Fiction River: Fantasy Adrift (12 page)

“Have you killed a girl?” I asked.

He took a step and the ice cracked.

Silence then, across the frozen lake. I shoved my hand into my pocket and brought out my knife. If he came close enough for me to strike him, would it matter? We would surely fall through the ice and die together.

“Have you killed a girl?” I asked again, louder this time.

“No,” he said, “but I will this day and in so doing, become a man.”

He took another step and the crack widened.

I held my ground, this act of being cold and quiet something I’d mastered during the long years I spent locked in the den, and called to him, “They told you lies. There are other ways to prove yourself and become strong.”

“Shut up,” he shouted. “I’ll have none of your tales.” And with that, he charged.

The ice gave way, huge jagged shards raking skyward as we fell, sinking into the deep black. The lake swallowed the boy’s dark form. I waited for my mind to go, for the endless cold to steal my breath, for death to take me one last time.

It did not come.

What happened is that hands like claws, bony and hard, gripped my legs and dragged me up and up until my head plowed through wet sand that clogged my nose. When I could breathe again and my body stopped shivering, I scrubbed my eyes. I lay on the floor of a cave. Somewhere nearby, waves crashed against rocks.

“You’ve got about fifteen minutes.” The voice sounded like gravel on sandpaper, sharp and full of acid. Familiar.

I pushed myself upright and stared into the ancient and ruined face of the old woman.

“Fifteen minutes for what?” I asked.

“To decide if you want to live or not.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t be stupid, child.”

You cannot trust her
, whispered a voice that might have been inside my head or come from the walls of the cave.
You told her your story. You told her the truth and she betrayed you.

“I will not kill myself no matter what you say.”

“Is that what you thought?” She chuckled with cool amusement. “I gave you a weapon, girl.”

“I was a child. What did you expect me to do with it?”

“I expected you to grow and bide your time and learn the strategy of patience.”

I stared at her in the shadows, the mass of frizzy white hair blown wild by the wind and her small, reddened eyes. “What are you?”

She grinned a wolfish smile and her teeth were like sharpened bits of yellowed ivory. “I am the girl who ran.”

I shook my head and backed away from her, a low moan escaping my lips.

She advanced toward me. “I became the woman who went after those who hurt me. I became a hunter. I am the girl who lived.”

“No.”

“I am the girl who fought back. Always.”

She is death
, whispered the voice in the cave.
She will kill you with the very knife she gave you long ago.

I stood there unable to move, trapped as surely as a rabbit in the hunter’s snare.
She is the old woman who betrayed me. She is the woman I might become, a bringer of horror as surely as those who took me into the woods.

“I gave you a knife, a worthy blade, but you became a girl who felt pity for that odious boy who fancied himself a hunter. You might have saved him, pulled him from the water and then where would we be?” Her mouth twisted into a sneer. “You are weak, and I cannot have that.”

I said, “I am not weak. I survived.”

“Because of me. I saved you.”

“And what of it?” I asked. “If we are the same, aren’t you saving yourself?”

“You know nothing of the way the world works,” she said. “The way it slices things and puts them back together in different ways. Choose strength and I’ll let you live and teach you to become a hunter.”

“If I make another choice?”

She smiled, a goofy thing that made me shiver. “Why would you do such a thing? If I wanted you to die, I could have left you in the icy water with the boy.”

The boy.
I had forgotten about him.

She’s afraid of the boy
, whispered the voice in my mind.
She is afraid you might make a different choice than she did.

She rushed toward me then, holding the thick, heavy stick in her hands like an axe, and she came at me. Again, my hand found the blade, but instead of striking her, I let it fall and turned and ran. Her screams followed me into the tide that swept me back into icy waters…

…where the boy’s dead white face floated in the darkness.

With all the fight and fury of the girl who never gave up, I grabbed him, kicked my way to the surface and dragged his leaden body onto the gravel-strewn beach where he gagged and vomited.

There was no sign of the old woman. I found the gnarled length of polished driftwood she’d used for a walking stick not far from the entrance to the cave where a set of footsteps in the sand abruptly stopped. I traced the footsteps back inside the cave until I came to where the knife had fallen, but it was not to be found. It was as if it had vanished with the old woman.

When I came out, the boy’s eyes were open. He stared about him in wonderment. “I was going to kill you,” he said.

“I know.”

A hank of wet dark hair fell across his forehead. Blood trickled from his nose. “You saved me.”

“I know.”

“What do we do now?”

I turned away from the cave entrance and faced the length of the beach and the clusters of houses piled along the shore with their shining windows.

“We go home,” I said, and held out my hand.

Introduction to “
Generations”

And now, a moment to breathe. Like our previous two stories, Steve Perry’s “Generations” takes a familiar tale and breathes new life into it. Unlike them, this story adds a bit of much-needed levity to the mix.

Ever since I edited
Pulphouse: A Hardback Magazine
, Steve has been my go-to guy for the off-beat. He was one of the first writers I invited into Fiction River, although I had to wait for the proper issue to showcase this story.

Because his career now spans four decades, he knows that editors can be an unruly lot. He has certainly worked with a bunch of us. Steve’s published everything from prose to TV animation. An Emmy-nominated,
New York Times
bestselling writer, Steve still finds time to write novels. His latest,
The Vastalimi Gambit
is part of his Cutter’s War series.

About “Generations,” Steve writes, “I like taking old tropes and trying to come up with new twists. I call these my wild-hair stories, and the ones that are the craziest are generally those for which I don’t expect there to be any market. Fortunately, I don’t get these urges very often. Pretty much every time I’ve had one of these loony notions, Dean and Kris have laughed and bought it. They’re passing strange, these two….”

Generations

Steve Perry

Ziegelstein heard Stroh’s ching on the room’s com. “I’m here,” he said. “What’s up?”

“We’re coming in hot! B.B. is a klick behind us and gaining!”

“Jesus! Is Stocke is with you?”

“Yeah. B.B. has got some kind of new toy, like a vortex thing. Took out my place like it was nothing, flattened Stocke’s like a fucking tornado, too. We’re screwed, Ziggy!”

“Maybe not. How soon are you here?”

“Three minutes.”

“I’ll stand by to open the gate. Get inside quick.”

“I’m not sure the gate or the mines will stop him, brah. That weapon of his blows through everything.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see how it does against the new fields.”

“Watch out for the damn tree!” Stroh yelled.

That meant Stocke was piloting the rover, and they were off-road, too.

Stroh said. “Two minutes, if Stocke doesn’t smash us into a tree first.”

“Fuck you!” Stocke said in the background.

“Standing by. Com off.”

Ziggy wiped at his mouth. It was only a matter of time, they had known it was coming That hairy-faced bastard B.B. was always going to be a problem, never a matter of “if,” but “when,” and the day had arrived.

Crap.

Ziggy had done as much as he could. He had solar-powered drones in the air, variable-field mines planted. The building was mostly armored in stacked, layered ferro-ceramics, and the force fields were brand new, installed two weeks ago, double-reverse polarities with shift-phase warblers and fourteen million rotating combinations during each phase, and good luck on finding a key to open them.

But B.B. was bad, you had to give him that. When push came to shove, he was fast, tough, mean, and definitely smarter than most. Step crooked with B.B., he’d eat you alive.

It was a small terraformed world, even though the gravity was permanently set to E1, the horizon only ten klicks away, and in this quadrant, not a whole lot of population. In fact, outside of himself and Stroh and Stocke, there was nobody for eighty klicks. Whatever B.B. had in mind, the three of them weren’t going to get any help, even if anybody wanted to do so, which, frankly, nobody did. They were on their own out here. Part of the price you paid for all the free land was having to deal with assholes like B.B.

Shit. He’d been meaning to get some guardbots, they were on the list, but that wasn’t gonna happen now, was it?

Too bad nukes were off the table. Replacing B.B. with a big smoking crater would not bother Ziggy one damned chin hair ...

The gate-cam burbled and flashed red on the holographic screen.

“Incoming craft,” the computer said.

“I see them,” Ziggy said. “Friendlies, open it up and shut it as soon as they clear. Switch off the mines in three ... two ... one ... now.”

The computer did what he told it to do. The gate blinked off and as soon as the rover passed through it, it blinked back on, a whirling wall of crackling blue energy. The rover zipped toward the house. Once it was clear of the field, Ziggy said, “Light the mines again.”

The anti-vehicle minefield sig blinked and went from green to red. There were two score of those out there inside the gate, their rotating fields overlapping the paths to the house in half a dozen places. Set one off, what was left of you would come down a kilometer away.

“Increase strength on the force field to maximum power.”

“Force field at maximum,” the computer said. “Power reserves at ninety-eight percent.”

Well, good on that. That gave them a month of power for the field. B.B. was going to get bored and hungry waiting for the reserves to run out.

Assuming that B.B. didn’t just kick a hole in the fucking fields with whatever he’d used on Stroh and Stocke’s places.

The yard cam showed the rover as it slewed to a stop, kicking up ochre-colored dust. Company had arrived.

“Open the front door,” Ziggy said.

The armored door slid open.

Stroh and Stocke scrambled from the rover. They had pulse-rifles slung and small back-mounted powerpacks, but that was it. They ran into the house.

The gate-cam showed B.B.’s hopper as it approached. The vehicle rode on a ground-effect cushion and it idled to a stop just short of the gate.

“Shut the door!” Stroh said.

The house door obediently slid back into place.

“Hey, brah, how they hanging?” Stocke said. He grinned.

Ziggy shook his head. “You led B.B. here because you were too cheap and lazy to armor your place worth shit. How is your brain hanging?”

“Nice to see you, too,” Stocke said. “He at the gate yet?”

“Just got there.”

The two new arrivals moved over to look at the holograph with Ziggy.

The com chinged. B.B.’s sig.

“Don’t answer him,” Stroh said. “Asshole just destroyed my house and everything in it!”

“I’m with Stroh,” Stocke said. “No point in talking. He’s crazy.”

“Yeah, I see how well you were able to deal with him, so let’s try it my way, hey?” He looked at the hologram. “I’m here.”

“Hello, Ziegelstein.” B.B.’s face appeared in the middle of the image.

He was flat-out ugly, B.B. was. Scare a tank full of starving piranha off a bloody steak. Genetics, but still ...

“What do you want, B.B.? I’m busy here.”

“Busy writing your will, I hope. You are going to need it. Why don’t you just open the fucking gate and save us all a lot of trouble?”

“No trouble at all for me to leave it closed. Keeps the riff-raff out.”

“You calling me names?”

“If the boot fits.”

“You really want to be pissing me off, Ziggy?”

“What, you are gonna kill us worse than dead?”

“I might.”