“Subversion” - an excerpt

He tapped his commands into the airlock’s keypad and waited. The interior gateway sealed itself first, protecting his unsuspecting crew from the unknowns beyond the exterior gateway, which now opened with its cinematically slow pace. There was no dazzling sunlight for Graft this time, only the seemingly solid darkness. Eden had no moons, nothing to reflect the glow of dual suns as the planet turned its back on them, and the omnipresent dirt sucked away every scant particle of light and swallowed it.

            Graft shivered in his suit, fighting the sensation of suffocation. He blinked a few times. The hab’s vague shadow finally appeared, but the utter absence of light distorted all dimensions like a telephoto lens. And the shadow was barely a shadow, a black lump on the black ocean floor.

            Graft hesitated, rethinking his motivations for the midnight walk.

            He scoffed at himself and reached for the pocket on his chest. Flashlights.

            Graft pulled out his flashlight, then went to the hooks in the wall where the other’s suits waited. He dug into Perez’s front pocket, took that light, too, and slid both flashlights into the railings on his helmet. He stepped up to the ramp again, his visor scraping the surface of night, and clicked on the flashlights.

            Two beams of LED shot forward, coming together some twenty feet ahead of him to form a single spotlight. Graft panned his head, testing his artificial guidance. He bobbed his head, shook it. The lights bounced and wiggled.

            He held still, gazing out towards the habitat.

            He left the airlock. His boots thumped down the ramp. The exterior gateway slid shut automatically, prompted by the weight sensors inside. Sealing him out. His tiny oasis of light jumped with every step, what felt like his whole world shuddering. 

            Graft stepped off the ramp onto gritty ground. Ground so dark it seemed dirt and air had blended into a single entity. And an “entity” was the proper word. Graft felt watched. Exposed.

            Day and night were two different worlds; when one went to sleep, the other awoke for its shift—it’s turn to exist. Graft nor anyone else here had experienced the night. He was a pilgrim of the darkness, pioneering into the latest unknown among hundreds, one step at a time.

            He kept his thoughts grounded with that mantra—one step a time. Nothing bad had happened to him on the last step, and the next one would be just fine. Then another, and another. He wanted to laugh at himself once more—the quickest way to douse fear—but he couldn’t manage anything, his tongue thick with tacky saliva.

            As he moved one step at a time, Graft’s thoughts drifted to the wormhole, the inexplicable miracle which had delivered them here. Passing through the hole had felt much like this walk with darkness. There had been nothing sensory about it, no amazing twirl of light and colors, no ear-splitting roar. There had been little flecks of debris bouncing off the cockpit, but every other sensory description of the moment came from inside. It was like something had ripped his mind from his body and therefore the ship, suspending him above the void where his existence lay grounded.

            Complete removal.

            He had been nowhere and everywhere. And all the while, the word time kept bouncing around his skull.

            Time time time. TIME!

            Time was him, an ever-compressing slate of memory and sensation, pushing itself forward through an unfelt substance using the swelling gravity of its ever-growing presence. Whatever force had strapped him inside his skeletal cage at birth had remained with him as only a faint speck of whiteness, casting tethers out in all directions. Past, present, and future. He was only to see what the tethers brought him, in the order they were brought, and nothing else. But the speck saw so much more.

            Graft had never understood the appeal of religion more than in the moments following his exit from the wormhole. He had felt judged in his passage. Something had observed every act he had ever made and would ever make.

            What it did with the knowledge Graft could not know, but it had watched him. Like the blackness watched him now…

            He started running.

            The night closed in around him, sentient down to the last particle. It explored his being, frisking him up and down, poking at his suit, looking for a way underneath to the soft, squishy flesh. The vulnerable stuff.

            Graft slammed into the door of the habitat, stopping himself with two hands. He went for the control monitor and tapped in the proper commands. The screen blinked red. Graft cursed and went again, slower, forcing his hands to be still, forcing his mind to stay away from the darkness.

            The screen blinked green. The hydraulic bolts inside the door clunked back. Graft grabbed the handle, jumped inside, and heaved his shoulder into the door.

            Clang!

            Lights clicked on in the airlock. A pleasant yellow aura bathed the small room. Graft pressed his helmet into the door. He closed his eyes, breathing manually.

            Finally, he laughed at himself, shaking his head. He opened his eyes and turned around. He crept to the window of the interior gateway, rising on his toes.

            Michelle’s corpse, greying and mutilated, lay in the center of the hab on the kitchen’s table. Graft cringed. It was like some barbaric, sacrificial idol, an offering to the darkness that it might spare them all for just a little while.

            Before Graft approached his inquiry of the night, he turned back around and made sure the exterior gateway was locked.

“One Dance” - an excerpt

“I’m starting to think this fiancé doesn’t exist,” Jess said.

            “Me too,” Cyprus said. “She keeps saying she’s almost ready, but I’m sure she’ll say it until she can say she accidentally fell asleep. She doesn’t like the ghost.”

            The music seemed to dim. The lights, too. Tanner blinked fast, questioning his own drink-count.

            “The what?” Tanner said.

            “The ghost.” Cyprus blinked. “Have I not told y’all this story?”

            “Negative.”    

            “Hold up. I need a beer for this.”

            Cyprus went around the bar and slid open the coolers. He asked if anyone needed anything. Jess said yes. Tanner was good.

            “All righty then,” Cyprus said as he plopped into a barstool. “We have a ghost. Or ghosts. Who knows?”

            He stopped there, as if this narration was sufficient. 

            “Now expand,” Tanner said.

            “Right. So, one of the first night’s I spent here with my fiancé, we were just hanging around drinking. A lot like this. Soaking in the weird environment of having an empty bar to use. Anyway, it’s damn late at this point. Like three in the morning. We turn off the music and we’re getting ready to lock everything up, then we hear it.” He paused, raised his fingers, and mimicked a walking motion. “Clop, Clop, Clop. We here this walking sound. A heavy walking. Like cowboy boots. And it just keeps going. Clop, Clop, Clop. We can track it just by listening to it, going around and around. Like, this thing is actually moving places.

            “We just sat there in stunned silence for like five minutes—and, I shit you not, that’s how long this noise went on. Now, I’m absolutely blitzed at this point. Can’t even tell my dick from my knee. But finally I think to myself ‘Hey, numb-nuts, go get the shotgun maybe?’. So I run to the backroom and grab my gun—terrible idea in hindsight, seeing as I was piss drunk—and my girl is almost in damn tears about the whole thing.

            “Now, in my head, I’m thinking something like this: it’s an old ass bar, no one has occupied it in months, and this town is absolutely infected with meth heads. So, someone’s been squatting, right? They heard the music go off and felt safe again. Logical, right? Well I walk up those stairs, real slow like, stepping around all the squeaky parts, and I leap the last two steps and plant myself down.”

            Bam!

            Cyprus jumped from his seat and showcased the motion. He swung his torso side to side.

            “I check the whole place out. Every corner.” He shook his head. “Not a damn thing.”

            “My ass,” Jess said and took a drink. “That was the most rehearsed performance I’ve ever seen.”

            Cyprus shrugged and sat down. “Probably cause I’ve lived that moment in my head a hundred times.”

            “Have you ever heard it again?” Tanner asked.  

            “I hear it all the damn time,” Cyprus said. “That night, after I came back down and calmed my girl down, we heard it again right as we were opening the front door. We booked like hell for home. But since then, we hardly react to it now. It’s like a little friend up there. One day, my fiancé was having a bit of a breakdown—she gets nutty like that sometimes—and the Clop, Clop started going, and she turns to the ceiling and she yells, ‘Would you shut the fuck up I’m kinda going through something!’.” Cyprus slapped his thigh and laughed. “Yeah, she’s nutty.”

            Tanner tried to remember this fiancés’ name. Had Cyprus said her name yet? And where the hell was she?

            “You really believe a ghost is up there?” Jess said.

            “One thousand percent. If you happen to hear it, you’ll believe it, too. I mean, cowboy boots have that very distinct sound, right? It’s too perfect, what’s going on up there.”

            “I wanna hear it,” Jess said.

            “Don’t get started,” Tanner said. “She goes crazy for that shit.”

            “I’m all about it,” Cyprus said. “Until I feel like I’m in danger, hell yeah let me live with some ghosts.” He paused, turning his eyes down. He fingered the tab on his beer. “My girl, though, she’s not a big fan. She claims she does have a bad experience with Mr. Cowboy.”

            Jess leaned forward. “What was it?”

            “Jess, come on,” Tanner said. “You’re going to wake me up when you have a bad dream. It’s late anyway. We should—”

            “Would you grow a pair?”

            Tanner flinched back from the bite in her tone. They always teased each other and made fun, but that one sentence was heavier than all the jokes.

            Cyprus seemed to sense the shift in mood, too, flicking his eyes back and forth. “Maybe it’s not the greatest idea. I’m kinda scaring myself and—”

            “Oh you big, big pussies,” Jess said. “Tell me, Cyprus. Come on. If your lady friend isn’t going to show, you have to tell me.” 

            Cyprus flicked his eyes at Tanner. Tanner looked away and sighed.

            “If you really want to know,” Cyprus said.

            “I do.”

            “All righty then.”

The lights went out.

“Something Rotten” - an excerpt

He smiled, and he crept, and he kept smiling. His hand touched the doorknob. The buzzing vanished. He smiled wider, adjusting his swatter. He ripped the door open, cocking his arm back—

            A swarm of blackness engulfed him, a particulate congregation of maddened buzzing.

            You got something rotten.

            He stumbled backward, swiping madly through the air. A thousand flies moving as one living organism. He tried to scream but only sucked in a portion of the swarm. Grit in his teeth. Vibrations on his tongue and gums. He hacked and wheezed and gagged, which only vacuumed more flies into his body. Deeper. He tripped on his feet and slammed his head into the floor. Stars bloomed behind his eyes, except they weren’t stars; they appeared as flies, green and black and blue, zipping back and forth. The breath of a thousand wings surrounded him. A bludgeoning swell of toneless buzzing. A sudden and detached type of clarity fell over him: he was dying, suffocating on a mouthful of flies. Every choking breath pulled them further down his esophagus. No matter how many of their heads popped between his twitching teeth, the flies seemed unquenchably determined to explore every crevice of his innards. And all he could do was clamp down on them as he fought for breath, popping heads, tearing wings, snapping legs, filling his mouth with an acrid, rotten slime.

            Maggots eat the rotten stuff. 

            Pure survival instincts kept Quincey moving as the employee’s lesson echoed to him and the flies assaulted him. His hands clawed across the floor, pulling him towards the door. The flies pelted him like sand in a barren, apocalyptic land. Even with his eyes sealed shut, he felt his world growing darker, like a worm burrowing into dank mud.

            He grabbed the door’s siding. Adrenaline shot through his veins. His eyes popped open, and hundreds of flies immediately pelted the soft, exposed sclera. He jammed his eyes shut again, but only captured the flies between his lids. They wriggled and flailed, feathery legs kicking and scrabbling against his eyes. Burning him with their filth.

            He sucked in one more meager, gritty breath and yanked himself to his feet with the door.

            As soon as he was upright, there was nothing. A sudden and complete absence. He was dead. Certainly, dead.