Free The Future Is Short by Anthology Page B

intrusion, Wayne stood. “Where on earth did you come from?” he said to her. “Billy, get a blanket.” The woman was slender and middle-aged and wore hiking boots, blue jeans, and a light sweater. “How long have you been out there?” he said.  Billy arrived with a blanket, and Wayne draped it across her shoulders. “Are you hungry?”
    “Thank you, I’m just fine,” she said. She extracted a phone from her back pocket and began dialing.
    Wayne smiled and said, “That won’t do you any good up here. There’s no phone service for at least fifty miles.”
    “Yes, I know,” she said, pushed a final button, smiled and met his eyes for the first time. “It isn’t a phone.”
    The campsite was instantly flooded with bright white light. Wayne felt euphoric and a tingling swept over him. He was transfixed by the woman’s black eyes and, in them, he could see the countless years of her existence. He heard whimpering and knew it was Jennifer. A piercing scream sent chills through him but he couldn’t tell who it was. “Mommy, help me mommy”—that was Billy. Wayne tried to move and could do nothing. He felt pain in his abdomen, yet somehow it didn’t hurt. Another scream and he still could do nothing. He began to cry, tears welling in his eyes, streaming over his cheeks and into his ears. When did he lie down? Then Kathy yelled, “Daddy!”  There was another scream, but this time it was his.
    It was one of those moments that imprints into the collective memory of an entire family. Something was wrong. The moon had set. The fire had burned down and now cast a sinister light on the scene. He held the smoking sapling that was inexplicably only a foot long.
    “Mommy, I don’t feel good,” said Billy.
    “I know, sweetheart. Let’s go to bed. Maybe you’ll feel better in the morning,” said Jennifer.
    Wayne watched the vacant eyes of his daughter and saw consciousness slowly returning.  Kathy glanced around confused, then met his gaze and he saw darkness in her that had never been there before.
     
    W. A. Fix (a.k.a. Bill Fix) is a retired information technology manager, who lives with his wife and three cats in the suburbs of San Diego, California.  He has “toyed” with writing all his life and recently became more serious about the craft.  Other interests include photography and golf.
     
     
     
     

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    25.
    Becoming Again
    J.J. Alleson
     
    “So … we right direction.” Jerala’s statement was more accusation than question. The accused watched him with eyes like black ice. The other three circled them, still a loose-knit group after six days in close company. The women were Nye and Kismet. The men: Jerala, Thomas, and Olain.
    In the murderous fahrenheit of an endless summer, it was Kismet who stood toe to toe, if not eye to eye, with Jerala. Nye stepped in, cooing mediation. “Please. Our quest is almost over.”
    They were five strangers whose paths had crossed on the way to Syti, the place where Earth’s population converged as one corporate laboratory. Four had left behind the braying scorn of their people.
    One had left a pile of unbleached bones.
    “You all sure? We close?” Jerala was a pedantic nit-picker; an outcast who had offended bio-engineers with no time for clinical validations. As they travelled, he spoke of better days three hundred years ago.
    “Big fuss ’bout oil once. ’ Til one company found ways to make hydrocarbons. Used corn starch, sugar cane … even grasses. All happy-happy. Couldn’t save ’zone layer, though. We overheated. The UVs came. Rogues took over. Stole those catalytic conversion techniques and put melanin in the mix for the staying-alive market. Not like the polka-dots from chemo, but all over smooth-smooth.”
    They all knew the history. The black-body scramble had, overnight, turned pariah-paupers into the Untouchable Dalit Gods of Afrik-Syti, protected day and night from contact with desperadoes seeking skin-scrapes. When