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Three and a Half Oaks

Based on a prompt found here.

🌳

Between the blink of an eye, in a heartbeat, in a breath, in things that stopped mattering, the world stopped – or at least we did.

People froze. I froze. Animals froze. Insects froze, I think. 

It was – when I thought about it clinically, it was fascinating.  My body didn’t hunger, didn’t ache, didn’t have any needs.  My eyes didn’t dry out.  I’d been sitting in the park.  The others in the park seemed the same – stuck in a single moment.  They didn’t fall over, even if in mid-jog.  The squirrel hung in mid-climb.  The ducks stopped in mid-nibble. 

Nothing moved.  Nothing but plants.  Nothing died, nothing rotted, nothing breathed, nothing but plants.  Continue reading

All the Worthy People

From writing prompt found here.  Um, warning, discusses the violent end of the world. 

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“You don’t understand!  I’m just an orderly.  There are plenty of doctors, plenty of scientists, plenty of people who can do a lot of good-”

They didn’t sedate me.  I didn’t argue with the point at the time, because if I was only restrained, maybe I could get out somehow, but they had gotten me trussed up really good and they were dragging me onto the ship.

All around me – separated by a very tall fence of chain-link and razor wire – people were shouting that they’d take my place.  I kept adding to their shouts.   Let them go instead of me

They were in a hurry; I understood that.  They were working against a literal doomsday clock; in less than 2 hours, the world was going to end. Continue reading

A Dream Fic – The Russian’s Motives

Today’s Great NanoWrimo Prompt Call tale was prompted by my subconcious, i.e., it’s a dream written down.  Cheers!

Content warning for: slavery, suggested violence, some actual violence and abuse, a good deal of objectification of at least one character. 

I swear I posted this the other day, but it’s still in my drafts. Soooo again, apologies if this is a duplicate.

The Great NanoWrimo Prompt Call

They were waiting, there wasn’t a better word for it.  They were quiet, idle, sitting around the lounge.  Except that he wasn’t sitting with the rest of them – neither he nor a couple of those who sympathized more with him, with what he was, had been, would be, than they did with the situation they found him in. Continue reading

Pumpkin, Spice

I cannot find that I posted this anywhere. If it’s a duplicate, apologies!

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“All right, I have three partial dictionaries from back then.”

Aatu waited patiently for Vijaya to finish digging through her piles.  “And – hrm.  One cookbook from that era, or, I mean, three pages of it.  Free of charge, Aatu, as long as you give me a sample when you’re done.”

“Thanks, Vijaya.  You’re a lifesaver.”

“Nah, I’m just a word-saver.  Go on with you.  Kairu is going to want to know what you want well in advance, you know.” Continue reading

Renovation Fics

These are a few microfics, written to prompts for my Renovations Prompt Mini-Call (which is still open as long as I keep getting prompt).

Claim the Sun

The tree was ancient, the sort of monster that managed to live through a convergence of luck and good soil, best placement and the weakness of her neighbors.  She had sucked up all the sunlight for what seemed, to the younger trees, like miles. And she had, in turn, sucked up lightning blasts.

It had been the last one that killed her, cutting through old scar tissue and toppling her in a  crash louder than any thunder. Continue reading

BeePocalypse 4: Kids

First: The Testers

Previous:  The More Things Change…

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Mom Cara shed her white suit, revealing herself to be still rather like herself.  “Not everyone has extreme visible changes. I run a few degrees colder than I used to, and I tend to be a little quicker to fly off the handle if I don’t pay attention, but I still look much like myself.  And I’m still myself, Kelly-boop.  I promise.”

“I believe you.”  Nobody had called her Kelly-boop in years.  She found herself wrinkling her nose the same way she had back then, before she found out that it would end more quickly than she’d thought.   Continue reading

The Threat

A story for my Apocalypse Bingo card. 

đŸ‘č

The monsters were getting closer.

The survivors had created three ragged perimeters around what had been, at one point, Main Street.  They had hung the outside with cold iron.  They’d put mines on the middle perimeter.  And on the inside they’d put up the biggest wooden spikes they could manage. Continue reading

X-Factor

“We’ve studied one million samples.”  Professor Georges was very solemn.  It didn’t keep Professor Osborne from scoffing at him.

“There aren’t a million people in this part of the world anymore.”

“We have been studying for a long time.  At approximately fifty thousand people a year for the first one hundred fifty years, and then a much reduced rate.  The last five years, we took samples from merely a thousand people.”

“So your rate of testing decreased over time.”

“The population decreased over time, and the methods became, by necessity, more circumspect: we could no longer use blood tests overtly.  Also, our own population was badly hit by the Disaster.”

“Yes, of course it was.  What did you determine?” Continue reading

Find

A story for my Apocalypse Bingo card. 

đŸ’„

Therosa had been walking through nothingness for well over a week, and it was beginning to wear on her.

Certainly in a physical sense: unlike most of the places around, the rubble hadn’t been cleared, cars had been left where they stopped, and junk was scattered about.  It was as if the Thing had hit yesterday and not nearly fifteen years ago.

Except the bodies.  Scavengers had pulled out a lot of them, but there were cars with the windows closed and intact remains still inside; there were a few here and there, as if a giant had trampoline-jumped, throwing people up into the air so that they landed willy-nilly.  Some of the buildings had faces pressed against the windows, faces that made Therosa reach for her gun, until she realized they were mummified, gone.

And there was nobody, nobody alive.  There were hardly even animals visible, just the bleached bones of people and of society, crumbled bits of buildings and the long cracked main road she could sometimes see through the rubble.

She kept walking.  She had never gone longer than four days of walking without seeing someone.  Not necessarily friendly someones, but people, living people, and the evidence of their passing.  Where had everyone gone?  Nowhere she had been had everyone died, even if the death rate had been between horrendous and mind-blowing everywhere.

She scavenged a few things here and there, not deviating more than twenty feet from her path.  There had to be people here somewhere.  There had to be something that was going to jump out at her, or shoot her, or-

She was picking up a dropped backpack – a kid’s backpack, pink, with Minnie Mouse.  There, in front of her, mostly covered by an old rug and only visible from this particular angle, was a trapdoor.

She was so going to get shot.  Or worse.

She moved the rug aside and opened the trap door.

A ladder went down into a room she was pretty sure wasn’t supposed to be there, not in what had been labelled as a law office.

She made sure the door closed solidly above her but didn’t lock and put her flashlight on its dimmest setting.  There, the shelf was just out of whack. She moved it aside, wincing every time it made a noise.

And there was a giant vault door, hidden behind a pretty decent curtain.  Heart in her throat, Therosa began to open the door.  If nobody had survived, if nobody had made it down here, there would be viable supplies.  She could live down here.  She could settle down.

The door stuck and jammed in her hand over and over again.  Finally, she went back to the shelf and got a bottle of WD40, which she applied liberally to every possible surface that might need it.  Using a rag to protect her hands, she turned the handle again.  Nobody had opened this thing since the end and probably a few years before that.  Visions of cans and cans of food filled her mind’s ey.

The door swung open.  Therosa found herself face to face with as many people as could physically fit in the narrow corridor in front of her.  The one in the front was ancient-looking; just behind him was a slender teenaged girl and an infant.  They were all pallid; they were all dimly-lit and the light made them look almost green.

“Is it safe to come out?”  The old man’s voice was a croak.  “Is it safe now?  Is the war over?”

đŸ’„


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BeePocalypse 3: The More Things Change…

First: The Testers

Previous: Up

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Slowly, very slowly, Kelly turned around.  It was Reyansh, and yet it wasn’t.  His face was more pointed, his eyes bigger and also more pointed, his skin looked iridescent, and he had wings sprouting from his back, bug-like wings that glimmered in iridescent blues.  “The Bees, their most potent attack was their most subtle.  They created something we’re calling a smart virus.  It mutates us, all in a hope of making our brains more susceptible to the Bee Hive’s commands.”

The green-blue woman filled in.  “Children born into this environment have almost no chance of surviving – they cannot withstand the immunization for the mind control, and second-generation physical alterations are almost always fatal in utero, if not soon afterwards.  They weren’t looking for a breeding population – or, we think, the ‘immunization’ against the mind control alters something that is meant to let us survive.” Continue reading