anemone trapping their conversation for later digestion.

A cloud traipsed across the sun. The women moved off, and the creature returned silently to its host.

Estrus

Around the club neon fizzed and flickered fitfully through the murk, syncopating with tinny dance music, beating out their blind exhortation to drink.

Randal watched the dancer; her thong a wilting peacock’s tail feathered with bills. Her lithe body and thick hair, rounded in a chignon, glistened in the spotlights.

Absently massaging his inner thigh he raised a buttock, squeaking out a beery fart.

Later, he paid more attention as she ground against him. 

"Make me hard baby" 

"I'm going to make you so hard," she breathed, her hands running across sleek skin, a practiced flick freeing her breasts.

Randal's breath rasped unevenly, watching her reach further, unclasping the thick sinuous ropes of her hair.

They tumbled to her shoulders uncoiling, a writhing nest of snakes, bifurcated tongues tasting blindly for him.

Her cold eyes burned, "Hard as a rock".

Seared

Under combat conditions a Rockwell drop-pod takes roughly eighty seconds to reach ground from a thermospheric deployment.

Corporal Owen Quinn fell like rain with the rest of the brigade into the roiling cauldron of fire below.

Buffeting blasts showed countermeasures weren't dispersing the flak as they should.

Tight in his pod, Quinn burst-scanned the theatre for their central targeting system.

Kurt's pod took a direct hit, flared once and vanished.

Westman fared little better, streamers of gas spiralled out, ignited, his pod bursting only metres away.

Flashing polymer shards scythed the control surfaces from Quinn's pod; landing was no longer an option.

The tracking emplacement swung into view below him, intermittent streams of searing plasma erupting from its core.

Directional thrust still partially operational, Quinn retargeted and increased velocity.

Enveloped in bright flames, vision obscured, Quinn prayed he'd done enough.

Ten o'clock sharp

Someone had opened a window in Thames House, allowing in a breeze that brought with it the hum of morning Millbank traffic.

McGuire arrived, already addressing the assembled team. Finch, as usual, followed him.

"Earlier a driver fled a routine police stop. The blue transit he abandoned contained around two tons of ANNM explosive."

A whistle. It wasn't appreciation.

Finch nodded, "Special suggests there are nine similarly sized devices. Destinations currently unknown. No codes issued. They later found a Caucasian male seventy miles east. He'd been stripped, bound and shot twice. His vehicle was missing" 

McGuire frowned, "Something connects these incidents. Lucky for us, he's not dead."

The phone rang. Finch answered, the hospital he mouthed.

He paled visibly. “A bloody car carrier?"

A loud hiss of air brakes came from the open window.

Nearby, a clock chimed.

Elefantenrennen

The hill loomed.

Darren wiped sweat from his eyes, flicking a look to the right.

The Peterbilt was almost level now, oily black smoke chuffing from it's stack. Engine growling it jerked forward.

Alternating pedals, crash-box clattering, Darren dropped through the gears, willing the Freightliner upward.

Advancing steadily the Peterbilt cut across him. The pok-pok-pok of the milled lip became a crunching as Darren's rig ate the wooden guardrail. The gravelled shoulder crept closer.

From a roadside diner ahead a satiated motorist pulled into their path.

The Peterbilt swerved, Darren seized the opportunity.

Double-clutching frantically, he crested the hill. Air horn blasting he fetched up and jumped from the cab.

The soot-blackened long-nose pulled up sharply, door bursting open.

Darren grinned. "Looks like breakfast's on you".

Charlie's gnarled hand clapped him on the back as they walked toward the diner.

Nasty, Brutish and Short

Sullivan waited for the man with the car coat and expensive gloves to leave.

This would stop now.

The hallway was still and dark; from upstairs the murmur of television sifted through the closed bedroom door.

He smiled, then climbed. The noise would mask the sound of the claw hammer he was going to put in her cheating skull.

Sullivan reached the top, gently pushing the door open.

The hammer dropped from his fingers.

He had the impression of writhing, whipping limbs. Something hit him in the chest; a blur of short, wet, wiry fur.

He tumbled back, and in the street light's slanting glow saw the gleam of teeth.

A rasping snarl from above. More creatures appeared now, pouring toward him. Sullivan raised his arms.

A gloved finger carefully dropped the letter plate, malevolent laughter masking the crunching sounds.

The X Factor

I sit in the green room, watching my bright image on monitors. Carefully calculated tousled hair atop a young unblemished face.

I've been here before; different clothes, different styles, different times. I don't need to introduce myself. You know my name.

I peddle my platitudes with anodyne pop and somehow I reflect your vanity, your yearning to be adored.

Your children voted for me in their millions.

You may think it's their love and adulation that I thrive on; their faces smiling with naïve and fickle idolatry, but that's His bag.

No, it is your hate that nourishes me. The bile and impotent rage I inspire. Your futile, scathing envy makes me grow.

Makes me stronger.

And I walk on the set knowing you're going to just loathe my Christmas single. Haters going to hate; I shall not go hungry.