"Husks"

Granite foothills inched over tundra. A crescent, enveloped by a smattering of pines. Error one: right climate, wrong soil. Permafrost left native shrubs stunted and inbred—why should it spare anything taller? Taiga forests began blanketing the landscape about three hundred klicks due south. Tempests began weighing down the horizon with brows of sleet. An hour off, maybe less.

Error two. Corn stalks whistled in the oncoming Arctic gale.

An ancient, glass-topped Diameter dome curled into the lee of the foothill's northern tip, somehow unscalped by the winds and the frost and the howling. The trunk-shattering cold of the deep winter hadn't destroyed a grey-timbered shed hunkered down a stone's throw from the dome. An autotrak's corpse rusted.

Last one of the day.

Jagg swung the 'bay doors open with a grunt. Waggling pine fronds disappeared without her scopes. Fine. She always got the last glimpse of the fields with naked eyes, before infrared and graphics objectified her view. Before the soot smudged out everything.
One tap: affirmative.

<Deploy—>

Static acknowledgments, fuzzy through cannibalized headphones.
Four purgeskins hopped off the manta-sleek shuttle's exit ramp, shook the pyro-gel caking their spigot burners with dainty flicks. Flat cloud-grey forearms, blank face-visors, naked cables contracting and loosing across the clunky suggestion of digits. All hammered. Boxy and dented and utterly interchangeable. No logos. Fuel-copias strapped to their rears (backs?) regurgitated constantly.

"Too close."

A wrinkled, ageless face slithered under a knotted archway of roots without making a sound or dropping the pipe between its teeth. Tar smoke followed, a double-barreled cloud, chasing the rotting furs on its back. Slipping down Venn's throat as his finger tapped the rifle's safety.

"Shuttle not slipped away." Soot caked dreadlocks and a beard swayed in the knife-chill. Lime-green corn husks woven into his hair bounced , all sixteen of them. Bandoleer belts rasped against his parka. Green Man, soft and still.

"I got em nailed—"

"—so pilot watch the scopes. Anything past the patrol, he notice." As if Venn hadn't spoken. Green Man only interrupted to fill dead air. Or correct dead words. Never forcefully, never harshly. Young wood bends.

"Pilot notice movement, it gone. You gone. We gone. All this out before it begin."

Ash flipped into the scrub and died.

"Watch. Wait."

Dozens of other smokerolls hissed out a second later—between roots, nestled in canopies, behind their agri-dome. Venn hefted the rifle's heavy butt into his shoulder. Blinked.
Shoulder seals popped out of optical haziness.

His headphones squawked.

<Tighten up—>

—Jagg called. The arrowhead bunched. Spigots flared. Wind caught at the barrages of sparks shooting from the clumps they'd already burned. An oval-shaped patch at the crescent's southern tip had already caught, exploding into an inferno greased by old husks. Just three percent of the field was ablaze, but the oncoming storm would drag the flames north and into the pines.
Eight Patrol only needed to trim the corners and guide the bulk of the inferno. Then run a final mop-up to catch every last seed, stalk, and bunch. Routine purge. She'd been running them since the feeding camps spat her out for uncooperative behaviour. In her duffel bag was a textbook, an old CD with archaic indoctrination videos. Scissors, for her hair.

She joined Eight Patrol the next morning.

<Anyone want to ignite—?>

<Called it>

<All yours, Mora>

A single purgesuit broke from the arrow's left flank, lumbering towards the agri-dome with a utiliclaw scrabbling at the stock mag-strapped to its back. Danger sigils blinked in the dying light. Grenade launcher.

Yeg's mob didn't twitch. They couldn't see, crouched behind the shed with antique shotguns hefted between frostbitten fingers.
Venn give the orders: Green Man's words.

"No."

"Yes."

Static sputtered in his ears—auditory refuse. Clicks from the other six mobs encircling the fields, pressing their bare mouths into snow to leave no trace on any scanners.

"Can't expect me to wait."

"I do."

Punk! Punk-punk-punk!

One HE round per support: accurate and quick. Bass rumbles pummelled Venn's eardrums, overlapping as the supports cracked and steel pieces sprayed for dozens of yards in every direction. Decapitated branches fell all around, the Green Man nodding with his charcoal-painted eyelids closed in a slow sad rhymn of weariness. The closest to acceptance their pitiful tribe was ever allowed to witness.

No beans, no potatoes. Tomatoes, leeks, onions, celery—all of it broiled in a stew of fyceline and nitrogen and cordite as the acrid powder spiced it and bleached the ground for good. A final dish, flavoured with Yegg's blood. Fortified with the marrow of his bones and the flesh of his mob: three men, six women, two boys.

Half the field was aflame, spitting corncobs like landmines in great arcing pinwheels. The purgesuit lowered its launcher, tapped a symbol on its forearm terminal, turned on its heels to trot back to the descration team pushing deeper into their harvest.
Venn buried the stock into his shoulder. Clicked the safety off.

"I waited."

<Sleep well, freak garden—>

Mora muttered. Jagg grunted, rolling shoulders numbed by monotony. Nineteen hours in-suit. Forteen targets today, the dispatcher icon at her brow buzzing endlesslly until she'd broken protocol and hit the mute button. Eight Patrol took the brunt of the cleanup calls in the Northern Division. Thousands of acres evapourated under their spigots each week: corn roots, squash patches, glistening pink seas of wheat. All the symptoms of an aggressively, sickly, tainted Gaia. Freak ecology.

Seals hissed. The superheated air kept detonating the corncobs: sharp pops to punctuate the Diameter Dome rejoining the foothills in a puddle of glass. Mora thumbed her triggers, send another two rounds into the remains. Cackled as a fuel tank cracked somewhere inside, blindsided her suit's gyros, chucked her into the dirt.

Crack. Crack-crack-crack.

Dirt geysers traced around Mora's sprawled suit, took a chip off her left shoulderpad. She jolted once, lay limp. A magnesium-white explosion perforated her temple. Ground down the daisy decal on her temple into carbon scoring as Jagg was—

—crushed by disbelief and a hypersonic round to her midsection.

She tumbled, numb. A gash in the cornrows to her right added three feet to her fall, broke bones in her shoulders. Embers fluttered in the wake of antique bullets, crossbow bolts—the streak of a modern railrifle—populating the sky above her head.
Mora. Her laugh forever grating on the ears.

Red needlepoints pricked her eyes, followed her optical nerves straight down to the mess of her ribs. Seals held: her blood and spilled lymph puddled under the arch of her ruined back. Static assaulted her, squealing and shrieking. Inbound atmospherics.
They'd be buried. Ashes mixed with snow.

<Brix—>

"They dead."

Venn wrenched the bolt. Dabbed crosshairs gently past the mound of the grenadier, launcher sticking up crooked over one shoulder. Past the puddled limbs of the second purgesuit, taken by Kigali's sternum shot. Marking the pumping arm segments of the third one (with an X. Red paint on an albatross).

"Dead, ken? Nay broken. They flesh, they living."

Shot eight bruised his shoulder and punctuated the statement: a lethal period that caught the fleeing 'suit under its left actuator, tossed Kevlar plating fifteen feet in all directions. A short-lived exclamation point. Moe's mob, inching into the cornfields on their stomachs, clenched their triggers and tore the last suit to pieces. It toppled over its own heels. Hands raised.

"Them and the ones that sent 'em."

Out. Venn's bony fingers pried a mag from his boot. Clicked it home, worked the bolt. All automatic and totally futile against the withering of their livelihood in the blazing cornrows beyond. Cracks bridged the soundscape between reloads, a background hum to the whooping of the reserves slipping cautiously from cover and flipping their safeties off. Victory rounds boomed into the tumultuous skies: a few punched fresh dents in Kevlar heads.

"Those sensors be helms. Wi' heads 'neath them."

"Was helms, Green Man," Venn snapped. "Was. Then-tense. They's dead. Now-tense."

"Team. One team fall, aye. About the rest? Ones in shuttlecraft and groundriders? The many thousands livin' in th' Fertile South? Shielded behind twisted orchards and husks of cities and zap-wires?"

"We killed a team, Green Man!" Venn yelled, twisting out of cover to spit his wrath into the hooded eyes and crouched posture of their de-facto chief for all to hear. "We, the Corn Folk, killed a purgesuit team!"

"Aye," Green Man murmured, slathering at the pigment running near the corners of his eyes. The glare, or the heat. Their fields became an oven just a few dozen paces from where the two stood. Couldn't be tears? Green Man wore his own fingernails to the marrow planting crops. Crunched his molars into dust sucking the lichen from granite. Starved for the Corn Folk's sick.

Couldn't be tears.

<Anyone?>

Her neck tingled. A pyre danced into the blackening skies, leaving aftermarks on her retinas. The glarevisors were melting. Only proofed to last an hour's inferno conditions, tops, and the mission clock was running 01:12:55.

Static rinsed out her ears against all human voices. There were just spurts, half-syllables, garbled utterances more machine-code than spoken. No hails from the shuttle. They shared with Nine and Seventeen Patrol. Both waited on pickup a thousand miles east.

Serenity endued her remaining seconds. Adrenaline, or inevitability. Blood caked her sides, sticking to her hips where Ulda last kissed them. Ages ago—eleven hours—nestled into a foldbunk. Eastblock-22. She'd slammed her shin on the etching last night.

It stung. Required a fitness report from a night medic to prove that despite recklessness in the pursuit of a midnight fuck, she was in fact still capable of performing her duties. Plenty tried taking themselves out of commission after four ops. She'd been team leader on eight.

All routine. His words and hers.

Black dots crashed at her pupils. Her helm was someone's cymbal. Glass spidercracked.

Tink TINK. Tink TINK TINK.

Twin iron nibs tapped a crater into her visor. Fixed to a quavering tube. A barrel; ancient. Assault rifle. Green all-weather boots consumed the midground, ankles hewn by hungry mouths.

"Stop it."

Tink TINK TINK TINK CRACK

"Please."
No fury. It simply dribbled out the gashes of her broken back.

"Leave me."

They did.

Crackling masked the boot's retreat. Her helm had been wrenched irrepairably left into a divot driven through a molehill. Flames clawed at a sapling pine. Severed the cones and chiseled them apart. Inked itself onto her retinas. Deeper.

A wrinkled face filled her visor. Ageless, sooty-black. Dreadlocks died with lime-green corn husks swayed above a rough satchel. No rifles, no bandoleers, not even a bush knife strapped through the thongs on his shoulder.

"Alive, then."

Barely a whisper.

"I—" she coughed. "—not armed. None of us—"

A compulsion; to let the breath escape her collapsing lungs, external speakers or no.

"I be Green Man. You purgesuit. Starvation-drone. Hunger-banshee."

He stared at her neck-seal. Guessed at a gaze. Continued.

"—fields are condemned. You heard the bulletins—"

"We be planting here."

"—unnatural growths—"

"Corn Folk got needs. Cancers, hungers. You got designs. You impress 'em on the fullness o' our bellies. Shape it. Curb it."

"—medical aid—"

"I demanded peace."

Yellowed teeth flashed.

"But I's alive. I prune and shape and cull. I got designs too."

Pine cones hissed. Split. Fizzled under the first pinches of snow.

<Quota call: Eight Patrol. Quota call.>

<Quota call.>

<Quota call?>

October+New Project

October.  Shit.

In short, reporting has eaten my soul.  But over reading week (and between two profile interviews I may or may not be doing in the morning) I'm doing my best to carve out chunks of time to start--hopefully finish--a story I plotted in part on a westbound train drifting its way from Scarborough to Union station.  Toronto, by way of Oshawa.

Current working title is "arachnae.we."  Title's a bastardization of the source code of the world's first psychiatric AI system--Arachnae--created as a software entity that's part medical encyclopedia, part inhumanly patient counselor, part curious and intuitive behaviorist.

Arachnae's creation couldn't have come sooner.  A mental-health epidemic--the psypocalypse--is sweeping the globe, fueled by a thousand unresolved twenty-first century stresses.  Burnout, disillusionment, and suicide have claimed hundreds of millions.  Whole cities of people can't muster the willpower to leave their homes, let alone go to work, pay taxes, visit a corner store.  Parts of civilization barely creep along--or have shut down entirely.  Offices lie empty, theaters play sold-out shows to disillusioned sleep-deprived masses, thousands congregate in city centers to watch the world strain against the thoughts behind their eyes.  Children jack into automated game servers or wander nearly-empty streets, unsure of how the billboards towering above could ever keep their promises.

If only the next generation pulled beyond this eclipse.  It tried.

The World Health Organization, CAMH, Zeller Institute, and a myriad of agencies are lifting the worst sections of the world back onto their feet.  But the treatment of whole populations is daunting--impossible to any degree resembling perfection.  There aren't enough psychiatrists.  There aren't enough doctors.  Police forces find themselves running crisis intervention teams.  Routine patrols are delegated to volunteer citizen's watches.  Aid is needed.

So the Zeller Institute designed Arachnae.

They never expected it to work.  Or lash out.

This could be anything from a lengthy short story (6,000 words+) to a full-length novel.  Not sure what I want, or what the rest of the story will provide.  I'm thinking somewhere around 15,000-25,000 or so.  Writing this in part for a friend's anthology of modern-day kaiju fiction.  This is my take on the genre--one I've never tried and barely read.

Sections may be posted here.  Updates will occur at the very least.  Depending on the length and reaction, I might extend it beyond the anthology.  Might try and sell it as a novella.  Stay tuned.

"Paragons", Expanded

--"The city is piling up at her feet and she's laughing.

A hefty matron in shredded summer dress and a black-pearl noose of a necklace folds at the waist, empties green-grey intestines across the rotting remains of toes.  Disemboweled, the edge of the fireman's axe flipping in a grotesque thumbs-up.  She shoulder-checks the ravager aside and down.  Adds to the collection oozing in twenty-four inches of broken bones and burst tumours.

Empties clatter, wind chimes fit for a firing range.

A slick-haired pizza boy shambles neurotically, slips alongside the blood-encrusted pedestrian bridge.  Bony fingers grasp for handholds.  An index finger is missing.  The rest are worked to the bone, through it.  She swings, a textbook decapitation.  Steel-toed boots grip the gratings underfoot as a still-snarling head flies a dozen feet out and fifty down to an artificial current, still tugging trash and starvation victims along.  The turbines died eleven months ago.

The city is piling up at her feet and she's holding. 

She stares down Elysium.  A public park atop an urban island, ringed by an artificial river system in downtown Hades.  The names only ever clicked in February.  Or when bleak winter accented the droves of ravager-dead trampling designer gardens and memorial benches to feed on the warm proles from uptown.

Oh, the irony.

Gibbering, the wrecked remains of a riot cop drags itself along thirty yards of dripping bridge.  Uniform pants are violently hemmed at the knees.  Hacked carcasses draped around the suspension couplings provide purchase.  It shuddered and slurped at the carnage and her ankles.  She takes her time.  Two kicks; one to splinter the nose and wrench the neck, another to drive her heel through the brainstem and end the ravager's spree. 

The city is piling up at her feet and the grind isn't enough.

"No," she snaps to the overweight sharpshooter Samaritan with 'Hades Defense Force' stenciled across his jacket.  Beady eyes squint over a badly-gripped Bernelli shotgun, fingers throttling a hair trigger.  Pieter.  Idiotic enough to pay her nine clanking blade brutes as muscle.  Didn't understand the points system, the mentality, the guns they'd all refuse.  Or didn't care.  Bottling out came up for all the wrong reasons.  

Sounds wrong, anyways.  Bottling in is more accurate for the Paragons.

The AK-47's dead.  Pieter's twelve-year old son tears out a spent mag and hollers for more. 

A grey-toned construction foreman hefting a wrench and killer halitosis gets a hit in.  Smashes her shield up and aside, pain sinking teeth along multiple lines of bruising.  At least two fractures.  She howls, lashes a backhand into a knot of raised veins along the collar.  Bites deep, centres the hexagonal fused-sign shield as blood and worse splatters in a seven-foot cone to fade in among chipped red paint and the occasional white block letter. 

It stumbled, caught itself on the dead tide surging forward.  Mangled comrades draped and rolled over the edge.  Lineups formed on the opposite shore as the ravagers locked rotting limbs and leering teeth, setting.  The infectious skeletal pile-driver stubs out her adrenaline crash, doubles her vision as she hefts her ax and makes--

--contact.  A rotting fist snaps out, disintegrates under a sledgehammer swung from overhead.  A growl erupts from the ravager's throat: frustration, not agony.  The stump slumps in a peculiar pause they all understand.  One, two--

--impact.  A final swing compresses a chipped skull into a crumbling neck.  Violently.  The dead fill the breach and the living oblige.  A pair of Bowie knives to her left disassembles a groping hand from fingertips to elbow, biting a path up biceps twitching in rigor animatus.  Combat boots with toes like mirrors sweep-kick the ravager aside, lends momentum.  Shiva; muscle shorts, tank top, an androgynous welterweight.

Gauntleted hands grab under her arms as the almighty sledgehammer splinters a Wal-Mart store manager's shoulder like concrete.  She nearly tears them off their sockets.  He'd stopped to drag her out; slather hot blood across a dozen superficial cuts they'd both gathered over the last eighteen hours. 

"Taylor?"

"Loco?"

Her standing is third overall, second to Shiva in stand-up kills.  She doesn't use drugs, doesn't plan to.  She'd owe him assists. 

"Yeah?

Sloan leaps overhead, machete clipping the ear off a plastic surgery patient, still bound in hospital gown and facial gauze.  Slips, tumbles face-first into a mass of torn stomachs still steaming in the winter winds.  He doesn't try to stop the heels of the mob's first rank stomping down, down, splintering vertebrae and another one of the originals. 

Ninth, tenth?  They've never kept track.

"Get off."

He kept dragging her, past a swearing Angle propped up against the rail, clutching a soaked rag to her wrist.  A decapitated punk with liberty spikes the colour of Kool-Aid lay in the way.  Not long enough for her to see the rag's red beginning to purple.  Green splotches dotted the edges. 

"Guiding you, sister.  Didn't notice your knee, did you?"

Achilles stepped overhead and parried a hacksaw, Excalibur hand-and-a-half sword turning slow glistening circles.  Oilcan fires backlit the blade, caught the point and enormous pupils as it cleaved a schoolteacher in two.  A wrist-guard lashes out, close-lines a sprinting ravager in blue tracksuit. 

"It's fractured, I know.  Get back to your score."

Oilcan fires backlight the blade, catch the point and enormous pupils as it cleaved a marauding schoolteacher in two.  A wrist-guard lashes into the throat of a sprinting armless ravager in tracksuit and a Nike sweater.  Sidelined, meat for Shiva's heel.  The Captain misses a high block, loses a wrist to the blade section of a paper guillotine.  An office assistant snarls, dreadlocks flapping.  Horsetail banners, stained an unforgiving red.

"Fractured?  Try seriously fucked, dear, unless you've got any talent for contortionism."

True.  Her knee scrapes along soaked concrete, a kink under a shin-greave she wish she hadn't seen.  Adrenaline highs crash as hard as morphine, and there's nothing to blame but adrenal glands and the code they'd all sworn to.

"Creep."

Almost out.  The sweeping, organic curves of the observation deck's railings coiled into the gloom on all sides.  Double-sided park benches cradled the screaming and the dispatched. 

"Couldn't forgive myself if I let a drop of hot blood seep through that lovely face o' yours." 

She opened a dry mouth as--

--her eardrums explode.  Over, and over, and over.  The dull cracks of M14 rifles, the snaps of M9s, the throaty booms of Remington over-under hunting shotguns.  Twangs from high-tension crossbows.  A ragged chorus of munitions ascending to the heights of tinnitus as the hordes shuddered and slipped and fell apart.  A line chef lost his stomach to buckshot.  A nurse had both knees and one elbow cracked.  A teenager hefting a scooter like a Scottish hammer took a round that snapped his head back, and off.

"---fire!  Cease fire!"

Six of the self-declared Hades Defense Force are left; the old, the sick, the tired.  Rusty shells in fumbling hands, slipping through bones clothed by MRE's and canned peaches.  Pieter lowers his Bernelli, forgets to flick the safety. 

Ten yards past the entrance.  Casings and nine-millimetre lobotomy victims line the concrete lip of the shore.  Dozens draped across the bridge; maws open, limbs splayed and ajar.  Oilcans smouldered.  A barricade flickered a hundred meters away, piled cars tied off with electrical wire.  The last exit.  East onto Styx West, out to the highway and the inherent safety in speed--until the needle tapped 'EMPTY' and the maws closed in on a dark, lonely turnpike.

The city is piling up at her feet and she's alive. 

A solitary rifle cracks, denting concrete two hundred metres across the water.  No hits.  Several thousand of the dead milled to trample the results of their condo fees.  Ethanol engines grumble across the observation platform, figures throwing blankets and backpacks and the leavings even the vultures refuse to snatch.

"Is this endgame?"

Death is a disappointment to Loco.

"He wants us for the highway ride.  So, yes."

"Wants?"

"Needs.  You think they'll survive the ride out?"

The bridge is silent.  The dead are dragging and heaving their weary hungry thousands into a proper rush, a semi-organized flying column known to outlast bands of survivors lucky enough to receive UN Containment airdrops of assault rifles and M3 light machine guns. 

Shiva snorts, sheathes a knife and kneels beside Angle. 

"Checked their ammo count a few hours ago.  Only Han and Chi-Minh have anything more than a box mag.  Can't shoot straight standing up with no cross-breeze."

They leaves the rest unsaid.  Flips Angle's body over, letting the other knife slip across a still and silent throat.  Quick and quiet. 

"Final score?" Loco asks. 

"Nineteen hundred seventy five.  That's including a bonus for the punk."  Shiva is generous when they're impressed.  Taylor shrugs and doesn't challenge.  Same goes for Loco.  The rest are catching ragged breaths and finishing off anything still feebly clawing at their boots. 

She slips the shield off her arm, lets it fall into a puddle of half-melted snow swirling across the tarmac.  Gazes at half-inch spiked black hair, muddled nose, torn cheek.  Counts the dents along lacrosse-padding pauldrons , notes the hip-to-hip fingernail scratch across the bulletproof vest.  Tallies of near misses, charts of adrenaline highs.  The point of it all.

The city is piling up at her feet and she's haunted. 

Pieter draws close.  Wrinkles his nose, takes shallow breaths.  Lets his shotgun droop to his angles, swinging from the trigger guard and shaking through several levels of adrenaline and PTSD. 

"We leaving?" she asks.

Silence, gasping.  A shrug from Loco. 

"We're leaving," Pieter gasps.

Thousands drone across the water.  Flooding dozens of skyscrapers, rampaging across board meetings and paper and empty glass apartments under empty skies above. 

A look from Achilles.  A downward glance from Shiva.  Angle's dead eyes, critiquing from under a pile.  The others, exhausted and sharp.  Waiting for the cracks to prove the code is broken, easily and readily and often.  Waiting to give the rough kind of release. 

She wouldn't be the first.

"Yes," she says.  Hefting the fire-ax, testing a frayed grip.  Swings a loose circle, feels the stitches and braces and back-alley bone staples grind and hold as dozens pile into another column.  Sections collapse

"That's the point," she murmurs, rolling her shoulders, limbering up for the next onslaught waddling across shattered limbs and a sea of broken teeth.  Twenty on the arrowhead, a hundred fifty or more behind.  Half clutch table legs ripped from Home Hardware, socket wrenches, the bludgeoning necessities of a dozen garage sales.

The city is piling up at her feet and she's bored.

"Wedge?"  They approve, shuffle into the lethal triangle.  Shiva, Mint and Cora in back.  Falcon and Gawain in middle.  Taylor on point, as always.  Weapons clink and slam into palms greased with insecurities masked as nothing.  Armour rattles.  Bets hiss between the gasps of breath.  Fists clink, necks crack.

A shotgun blasts.  Pieter racks the slide.  Drops the shotgun, sends it skittering across the tarmac fifteen feet to nudge against Taylor's boot.  Spittle swings from a maw wrenched open by incredulity. 

"Don't be insane!  There's food, clean water, shelter, transport!"  

A Pontiac van sunk under another thrown garbage bag of cans.  Children's hands dangle out the side windows; five kids and two teenagers.  All wailing, all sick, all hungry.

"I promised good--"

"Sport, survivor.  That's all we ask for."  Taylor's biting her lip as the familiar rush sinks deep hooks, grips her forebrain with barbs soaked in raw nihilism.  Miles and lifetimes and countless improvised headstones hold steady in a skull dull with eighteen hours of holding actions, mad sprints, last stands.  The thrills of diehard mentalities.

Pieter's hand drifts aside. 

"Ask?  You promised--"

Shiva whips out another as the Bowie knife stops vibrating.  Pieter coughs.  Twice, three times before blood seeps into his boots and drips off his vest like rapids.  Screams carry across the tarmac.  A bearded figure in an overcoat throws a boy into the back of the last overloaded F-150, swings out a Remington bolt-action--

--but they're already beginning the creep; the slow march that builds into a sweating swearing bleeding ram that never runs empty or gets repetitive.  Arms lock in.  Her world evaporates to left and right.  PCP forces grating howls from several throats.

No shots.  Why shoot the living dead--life traitors, nihilists-- and waste a decoy?

Eighty meters.  Fifty.  Thirty.  Irises shudder and blink.  Fists clutch rolling pins, ladles, meat knives draped with precise lines.  The customer is always right.

The city is piling up at their feet and they're all addicted. 

"First to a hundred," Taylor chokes.  Score is low tonight.  The drills are at her skull, and the whirring won't stop.  She knows she isn't alone, but she knows only she'll worry.

This is it."--

Final rewrite for "Paragons".  A character sketch piece I found myself sucked into at the beginning of September.  I'd finished Telltale's "The Walking Dead", and I had a few thoughts about turning zombie/survival stories on their head: for starters, will adrenaline junkies exist after the apocalypse?  Short answer: read above.  Long answer: stay tuned.

"Paragons"

--"The city is piling up at her feet and she's laughing.

A hefty matron in shredded summer dress and a black-pearl noose of a necklace folds at the waist, empties green-grey intestines across the rotting remains of toes.  Disemboweled, the edge of the fireman's axe flipping in a grotesque thumbs-up.  She shoulder-checks the ravager aside and down.  Adds to the collection oozing in twenty-four inches of broken bones and burst tumours.

Empties clatter, wind chimes fit for a firing range.

A slick-haired pizza boy shambles neurotically, slips alongside the blood-encrusted pedestrian bridge.  Bony fingers grasp for handholds.  An index finger is missing.  The rest are worked to the bone, through it.  She swings, a textbook decapitation.  Steel-toed boots grip the gratings underfoot as a still-snarling head flies a dozen feet out and fifty down to an artificial current, still tugging trash and starvation victims along.  The turbines died eleven months ago.

The city is piling up at her feet and she's holding. 

She stares down Elysium.  A public park atop an urban island, ringed by an artificial river system in downtown Hades.  The names only ever clicked in February.  Or when bleak winter accented the droves of ravager-dead trampling designer gardens and memorial benches to feed on the warm proles from uptown.

Oh, the irony.

Gibbering, the wrecked remains of a riot cop drags itself along thirty yards of dripping bridge.  Uniform pants are violently hemmed at the knees.  Hacked carcasses draped around the suspension couplings provide purchase.  It shuddered and slurped at the carnage and her ankles.  She takes her time.  Two kicks; one to splinter the nose and wrench the neck, another to drive her heel through the brainstem and end the ravager's spree. 

The city is piling up at her feet and the grind isn't enough.

"No," she snaps to the overweight sharpshooter Samaritan with 'Hades Defense Force' stenciled across his jacket.  Beady eyes squint over a badly-gripped Bernelli shotgun, fingers throttling a hair trigger.  Pieter.  Idiotic enough to pay her nine clanking blade brutes as muscle.  Didn't understand the points system, the mentality, the guns they'd all refuse.  Or didn't care.  Bottling out came up for all the wrong reasons.  

Sounds wrong, anyways.  Bottling in's more accurate for the Paragons.

The AK-47's dead.  Pieter's twelve-year old son tears out a spent mag and hollers for more. 

A grey-toned construction foreman hefting a wrench and killer halitosis gets a hit in.  Smashes her shield up and aside, pain sinking teeth along multiple lines of bruising.  At least two fractures.  She howls, lashes a backhand into a knot of raised veins along the collar.  Bites deep, centres the hexagonal fused-sign shield as blood and worse splatters in a seven-foot cone to fade in among chipped red paint and the occasional white block letter. 

It stumbled, caught itself on the dead tide surging forward.  Mangled comrades draped and rolled over the edge.  Lineups formed on the opposite shore as the ravagers locked rotting limbs and leering teeth, setting.  The infectious skeletal pile-driver stubs out her adrenaline crash, doubles her vision as she hefts her ax and makes--

--contact."--

--->  Chuck Wendig's blog terribleminds.com holds flash fiction contests every week or so.  The point this week is to leave your piece on a cliffhanger for someone else wandering the comments bar to finish.  The above is a character sketch-turned-story on the thrill-seekers unsatisfied with surviving the zombie apocalypse the conventional way.  I'll post my ending next Friday if nobody bites.