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.

HOT RATS
By Gareth L Powell

The four rats appeared high in the upper atmosphere. For a few seconds, they burned like meteors. Then they were back in the lab, smoking and smelling and setting off every alarm we had.

You see, we tried to send them into the past but we forgot: the Earth is rotating at around 1,000 miles per hour, and moving around the Sun at about 67,000 miles per hour. Plus the sun itself is rotating around the centre of the galaxy.

We sent them a couple of minutes into the past. They travelled in time but they stayed in the same physical location - a location the Earth hadn’t reached when they arrived. It hadn’t got there yet. It was still spinning around the sun, a few minutes behind.

But it was coming.

The rats were tumbling through space at 67,000 miles per hour when the Earth’s gravity caught them. There were four of them in the cage. They hit the upper atmosphere at many times the speed of sound.

It’s amazing we got anything back at all.

ROSWELL
By Gareth L Powell

So there we were - me and this kid - sitting beneath a fizzing neon sign in an otherwise empty bar in New Mexico. We were both in uniform, and it was one of those clear desert nights where the moon’s a pickled egg and the air’s sharp enough to cut you.

We’d borrowed a jeep from the base and it was parked out front. I had five dollars and a harmonica in my back pocket. The kid – whose name was Eric – had a comb, a pack of cards, and a picture of his high school sweetheart. He sat looking at it, smoothing it out on the table.

“Where are you from, anyway?” I asked him.

“Banner County, Nebraska, sir.”

“Who’s the girl?”

He touched the face in the picture and his shoulders slumped. It was the first time since we’d left the base that I’d seen him relax.

“Her name’s Luanne. I’ve known her since we were eight years old.”

There was a cow’s skull on the wall above the door. I said: “Is she waiting for you?”

He shook his head and the light caught the scars on his face.

“We haven’t spoken in five years. The last letter she sent me, she’d met this guy from Harrisburg – a meat packer, I think - and they were talking about getting married.”

A song came on the jukebox – blues on guitar and piano. He picked up his glass and the ice cubes clinked.

“I still think about her, though.”

He closed his eyes. A car passed on the highway. The stars were bright and hard. I looked at my reflection in the window, counted the stripes on my sleeve.

I said: “Yeah, life’s like that.”

THREE THINGS HE REMEMBERED ON HIS DEATH BED
By Gareth L Powell

1.

When he was sixteen, he almost drowned. He lost control of his kayak at the head of the rapids at Symonds Yat, overbalancing where the green river water met the first black rocks.

2.

He saw his first dead body at the age of twenty-two. He was working in a pet food shop in Gloucester. He heard a noise outside. When he went to investigate, he saw there had been an accident in the street. It was a hot summer’s day. People were lying smashed and bloodied in the dust.

3.

He was in the kitchen of a friend’s house with Lisa, fetching the dessert. He was forty years old. She had offered to give him a hand. The other guests (including her husband) were drinking wine around the dining table on the patio.

‘I want you,’ he whispered.

She squeezed his hand. ‘I really want you too. But you know if we do this, we can never, ever tell anyone.’

DEPARTURE LOUNGE
By Gareth L Powell

As they filed through the departure lounge, a woman broke from the crowd and the guards shot her. She fell awkwardly; her legs were still twitching as they dragged her away.

The other passengers shrank back. Why had she run into their bullets like that? What did she know?

On the edge of the crowd, Nina took a tight hold on her duffel bag. A single tear ran down her cheek. Beside her, her Donor grunted and picked up the two large cases containing everything she had left.

“This is intolerable,” she said, as the guards, using batons and curses, tried to get the queue moving again.

“Yes, ma’am.”

The Donor’s eye were dull, undisturbed. For an instant, she envied its lack of empathy, its simple-minded acceptance of events. Then, in the crush of bodies, she caught a whiff of its familiar sour sweat and wrinkled her nose in disgust.

“Shut up,” she said.

She shuffled forward with the rest of the passengers. They were mostly hot and scared. Some carried children.

When they reached the departure gate they were led across the dusty, windblown apron to a flotilla of waiting trucks.

“Where is the plane?” Nina asked.

One of the guards grunted and his lip twitched. The wind smelled of ash and spilled petrol.

“Just get in,” he said.