Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

The Hymn of Ordeal, No. 23

Originally published by Women Destroy Science Fiction, June 2014

Your brother’s bones, suspended in mineral fluids, turn as smoothly and shine as brightly as the oil-coated joints of the mechanism they guide. When you touch the heavy plastic that separates you from his body, it is cold. The iron plate that serves to cover what is left of his face turns towards the tapping, and nausea wells deep in your throat. You catch a glimpse of yellow fat, the hole of a socket, nerves that once bundled into the base of an eye now strung behind the iron half-mask.

Flesh did not make the transit to deep space whole, only guts packed in gel and nerves strung into wires, the delicate threads that extend to outer sensors, thrusters, and lenses. That is what they are now. Not people, not soldiers, but shrikes, the folded warbirds sent through void to cleanse it of the invaders, to impale them on their own stardust ruins, to leave broken chassis and frozen corpses scattered as warning to others who might threaten us. If the invaders left corpses—you have never seen them, only the scars of their passage left across the skin of Earth.

Only the shrikes see them, and the shrikes are silent.

The motion makes you queasy, to see your kin laid bare in this way, deconstructed into scaffolding, but he knew what he had volunteered for long before the first flensing cut had been made. Most people are advised not to see the volunteers after induction. Now you understand why.

You’re told he does not acknowledge you. The movement is involuntary, a roll in his sleep while he dreams the dreams of kites. He does not see inside the ship any more than you can peer inside your own ribcage.

After you leave the shrike and the remains of your brother behind, you lift your phone as you have many times before, to listen again to the last message your brother left you, on the day he decided to join. The words are as hollow as you felt when you first heard them. You thought a suicide note might be less painful, but you did not know what you could do, you never raised your voice against him, and now you walk away.

"How else do you see the stars, but to join the war?" he asks, distant and thin through the speakers. "I don’t know if you’ll understand," a pause for breath, and you stop the message. You know how it ends.

On launch day you stay at home while astronomers gather on hills and look up for the tiny stars, winking out one by one as the shrikes break orbit and fling themselves far past the shadows the sun casts. It is all the news discusses for weeks, how we are taking the fight to them, how brave the volunteers are, how we are turning the tides of history this day, this year, this century. Reconstruction will last generations. Who knows what civilization will follow in the contrails of conquerors?

You sit at home and you do not listen, but the shadows flit through your thoughts as you wonder how we will know they have succeeded, how many thousands of years will pass before the night sky shows the scars of war, if your children’s children’s children will be able to look up and trace battle lines by the absence of light.

News feeds and reports of the war arrive in fragments, sentences at a time, signaled in light packed tight and sent back the way they came, the way the invaders came. All years too late. If there is humanity among the stuttered laser missives, songs or stories or riddles the shrikes call back and forth through flickering verses over void to pass the time, it is not shared. Only life confirmed and life lost, coordinates and absences.

Light casts long shadows in vacuum.

There are more launches. We are winning, the missives say. Victory is a mathematical equation.

The equation is repeated daily. Sometimes, as the announcer’s voice drones on, name after name, you wonder why they list the casualties at all. They volunteered to be killed long before they were sent to the front lines. But those thoughts are treason, and you push them aside even while listening, always afraid, for your brother’s name to be spoken among the dead.

It never is, and you are never sure if you are grateful for the sparing or sorry that you have no chance to grieve. You wonder if the machines will fail first, or the organics inside them, or if age no longer applies to a kite of angles and shards.

You transfer your brother’s last message from phone to phone to phone as you move from place to place, buried deeper under your new life with every adjustment made for your work, your career, your friends. That is how it should be. Life moves on. Sometimes you think you hear your brother’s voice, your brother’s words—humanity is worth fighting for—and you wonder whose wounds will leave the most visible scars; those dismantled to wheel like hunting hawks out into the void, or the handlers left behind to fit each twisted spar back into place, one by one?

Time passes. The shrikes' infrequent transmissions shift in measured steps from war to the equations of extermination, and the ones who do not wish to mask truth’s sharp words with poetry call it genocide. No plea for surrender comes, and the news turns its attention to closer matters, to expansion, to colonization, to business and the small strifes that spring up after the need for unification has passed.

We no longer tell the shrikes what to do; they are bladed kites loosed upon æther, ours in name only. On Earth, cities are built over and around the ruins. If not for words carved into glass, speeches that remind citizens never to forget wounds past, and crystal walkways over exposed bedrock, there would be no physical memories of the damage wrought at all.

Did you have children, did you marry, did you retire well or not at all? It doesn’t matter on the day that the sky opens wide again and the shrikes pour down through the tears. No signal heralded their arrival, no sound and no light. They never left unheeded any command, but they broadcast no warning of their return. And with them come unfamiliar ships with geometry more grown than manufactured, bone-bright and entwined with the shrikes in the sky, as equals. Only decades-old footage will identify them as the ships of the invaders, the lances that carved irreparable gouges into the Earth.

The shrikes flare out, the lancing lights among the stars that flew to cleanse the void of a threat returned and dragging their catch with them. The world falls quiet under their long shadows. The shrikes lie silent, waiting, listening, wings spread in formation, shining knives to cut the sun.

Of course you walk outside with the others and you crane your neck, wondering which is your brother, aware of how vulnerable you are in this moment, how they could rain fire down upon you all.

They do not rain fire. Instead, over the growing hum of fear and conjecture, the enemy ships sing. All at once, they sing, and the noise brings you to your knees.

Weave, they sing.

teach us to refasten our kin

in your image

in the image of the kites

kestrels, swifts, merlins, shrikes

we too wish to cut the stars to thread.

You shield your eyes to study the blinding angles because there is no point to shielding your ears from the song. If you can recognize him, if he would know you, if he survived, if it can be called survival and if he still could be called your brother. But they all look the same and you see him in every one, and in every one yourself.

Charge! Love Heart!

Originally published by The Sockdolager, March 2015

Sometimes when you’re lying awake in bed and pretending to be asleep because it’s way too late for a high school student to be up, you can hear ‘um; a series of bass thumps, more felt than heard, the footsteps of a giant. They’re not what people tell you—not a semi compression-braking on the highway, definitely not the warrior ghosts of the Night March (the huaka‘i pō make no sound as they pass), not even artillery testing (those exercises mostly happen during the day). I can tell you, but you have to promise to believe me and not share this around.

Okay, to start with, I’m kind of a dork. There’s no shame in that kinda thing any more; the revenge of the nerd days are way over. Everyone here grew up on Kikaida and that kine toku anyway; we all know about Bijinda’s bust lasers (pink, heart-shaped) and Mazinger and Astro Boy. They’re practically household words. So that means I’m an expert on what I saw, yeah? This story isn’t about that kind of Internet dick-measuring, anyway, who’s what kind of nerd or whatever. This story’s about how I met my girlfriend.

The first time I saw her—well, okay, noticed her—was across the lunch table. I was sitting in the shade, she was sitting in the sun. We had the same lunch—timeslot, not food—everybody had the same cafeteria food. It was chili and cornbread, but not in a good way. I elbowed my friend Kimo and asked him who was that girl. Kimo knew everybody. He squirted the packet of mayo he’d just opened all over the table instead of into his chili like he’d been aiming for and then elbowed me back hard. I handed over my napkins sheepishly.

He squinted across the concrete tables while he wiped mayo off his tray. "Who, Erika? She’s from Big Island. She’s my girlfriend’s cousin."

"No shit?" Just then, the eagle charm at the end of her necklace glinted in the noon sun. I got up and Kimo swiped my mayo packets, too. I ignored it; I was on a mission.

"What, you gonna ask her out?"

"Maybe."

The eagle had made up my mind. I marched over. Like twelve girls with perfect frizzless hair and hella makeup stared back at me and my resolve pretty much died in my throat. "Hey, is it cool if I…hi. Sit here?"

"What, James, you got something to talk about other than League of Legends?" That was Kimo’s girlfriend, and it was good enough for me.

"Yeah I do!" I said, offended. I sat down, not so close to Erika that it was creepy or anything.

Erika was looking at me, her fork paused mid-air. She was way cute even up close—no offense, but some girls aren’t—round face, lips pursed thoughtfully in my direction. She was wearing a spaghetti strap top, and I followed the strap down the curve of her shoulder to the bra—I yanked my gaze back up to her face and stammered. "So…um…Kamen Rider, you a fan?"

"Huh?"

Behind Erika, Kimo’s girl mouthed Ka-men Ri-da slowly.

"The eagle?" I prompted. The whole table full of girls was staring at me. They’d even stopped eating, and two or three of them had these smug girl-smirks on. I kind of wanted to die, or at least crawl back under my table and wait for the lunch bell to ring. Instead, stupid words spilled out of my mouth. "It’s uh, the SHOCKER symbol, from Kamen Rider…First?"

"This?" Erika held up the charm, looked from me to her hand. Kimo’s girl covered her mouth, which did basically nothing to muffle her laughter. Erika shrugged graciously. "I dunno, sorry. My dad gave me it?"

"Oh," I said. "That’s cool." Stay cool. Pretend you’re not into the shit her old man was into. That charm was gonna go straight into a drawer when she got home, and never out again, I knew it. "So, hey, you know Kimo, right?" I waved back towards him. His face was full of mayo chili. "I’m James, I’m like, his best friend."

She leaned around me to check, then back. "Yeah, I guess I know Kimo. I’m Erika."

"Uh…you paddle board? Stand up?"

She thought about it. "Not like…a lot."

"You wanna come with me and Kimo and a couple of the other guys on Wednesday? We go every week, leave at noon during study period."

"So what, like, Hickam?"

"Nah, we’re heading down Kāne‘ohe."

"Shoots, sure," she said.

There was a hoot from the table. "Hooo, Erika, you go girl!" Big change from all that tittering earlier, eh? But it made my face burn just as bad.

"Cool, I’ll meet you in the parking lot, Wednesday, yeah?"

She nodded, little smile lighting up her face, and I retreated back to Kimo’s table in the shade.

"You actually asked her out?"

"Yeah," I breathed. My hands were shaking. Kimo shook his head and returned to his chili.

So that Wednesday we all piled in the back of the truck and went down Kāne‘ohe side to paddle down to the sandbar off He‘eia. It’d been a pretty cool winter—don’t laugh—and the surf had been high, which was great for the lolo surfers and not so great for us less extreme stand-up paddle boarders, otherwise we woulda been up North Shore. We parked at beach access on the Marine base and started to walk down to the sand when I heard the thumps again. I grabbed Kimo’s shoulder. "Oh man, you hear that?"

"It’s the artillery, brah."

"No way."

I listened close, but all I heard now was the surf and the clap-clap rustle of fan palm leaves in the breeze.

"Aren’t they filming Godzilla?"

"Shut up, man." I turned around and almost ran into Erika. She’d changed into a pair of really tiny hibiscus swim trunks and I had to pull my gaze up and then up again quickly. Thankfully she didn’t seem to notice.

"Ey, James, what’s up? You look like you saw a ghost."

"You hear that thump?" I asked her.

Her eyes got wide. "Man, I heard that the first night I got here! I was like, the hell is that?"

I glanced left and right. Big wet clouds were rolling in, and we’d get soaked if we went into the surf or not. Kimo and his girl had run off to make out in the naupaka bushes on the other side of the beach. I dropped my voice to one low whisper. "You wanna go check it out?"

She glanced left and right too, then dropped her voice. "Shoots," she said.

We’d gotten about three miles off base, across the freeway, and over a chain-link fence into a live ammunition zone alongside the quarry road before the elation wore off. I realized this was a real stupid thing to do whether Erika was with me or not. I was pretty sure the military didn’t shoot people on sight anymore but we’d hopped the live ammo zone fence and I’d heard they still had land mines for one reason or another. I mean, the military, right? They kinda just had land mines around, didn’t they?

I didn’t mention any of this to Erika, but I did start doing a weird half-trot hoping that I’d hear the land mine click before lifting my foot and then exploding.

She held her hand out to signal that I should stop. "I dunno if they have land mines," she whispered. "Gotta be careful."

We helped each other across the scrub, increasingly paranoid, until the ground was so rocky that they’d have to drill a hole to stick an explosive into there. I checked my phone for the time. My phone was dead. I groaned and shoved it back into my pocket.

"Mine’s good," Erika said, but I barely heard her because there was a noise so loud I barely registered it as the thump until it had passed. I ducked and so did she. "That’s it!" She pointed. "I saw it!"

"Saw what?" I didn’t see nothing. I followed her finger with my gaze up to the sheer cliff face above us. I craned my neck, but Erika leg’um up the mountain into a bunch of scrawny haole koa trees right before the rock got just about vertical. She climbed up there and then she vanished into the scrub with a little yell, just gone, outta sight.

"Hey!" I called after her.

No answer.

When I caught up I saw it wasn’t a little bit haole koa, it was a big ol' pile of california grass covering one gaping puka in the lava rock. I peered into the hole and saw a thin light way down in the cave. Erika’s cell. I patted my useless one in my pocket, and seriously considered just ditching her and walking back off down the highway to the beach before some menehune or whatever lurked in mountain holes got me. But man, she’d trusted me enough to hop in a truck that morning. I crouched to see how well I fit in the hole. Pretty well. Even my shoulders were skinny.

"Come on!" Erika called. I took a deep breath, and crawled in. The pāhoehoe dug rough, but not sharp, into my hands so I scooted forward fast instead of careful. I almost ran my head into her butt, and she shined the cell light in my face and then laughed, I guess at how red my face was. I apologized and she laughed more; "you can’t see back there at all, huh?"

"No way," I said. The crawl wasn’t too long, which was good for our knees, coz even with that little crawl they got scraped bloody. Take my advice, man, don’t spelunk in board shorts. We squeezed out the other side, in the shelter of a copse of koaia, but not into the other side in Maunawili like I expected. The sky was getting dark, and it was raining, big walls of rain passing through every few minutes with the trades. The clouds cast mottled shadows over the bare stone walls, but the alcove kept us dry. Erika shaded her eyes to squint into the dusk.

We’d found a little valley carved into the actual mountain, like a knife had cut down the sides and lifted one slice of mountain-cake out and away into the sky. Netting and new plants sheltered the valley from the air. Built into one side, just like the old WWII bunkers, was a towering concrete launch pad, and on the launch-pad stood a machine big as an apartment building and probably as heavy as one. It was painted mottled grey and green, pixelated camouflage. Long antennae like Lü Bu’s helmet swept back from the machine’s crested head, red mud splatted all up the bulky legs. It looked like a person, if a person looked like a tank.

You wouldn’t think they could hide something that size on an island.

But they do.

Erika and I stared down at it, from our vantage on the cut-up mountain. I was too dumbfounded to even start to put words together, but Erika wasn’t.

"Holy shit," she said. "It’s a fuckin Gundam."

We’ve been going out ever since.

How to Survive the Apocalypse

Originally published by ZEAL, September 2015

Before you leave the safety of our encampment to fight the zombies, make sure your eyelashes bat thick and full. Cover scars and lesions with foundation and powder, and apply gloss or lipstick liberally, but neatly. Do not cake on foundation too thickly. The inherent risks should be obvious. Use glitter sparingly, and try to avoid bedazzling prosthetics, jackets, faces, or weapons. Flashing attracts attention.

In-between raids you may need to stop, adjust your hair, powder down your face and wipe away smudges; a compact mirror is essential on longer missions. Hair conditioner is in short supply now, of course, so if you come across malls, supermarkets or a convenience store, be sure to check the health and beauty aisles first. Hair salons are high-priority targets, but avocados, olive oil and mayonnaise are acceptable substitutes to keep your hair lush and high-luster, if products cannot be found. Tooth whitener strips should be applied after eating heavily pigmented foods. If possible, avoid coffee and black tea; if you need caffeine, energy drinks and nicotine patches are preferable, but they may still cause bags under the eyes. Bottled water and Vita filtering systems are also priority supplies, as sallow cheeks and dry skin are among the first signs of infection. Other hydration sources may carry the virus if not boiled.

Make sure that while you have a unified aesthetic in some way, no two members of your team are dressed too similarly; for example, only one person in the group at a time may don a bomber jacket or hat. If multiple members of the group are missing an eye, encourage one to use an eyepatch and another to either wear sunglasses or utilize a glass eye in a pleasant complimentary shade to the color of their biological eye. Safety in numbers may seem to be a tactically intelligent choice, but this is the logic of the enemy. Keep squads to five members maximum.

When at all possible, eschew a paramilitary look. Showing some shoulder or leg can be classy on persons of any gender. If you are accessorizing a miniskirt, make sure stockings are at least over-the-knee and paired with a garter belt to avoid slippage and tangles. Should your leggings or tights develop runs, either discard them immediately or consider adopting an edgier look. Don’t overdo it. Some zombies have developed a keen sense for detecting sub-cultures.

Remember that the zombies are attracted to human scent; deodorant and perfume should be worn at all times. Similarly, you must avoid all sexual conduct in the field, whether intra- or inter-personal. Minor flirting is fine, so long as it contains the requisite amount of sass. If you do not come up with quips handily under pressure, be sure to memorize a few before you leave. Manicures and pedicures are good team bonding activities.

If you are wounded in the field, prioritize a solution to the wound that maximizes mobility and prevents any decay or unsightliness. Hydrogen peroxide with surgical clippers can be useful both for personal hygiene and to snip away extra flesh or sterilize cuts during emergency surgery. If bleeding is profuse, be sure to compress the wound and wrap the bandages neatly. If bandages are not available, rip white shirts up for bandages; white shirts dirty so quickly that you may carry them as supplies but never, ever don them as part of your uniform. Sloppiness kills. If your wound heals in a non-aesthetically pleasing manner, embellish the scar. In a pinch, fastening a weapon such as an assault rifle or machete to a lost limb will at least ensure a minimum of practicality. In a best-case scenario, try to emboss the prosthetic with a meaningful but enigmatic symbol, or at least your name so that your squad mates know what happened to you when they find it.

If a member of your squad has been severely injured or has lost their nose, there’s no recovery. Be sure to place a tasteful assortment of flowers over their grave marker.

If you come across survivors, wipe down their faces with a damp cloth immediately, and apply correctly-toned makeup to cover any scars. When your medic administers the physical in a secure area, be sure they are accompanied, as this process can often make the infected violent or belligerent, particularly if they are under the delusions that obvious signs of infection such as severe facial acne, extreme body odor, matted hair, and ill-fitted clothing are in fact ordinary human traits. If you discover a group of children, though they are more resistant to infection, try to only escort one child back to the encampment at a time; they’re noisy, have difficulty following instructions, and resist efforts to introduce and maintain the proper makeup protocols. Be sure the child has one, but no more than one, stuffed toy. If you find teenagers, be sure to introduce them to each other and instruct them to act as close—but not too close—friends. Enmity within groups of survivors is easily sensed. Once inside, survivors will be quarantined for twenty-eight days before being released into society, or what passes for it these days, anyway.

Above all else, zombies are ugly. Your job is to represent the last hope of humanity among the thoughtless, ravenous hordes by being wholesome, clean, symmetrical, patient, and most of all, unique.

Good luck.

I can already see you’ll need it.

END