SEAHORN EPUBLISHING ANTHOLOGY OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ISSUE TWO VOLUME ONE PHIL SEAHORN
SEAHORN EPUBLISHING ANTHOLOGY OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ISSUE TWO VOLUME ONE By Phil Seahorn
Copyright 2013 properties of Phil Seahorn All rights reserved by owner of the content in which this ebook is based. Under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication will be produced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the owners of the content in which this ebook is based. Seahorn Epublishing www.facebook.com/seahorn epublishing First Edition: July 2013 Seahorn Epublishing is a Facebook based epublishing service which produces for the Internet written, audio, and video content, to be sold to Internet outlets as content. 1.Ebook 2.Science Fiction 3.Fantasy 4. Anthology ISBN LCCN 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 BRD-C
CONTENTS 4 . Hoof Prints in the Snow 9. Thaw
4. Hoof Prints in the Snow Andy woke up around three on this particular Saturday morning, which was like all the Saturday mornings since he moved to St. Louis to finish up his undergrad the past three years. He had just graduated the past December, and was in the process of preparing himself to get out into the workforce with a Bachelor’s degree in Science. That thought of what the future would hold for him, a man of color with a degree in the job market of 2014, was enough to keep anybody from getting sleep. Such was the case with this cold February morning, snow again hitting St. Louis. Andy was making damn sure that wherever he would go from St. Louis, it would be some place fucking warm. But Andy did not let the view from his kitchen window stop him from preparing to do his laundry. He always liked that time of the morning to do his laundry, almost making it a Zen thing. In the last three years that he lived at this particular apartment building, he never had to contend with four inches of snow while he did his laundry in the winters past. Andy gathered up his laundry bag of the week’s clothes (he worked at a call center at a major university, so he didn’t really have a lot of cloths). Plus being a student for three years, he didn’t need to have many. The bag of clothes was slung over his back like an urban Santa, as he climbed down the back steps of his apartment building. He would take the back way of the building, avoiding walking thru the parking garage in the basement to get to the laundry room on the other side of the parking garage. Andy still took the precaution of packing. He didn’t care that he lived in Richmond Heights, one of the more affluent counties in St. Louis. Even doing his laundry, Andy would pop a cap if necessary. No place was safe nowadays.
5. The thing that really spooked Andy was the stories that were told to him about the building he had moved in. He had started messing with a blonde with a big ass around the corner, as she had a mixed daughter and was looking for a positive man of color to come into their life. It didn’t hurt that Andy was attending and working at the most prestigious university in the region, either. She had told Andy about the building, how the building was haunted. Turns out there had been a cult that had preferred moving it’s members into the apartment building Andy was living in. People in the neighborhood would notice tenants that would come out of the apartment, in the dead of winter, 15 or 20 degrees, with nothing on but the clothes they were wearing: no coat, no hat or gloves. And that they all carried what looked like Daniel Boone bags, both the men and women. But it was the behaviour of the tenants in the winter and their clothing (or lack thereof) that puzzled the neighbours. About ten years back, a double murder and homicide had occurred in the building, all involving tenants who dressed like that. But it was what happened after the murders in the building that got the neighbors to really start talking. They would notice figures during the day and night walking around the complex, all of them in the same clothes and Daniel Boone bag, but looking more out of place. The only problem was, some of the folks would just disappear before entering the apartment. Then, the apartment managers would move people into the apartment of the triple deaths. The neighbours in the apartment complex would complain of very strong, almost cinnamon smell coming from the apartment of the deaths, as if the people inside were using incense to cover up smoking ganja. Only problem with that, Andy’s blonde neighbour explained, was that
6. the tenants never had incense, and never used it. They, too, would complain of the smell in the apartment which would just suddenly appear for periods of time, then completely disappear. The kicker to the stories that Andy’s on and off again blonde girlfriend told Andy was what would occur in the basement of the building. She told Andy that people would see a guy with a baseball cap hung over his eyes, wearing a baseball jersey that would seem dated. He would pass by you in the basement. If you turned around, suddenly he would be gone. Andy really did not appreciate the last part of the neighbor’s story, as she knew that whenever they would get thru fooling around in the middle of the night when she couldn’t get to sleep either, he would do his laundry. Sometimes they would do theirs together .But he couldn’t wait for her to do his laundry with all the time. It was that snowy Saturday morning, around four in the morning after Andy had showered and meditated, he would do his laundry routine. He got down to the basement, put his clothes in the laundry machines, took his pistol out, and scanned the basement.The snow outside had started to come down pretty fast. Andy knew he had to get the laundry done by 6 in the morning, or he would be facing a half foot or more of snow to drag his clean cloths thru. Andy made sure the basement was clear, but still backed up the stairs, still facing the basement. It didn’t help that he had smoked some of the best ganja that he had come across in St. Louis in a while. Andy opened the back door and looked at the snow. It was coming down hard, and he could see the cars slowing down to a creep as they turned onto highway 40, in which the apartment was right next to. Then Andy looked down.
7. At first, Andy thought it was the ganja. But then, he looked more closely. There were hoof prints in the snow. Now, Andy was a city boy, but he could pretty much figure out what constituted as dog prints. These prints were a size 8 or 9.They stretched from the doorway to the laundry, all the way to the door in which Andy exited his apartment. Andy stepped out, and looked up and down the small ally way that existed between the apartment complex and the sound walls of the highway. The snow gleamed off the metal of his pistol, as he slipped the clip out of the pistol, to make damn sure he was loaded. He snapped the clip back into the pistol with an audible click. Andy didn’t know what the fuck made those hoof prints, but the prints were a fucking lot bigger than a dog. Andy looked at the print in the snow. Yep, Andy thought, this was a hoof print, and this was not made by any dog he could think of. Andy stood in the snow and night air, shivering. Fuck this, he thought, and held the pistol in front of him as he made his way to the other door. Andy slowly opened the door to the back entrance, putting his foot into the door that led to the basement. That would prevent anything, he meant anyone, from coming up and thru that basement door. On doing this, Andy quickly got his keys out, and entered his apartment. Then, he screamed. The apartment manager dreaded coming to the apartment in Richmond Heights, on news of what happened there. The Saturday night air was filled with sirens and cops were still there at the building in Richmond Heights. Apparently, one of the tenants, the one that was moved into apartment One West, seemed to have come under some kind of foul play. The neighboUrs said that they heard a scream and a gunshot that early morning, and by the evening, a strong odor was
8. coming from the apartment. They described the odor as strong cinnamon. It got stronger and stronger as the evening went on. But it was the gunshot that made the neighbours call the cops. When the manager arrived, he gave the cops permission to enter with him, as he had the master keys after he and the cops knocked on the apartment door for five minutes. What they saw inside the apartment made the manager and the two cops throw up, almost comically simultaneously .The manager and the cops staggered out the back door of the apartment building into the snow. It started snowing again. And then, a strong cinnamon smell appeared out of nowhere. But what caused the manager to almost shit his pants was what he and the cops saw in the snow. Giant hoof prints. THE END
9. Thaw The orbital routes had been open for almost two years without incident between the moon, Earth, and the asteroid belts off of the orbit of Neptune. The Asteroid Wars had been over for eight years with less and less terrorist activity until a year before Alonzo Bellingrande decided to opt for space freighter duty. The economy had bounced back enough in Sky City One, but there were just too many people migrating from the surface of earth to the floating suborbital cities, the Asteroid belts, even to the Moon and Mars colonies. The Asteroid Wars had taken place primarily on earth, which everyone agreed after hindsight was extremely stupid. The war was over asteroids in space, after all. Alonzo had enough job offers, but none that would pay him enough to leave Sky city eventually. He had lived on Earth until the Asteroid Wars, when half of the world’s population migrated to the three sky cities that were already built. Before the migration from the surface to suborbital Earth ended, 13 more sky cites were constructed and placed into operation in suborbital space all over the globe. Because of this migration, one third of the world’s population disappeared from the surface. The unintentional side effects of the crazy corporations military’s killing enough of each other to make the remaining world military weak enough for sancture.The Wars ended, and the repairs of earth had begun. Alonzo would have taken a job in New St, Louis, Missouri, rebuilding the gateway Arch after the Asteroid Wars attack on it. He decided that the Asteroid Run would make him far more money, and allow him the chance to explore the new mining towns that were popping up all over the asteroid belt.
10. Alonzo had just reported in to duty on the freighter ship Solomon Northup, which was assigned three stops and pickups in the asteroid belt before it docked at Obama City. From there, Alonzo planned on heading to the mars colonies to exchange his credits for America dollars, as that was the only accepted currency in the Asteroids. Something about being as distantly removed from United Earth federated money and the U.E. itself. It was still a pain in the ass to go to mars. Mars was a shithole. He had just gotten comfortable in his space walk gear, when everything light up outside his suit’s helmet visor like the sun. After blinking numerous times, Alonzo opened his eyes. The interior readings on his helmet visor had gone to red. Alonzo instantly knew why. The ship had vanished around him. The Solomon Northup was in pieces, as Alonzo floated thru the wreckage. He could see the remainder of the crew floating amid the wreckage. He also noted that his energy shield had been activated just as he completed checks on the flight gear that was attached to his space suit. Alonzo knew that was the only thing that saved his life. He got no other life readings from scans of the floating fellow crew members. He didn’t even bother to jet over to a floating body, because he knew that they were just that: dead bodies floating in space. Alonzo immediately keyed in a location beacon for a life ship. Before the war, thousands of life ships were launched into the space between earth and mars, guarantying the safety of anybody who found themselves adrift in space. No matter the drift time in an untethered space suit, a life ship would key in to your location, and eventually a drifting astronaut would be picked up.
11. It took two minutes until three life ships keyed into his position. The only problem was, the nearest one was 24 hours away. Alonzo cursed himself for not insisting that the route in which the Soloman Northrup was taking to get to one of the asteroid stops was way to off the established star shipping routes, taking the ship almost 27,000 miles outside the shipping radius, and putting the ship in exactly the type of situation it had found itself in as well as her crew. Alonzo keyed in the sub hyper sleep routine. Better to wake up a day later on a life ship than go crazy floating in space for 24 hours. He would spend all those 24 hours trying to figure out what the fuck happened that destroyed the Solomon Northup. Alonzo opened his eyes. He was staring at a ceiling of some sort, in a color that he had never seen before. That was his first gut instinct reaction that something was very, very wrong here. He winced, trying to raise his head from the padded table he was lying on. His suit and gear had been removed, but the specs of the ceiling and the surrounding room was nothing like any interior of any spaceship he had ever seen ore been on. The large room he was in was lit very brightly as he raised room the table. His body and shoulders ached tremendously. His arms and hands were shaking .He settled himself as he trained to do in dealing with the affects of long term hyper sleep. The pre medicated endorphins already in his blood stream should even him out, as well as the other meds that were instantly injected into him once he put on the spacesuit for a spacewalk. The meds were used in case of a forced hyper sleep using a suit hyper sleep device, which was much different form a standard issue hyper sleep unit for a spaceship. Alonzo looked around the room, more cube shaped than a room that humans would build. Alonzo knew that not only had he been in hyper sleep far, far longer than a day, but that this
12. room was not part of a ship built by humans. He looked up at the ceiling of the room which had nothing else in it but the table in which he woke up on. He looked at the far right wall of the cubed room. It was window of some sorts. He was able to physically walk over to the window and look out. Yep, Alonzo said out loud, he wasn’t in Kansas anymore. “I assume that the hologram is something that does not represent your true form?” Alonzo asked the hologram of the human woman in uniform. The image grew to be the height of the entire room, with the human figure looking down at Alonzo. This made Alonzo extremely uncomfortable. “Yes, we have assumed that this appearance would make you feel more comfortable. While frozen in your suit, it sustained you thru solar repowering for almost three hundred of your years, is a remarkable feat for a people such as yours.” said the hologram. Alonzo really didn’t like that tone. He knew he was fucked: an advanced, space faring civilization has captured him or rescued him, he didn’t know yet. And they already feel that his “people” are substandard. He saw a” white man meets Indians for the first time” scenario, with him being the Indians. The figure started to change its appearance.”We are the ….” Alonzo saw nothing but blinding light after that. He awoke back in his suit, still floating in space waiting to be picked up by a life ship. He checked the chronometer in the faceplate screen. It read”23 hours plus”. He looked to his left. Alonzo saw a bright light far off in the distance of dark space. The readings on the face helmet
13. indicated that something was approaching his position. Alonzo felt very groggy. Short term hyper sleep was never a good idea, as hyper sleep was meant for extremely long term use. Short term use, especially if the body is under extreme stress, was simply not good. And Alonzo felt that. He saw from his readings that, well, something was coming closer. The instruments would not give a direct reading. “It should read a fucking life ship” he said out loud. The light in the far distance of space was slowly coming closer. Alonzo still was not getting any accurate reading as to exactly what was coming toward him. Then he remembered the strange ass dream he had while in mini hyper sleep. He looked again at the chronometer. His eyes grew wide. Tapping the interior light of the helmet up to” full”, he read the chronometer correctly. The grogginess of stress involved hyper sleep, or the static of the readings coming thru on the face plate screen, had caused him to misread the time stamp on the chronometer. After the number “23” was a number “7” and then the word “years”. Alonzo knew then: his dream was either a premonition, or a warning. The light came closer as the readings on his visor became more and more erratic. Alonzo was about to find out which.
THE END