Doing What You Have To Do To Get By

By Gareth L Powell

The three inflatables rounded the headland an hour after sunrise. Kadie Jones crouched in the lead boat, wrapped in the noise and fumes from the outboard motor, gripping a heavy service revolver in one hand. She wore a thick military surplus coat and a fur cap with khaki earflaps. As soon as the prow of the boat hit the beach, she sprang out and splashed up onto the shingle, her boots crunching noisily as she ran. Ahead, in the town, the church bell tolled.

“We’ve been spotted,” she said.

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This is a sneak preview of a story that will appear in the forthcoming anthology Conflicts from NewCon Press. The full story is around 5,000 words long. This is the opening scene:

FALLOUT
By Gareth L Powell

Despite what was to come, the day started well. An hour before sunrise they landed the rented jet at a decommissioned RAF base in Wiltshire, near Swindon. It was a cold morning and frost glittered on the grass at the edge of the runway.
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This is an extract from a short story called “The Winding Curve” which I co-wrote with Robert Starr, author of Creek Water and The Apple Lady. The full story appears in Rob’s 2008 collection Sophistry By Degrees.

A year after his wife’s death, Mike finds himself on the old coast road south of town, with his daughter in the back seat. They’ve lingered too long at the cemetery, and now they’re driving around because he can’t face taking her home to an empty house.
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This is an excerpt from my 9,000 word novelette “Arches”, which has been nominated for the long-list of this year’s Theodore Sturgeon award.

Excerpt from “Arches”
By Gareth L Powell

When he arrived, she was waiting in the yard in front of the house. She had a shotgun in one hand and a backpack in the other.

‘Nice car,’ she said, throwing the pack onto the back seat. There were wind chimes on the farmhouse gate. The night air smelled of cut grass, and the stars above were hard and sharp.

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I’ve written and published 25 pieces of Friday Flash Fiction this year. That’s slightly less than one per fortnight, which isn’t bad going. As we’re approaching the end of 2008, I’ve compiled the following list of my 10 personal favourites from 2008, with links.

1. Roswell
2. Carnival
3. Natalie
4. Mid Life Crisis
5. Fresh Meat
6. God’s Gift
7. Hot Rats
8. Life Goes Wrong
9. Chip Heads
10. Jetsam

This week’s story is a sequel to the full-length story Flotsam, which appeared in my short story collection and was recently featured in issue 3 of the Concept Sci-fi ezine.

JETSAM
By Gareth L Powell

Toby Milan thought he’d drowned. When Odette and Safak pulled him from the sea, his lungs were full of water and he was unconscious and bleeding from a knife wound to the thigh. They pulled him into Safak’s old twin engine Grumman sea plane and flew him to Barcelona, where he spent the next three days on a hotel bed in the Gothic Quarter, his leg wrapped in bandages.

Continue reading “Friday Flash Fiction 48″

SLEEP NOW
By Gareth L Powell

It begins on a sad and lonely September evening, as the sound of a piano draws me to the back room of a small pub on the edge of the park, by the river. Stepping inside, I slide over to a table and order a drink. The pianist sits in the darkness behind his instrument, a cigarette dangling from his lips, his fingers stroking the keys, his eyes screwed tight. Continue reading “Friday Flash Fiction 47″

THE CLOUD PRINCESS

By Gareth L. Powell

 

He came in fast, aerobraking hard, scrawling a fiery trail across Jupiter’s pristine clouds. And then, when he’d shed enough velocity, he dropped, spreading black carbon fibre wings to catch the pummelling jet stream.

 

Ahead lay a dark whorl of cloud – a raging storm the size of Earth’s moon. And before it, dwarfed by the fury of the maelstrom, he saw the Cloud Princess.

 

The old airship was labouring at a depth far deeper than the one she’d been designed for, her vast impellers spinning furiously as the storm dragged her in.

 

She’d seen better days. As he got closer, he could see where some of her docking spines had been torn off. There were panels and aerials missing. Whole vanes had been ripped from their mounts.

    

He pulled in his wings, falling in a swooping arc that carried him under her rudder, into the shadow of her gas bag. He was aiming for the promenade deck at the rear of the gondola, and the airlock that accessed the main ballroom.

 

Once there, if he could get to her bridge, there was a chance he could save her.

 

CHIP HEADS

By Gareth L Powell

Five years ago, the first neural chip implants appeared – soft biotech gel memory chips that held our schedules, important birthdays and anniversaries, the phone numbers of our friends and families…

Over the next few months, the chips were steadily upgraded. New models were released with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. They took the place of our mobile phones and our internet browsers, giving us inbuilt access to the sum total of human knowledge, twenty-four hours a day.

We became reliant on them.

And then something in the net ate everyone’s brain.

Well, not everyone. There are still some unaffected people – children, some pensioners… and people like me, who dug the chips from their heads and survived.

The affected people move in strange patterns, like shoals of fish or flocks of birds. They are calm and do not see the world around them – until whatever it is that controls them releases its hold, which it does every few days, for them to eat and shit and go crazy… Then they’re back to walking in strange, soothing patterns again.

When they’re released, they’re usually starving. Like ravenous zombies, they’ll eat anything to hand, pursue any animal or unaffected human they see and tear it apart.

Trust me; you don’t want to be caught in the open when that happens.

Currently, I’m living with a handful of unaffected men and women on the upper floors of a downtown tower block. The lift doesn’t work and we’ve blockaded the stairs – but we’re not going to stay here forever.

There are mobile phone masts and Wi-Fi servers everywhere. Somehow, they still have power. If we can knock out enough of them to disrupt the signal that controls the chips, maybe we can make a difference… And maybe we can start to rebuild.

AZTEC JAGUARS FALLING
By Gareth L Powell

It’s nearly time, and they’re in a small plane, flying over the Mediterranean, fleeing the coming catastrophe. The radio’s quiet tonight; hardly any traffic. The clouds overhead reflect the day’s heat.

“How much longer?” she says.

He looks at his watch: “A few minutes.”

They’re both quite drunk. They’ve been drinking ever since the announcement, two days ago. God knows how he’s got the concentration to navigate up here, in the dark.

Folding her arms, she turns to look out the window at the coast of Spain. It’s a ribbon of yellow light.

“Do you think it’s going to hurt?” she says over the noise of the propeller.

He doesn’t answer. She can see his face reflected in the window, illuminated by the dials on the dashboard. She can see the sweat on his forehead; smell the cabin’s mixed scents of engine oil, fear, and hot plastic.

Neither of them sees the impact – they’re facing the wrong way when the comet hits – but the shockwave catches them about a mile off the coast of Barcelona, and they have to ditch in the sea. It’s midnight. The plane flips onto its back as it hits the water, and the tail breaks off.