Custodiet Ipsos Custodes

            Paranormal, probably a short story. The main character finally falls in love with a girl, the first person that knows about his compulsion. One day, he receives a premonition that she is going to kill someone. The story hinges on his decision of whether or not to kill her. 

           The first round took the priest high in the chest, severing his aorta and sending a long spray of blood against the brick wall. I racked the bolt and aimed down the scope. His t-shirt soaked with wine-dark arterial blood as he staggered back. The groceries he was carrying smashed against the ground.

            I guess this is the part where I have to say that he was raping choirboys or trafficking cocaine. He wasn’t. He didn’t have any prior arrests. He didn’t have any prior crimes. He entered the clergy at fifteen in a Catholic school, trained for years.

            He was leaning against the wall then. His mouth was moving. Sacrements, perhaps. His own last rites. Can priests do that? Administer their own last rites?

            I squeezed the trigger again and his brains evacuated.

           

           

            You know how detectives will show up to a crime scene, do the dirty work, find the bad guy, and put him in jail? Then sometimes there’s vigilantes, who hunt people down that have slipped through the cracks. Well, I’m a little different.

            I see things before they happen. Not things. Crimes. Murders, specifically. It is always a one hundred percent chance that it will happen. This started when I was thirteen.

            The first one was my neighbor. She was older, maybe fifty. Sexy, for an older lady. She asked me to water her garden. Standing in the heat, hose gripped in my right hand, I had a sudden vision. I watched her in my mind’s eye as she straddled a man in her bed and wrapped a curtain cord around his neck. I chalked it up to hormonal fantasy. Two weeks later, she drove away in the back of a squad car; past the ambulance where paramedics loaded a faceless corpse on a gurney.

            The second time it happened, I tried to stop the murder. A neighborhood kid, maybe two years older. He went by the name of Chow, good kid. I saw him in that vision swinging a bicycle chain, leaving little chubby Danny Goodwin bleeding in the arroyo in our neighborhood          .

I walked Danny home every single day for two months. He didn’t understand why I carried a butterfly knife with me. My appendix ruptured one day and I went to the hospital. I saw Danny Goodwin’s body from a helicopter shot on the evening news.

The murders are unstoppable. They find a way, like weeds growing through a sidewalk. When I get the vision, it’s only a matter of time before every clue in the vision lines up like lock tumblers and the victim dies. There’s no way to stop it, so I kill the killer before he kills someone innocent.

Shaman

Tribal post-apocalypse? I don't know.

Fir, a young shaman and magical guide of a dying tribe must help their new leader, his brother Feral, guide them to Pantheon, the flying world that they had been taught was the heaven where their gods resided. The other members, Rory the outsider and wanderer, Jara the huntress, and Liss the captive, help them commit the ultimate heresy to find that the Lode is not heaven, but a tiny world filled with warring clans and struggling kings. As the beasts that roam the frozen darkness below grow bolder and begin to mount their assaults, Fir finds himself torn between justice, loyalty, and survival.

Sharvas died early in the morning; quietly, without waking me. He slipped away the way our dogs had left to die when the food grew scarce. I found his head turned at an odd angle in my lap, cold and crooked like a frozen tree branch.

            Feral woke next and saw me leaning my head against the wood-clad wall of our cavern. I flicked my eyes to see him and he seemed to understand intrinsically, instinctively, the way he always knew what to do. He stayed quiet, those wild golden eyes of his glittering through the darkness like an animal’s might. Without making a sound he rose and gently pulled the husk of what had been Sharvas off of me. I brushed my thick woolen overcoat as if death by old age was something that one could catch.

            Rory was crouched at the mouth of the cavern, just outside the thick leathers and furs we draped to keep the nail-sharp wind out. A pike leaned against the mouth of the cave nearby. He’d carried it with him since we found him broken at the foot of a bloody spire some of the outer tribes worshiped as sacred during the months-long night. He didn’t speak much, but when he did it was strangely accented and usually vitally important. I sat next to him and didn’t say anything.

            The sun was a russet globe lingering at the horizon. It would stay there for the next seventeen days, I knew.  I couldn’t say how I knew, any more than Sharvas had known I knew. He had always known things like that, and he trained me in the ways of the others like us: traditions reaching deep into the arcane past. It didn’t seem like dawn, but there wasn’t much way to tell either way. It was either dark or it was light, and that was about all there was to it.

            Pantheon wasn’t visible on the horizon. It had been a few days ago; a blue-green globe of stone and trees wickered with tunnels that glittered when the dying sun hit it. Heaven, I’d been taught, but no one had ever visited it, and no one had ever come from it. It flew like a vagrant moon over the mountains and through the tall spires of stone that decorated the hostile terrain we lived in, seemingly at random. If we followed the teachings of Sha-Serah; if we were kind, obedient, brave, honorable, and just, we’d go there when we died. Sharvas was there. Or his spirit. He’d been kind of fuzzy on the details about it.

            “Hey. Breakfast.” Jara’s voice cut through the silvered light. I turned and looked at her. She was lean and long, a panther-like woman only a year or so older than me. We were all young. The older, weaker ones had been killed or starved long ago. The children weren’t quick enough to keep up and were torn apart or lost in the darkness in any of our countless flights from cavern to cavern when the Bromidae had discovered us. We were all that were left.

            Liss was pulling salted salmon out of the leather packs that wilted against the wall. The ale and mead had run out a few months after we’d found the last grotto, so now there was only the water that we had to crack the ice on top to sip slowly. I took the piece she gave me and tore into the dry, pink flesh. Liss watched me the way she watched everyon, with those eyes the deep violet of hyacinths. She rarely smiled, but then again, few of us did. We’d taken her from the burned out shell of a Karth village deep in the south, but even years later she seemed to view us all with distrust, except for the fanatic, animal loyalty she showed Feral.

            Feral wasn’t one for speeches but he spoke the most. My older brother was harnessed in muscle and stood taller than the rest of us. His shaggy black hair was bound back in hemp twine, the ends touching his shoulders, and his beard sometimes betrayed the sharp white flash of his teeth when he spoke, which was often, or laughed, which was seldom. My own hair was shorn close to my head and my face beardless, my arms lacked the strength his possessed and my eyes were the green of cave moss.

            “Sharvas, as you noticed, has left us.” Feral took a bite of the salmon

            Unbidden, we each glanced to where the body lay near the wall.

            “What now? Sharvas was the one keeping us here but we can’t stay. Night’s coming and when it does the Bromidae will move again.” I fiddled with the bone charms hanging from the end of my staff to avoid looking Feral in the eye. I felt Feral read the group.

            “You’re right, Fir. We can’t stay.”

            “We can’t go either,” Jara said. “We’ll starve. Fir said night’s coming, how can you think we should run into the world only to be slaughtered by Bromidae when night comes?”

            “Or starve here until the Bromidae find us?” Rory’s blue gaze was unblinking.

            “I have a plan.” Feral took a bite of his salmon in that irritatingly unbothered way he had.

            “Well?” Jara spat.

            “Fir won’t like it.”

            “If I stay alive, I’ll like it.”

            “Oh?” Feral’s eyes glittered with something like malice. “We’re going to invade Pantheon."

           

           

           

           

            

Il Paradiso

            We walked for hours without stop and every time I tried to slow down Belvedere shouted things at me in languages I didn’t understand and I felt alone and tired and misunderstood despite the knotted mass of us together but I kept walking.

            They carried guns and didn’t try to hide them even though we were walking through the most dangerous section of the pass and the tall camera-towers stood on either side and would have called the shadowy helicopters like flies to carrion should they have been seen or even paid attention to but no one did so we kept walking and they kept carrying their guns.

            The ground was flat and hard and broken in parts by large rocks too small to make the road impassable but too large to comfortably ride a cart or car or horse or ATV over so we didn’t seem to make much progress but there was still much progress to be made and if we slowed Belvedere and the rest continued to shout and the young ones marching in the front continued to cry and I continued to swear vengeance in the half-asleep manner of one who has lost his mind or his will aside from that consuming fury.

            (I have no patience) Belvedere would shout in that voice of his that should have belonged to a god or a statesman or someone who would have used it for something else besides that rage that seemed to boil like fire inside of him.

            There was a soothsayer named Salvador that once had sat and muttered by the fire and thrown tiger’s teeth that snapped and clicked together in the air and had scarred his hands as the spirits made the glyphs face up or down to tell us their twisted wills and he had sent the children into battle for us and we had listened to him but now he was walking with us and beside us as though he was one of us but he was not and when we stopped at one of the streams for a blessed break to drink water two of the young men one of whom had lost his brother in the blood and the war spent the precious seconds they could have spent drinking water they would not get again for hours drowning Salvador in the stream and letting his body float downstream.

            I remember Belvedere laughing and cradling his gun like a child as he watched the two young men drowning our soothsayer and letting his body float downstream and I remember hating him the way I had never hated anything or anyone else in my entire life but there was nothing I could do and that made me hate myself.

            They called it paradise but it didn’t look like paradise.

            They locked us in corrugated steel shacks that twelve of us stayed in per bunk and I remember catching Father’s eyes as he tried to get us together again but Belvedere saw our look and singled Father out and dragged him before the rest of us and chained him to the giant stump that stood in the middle of the compound and chained him to it and stripped him of his clothes so that we saw his tattoos and his scars and his shame and Belvedere told us that Father, but he didn’t use that name, was going to die but he would let the gods of nature do the killing and not waste a bullet and I remember the screams far into the night as the tigers that crept through the compound stripped him of flesh and organs.

            They came to me once during the day and they asked me, (do you know the old ways?) I told them I didn’t but they insisted and they told me they knew the scars on my arms and my hands and refused to let me alone until I allowed them that I knew the old ways but if Belvedere or the others found out they would pull my bones from my body like ribs from a pig and they let me alone but made me swear to assist when the day came.

            The day came and they struck at Belvedere but he knew the old ways too and before they could raise their machetes and strike him down he called fire and poison from the trees that surrounded us in Paradise and consumed them like leaves in a forest fire and he ordered their corpses which crunched like cooked pork to be thrown in the clear and blue ocean and I remember that I was carrying a girl named Annamaria but now she weighed no more than a rick of punk wood and when we threw them in the ocean they floated and Belvedere laughed and asked his men politely to shoot their bodies and they did and the bodies exploded across the water like cones from a pine tree and the fish came and ate the pieces.

            (Sic semper ignavus) I remember Belvedere saying which wasn’t right it should have been something else but I cannot think right now but he left and went back to the white and clean house he lived in and we were locked in our steel huts without light or food and in the middle of our filth and starvation two of the young men who had killed Salvador killed again and ate the bodies and descended to madness and the next day was Christmas but we did not celebrate though Belvedere commanded celebration.

           

            

The Savants

I'll admit, this is dark. 

            They landed on Earth on a Tuesday, for some reason I remember that. So many decades of wondering; we had imagined golden bodies and tentacles, green dwarfs or scarlet gods. We wondered about their size, their metabolism, their lusts. When they came, though, they seemed quiet and reasonable, and both terrifyingly and disappointingly like us. They had translucent blue skin, eyes that glowed nebula orange or green or violet, depending on their mood. They spoke quiet, strangely accented languages, but limited themselves to English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Cantonese. We humans, trained by decades of alien movies, expected annihilation. Instead, the domination was short, minimal, and brutal. They had soldiers that we called Samurai who wore sleek black armor that shrugged off tank rounds like a leather jacket shrugs off hailstones. They were nearly invincible. News cameras captured footage of a single Samurai punching holes in tanks, catching armor piercing rounds like footballs and slinging them back. Twenty of them destroyed the human resistance in New York, seven took Berlin, only three strode into Paris. We hoped that was all they had but when one was slain, with a subnuclear ICBM outside Baltimore, thousands dropped out of the sky, falling from their worldship that anchored itself to our moon and disrupted tides. They quietly, almost apologetically, dragged world leaders into the streets and blew their brains out with weapons that shot glowing slugs. Several of their chieftains politely arranged a press conference and explained that Earth was no longer ours, and to avoid decimation and sterilization we would quietly resume our business and allow them to go about the business of extracting the minerals they needed from our core. Afterwards, they would allow us some measure of autonomy. Their name in their language was long and musical. “Call us Savants,” they said.

They didn’t mean any of it.

Millions died. Those who resisted the massive, gaping holes they tore in the surface of the earth were put down like rabid dogs. The skies were blackened with soot.

            I don’t know who discovered the properties their blood carried. No one ever knows these things. We called them Cannibals. A few fighters in Saint Petersburg managed to kill a Savant who had removed his armor and perhaps in some orgy of bloodlust, drank the blood. They became godlike. They moved nearly faster than people could follow, ran on walls, gained strength beyond natural abilities. They attacked six more Savants and tore them apart. They stole their weapons and assaulted a shuttle heading for the worldship.

            And then the effects wore off. They had assumed the effects lasted forever and hadn’t bothered to put on a samurai’s armor. They were slaughtered like animals when their reflexes slowed, their motor skills returned to normal. They weren’t able to raise the guns the Savants carried like pistols.

            More followed suit, stealing bodies of Savants and draining them of blood they then injected into their arm like heroin. The long-term effects became apparent. They went crazy. Cannibals craved Savant blood. They snapped and snarled. They became feral and would lose themselves in that place in their mind, the eternal ecstasy of the bloodrush. They would hurl themselves, naked and furious and totally without the protection of armor or bloodrush at an armored Samurai, leaving us to dejectedly hose them off the streets. If they had enough blood, though, they could be kept sane enough to keep fighting the way they had. We stole more weapons from them, because as it is with any species, the ones who know best how to kill them belong to their same species.

            I heard about the Cannibals and their fight to get the Savants’ God-King in the worldship, but I continued to hold to my strategy of remaining quiet and going about my business.

Everything changed when the Savants found my wife and daughter had a rare type of gene they wanted for their genetic museum back on their homeworld. They broke into my house at one in the afternoon, found my wife and child there with me, and while one of them smiled gently and held me back, dissected them on the living room floor and harvested them like cuttlefish. I still remember the Savant who did it tying his golden topknot back before surgically laying my still-living wife open from clavicle to pelvis, ignoring her screams as they snipped her organs from their places and sealed them in plastic. Then, my daughter, my child. I went away. I remembered holding her hand as she skipped to her first day of school. I remembered watching her blow out the candles on her fourth birthday. I remembered teaching her how to say her alphabet. And now, along with those, I remember a blue-skinned Savant snapping her ribs as he opened her like a box, taking out her tiny, perfect organs and hosing the blood off of them as she screamed for me, until he took her lungs too.

People ask me why I fight, why I am a Cannibal. I tell them it’s because I’m crazy.

Maybe I am.

Saint D's

Hey guys, sorry it's been so long. Gonna have some new stuff up in the next few days. 


Simon came home to find his father sitting at the kitchen table, sipping a cup of black coffee and reading a letter.
"We've got an acceptance letter." He said, when he saw his son standing in the doorway. Simon nodded wearily, still in his gas station attendant's uniform.
"Where's it from, pop?"
"Looks like Aelius."
"Aelius Ohio?"
Simon's father gave him a strange look. "Surely I've told you."
"Told me what?" It was seven o'clock, customers had been uncharacteristically rude, and Simon was hungry.
"Good grief, I must have totally forgotten. I applied to St. Dietrichs University of Common Occupations in Orbus."
"Where is Orbus?"
"Have you ever wondered if there were other worlds?" Simon's father asked, with a mysterious look in his eye. Simon opened a loaf of bread and began building a sandwich.
"What area you talking about?"
"I should have told you this sooner, I could have sworn I did. Son, technically you're not from Earth."
"What do you mean, 'technically?'"
"Well, I mean that I'm not from Earth either, and neither was your mother. We're immigrants, I might say."
"There are other worlds?"
"A couple, that we know of. Orbusian worologists don't go poking about too much, it could break something, and that could be pretty hard to fix. Anyway, there's Earth, or this plane of existence, anyway, and then Orbus, that's where we're from, and then there's Limbo."
"Limbo?"
"Awful place. Went there once on a field trip. Demons, pits of fire, vast plains of grey ice, no decent restaurants. Not a place a civilized being would go."
"So do I have powers?" Simon asked, sitting at the table. His father took a sip of coffee.
"Of course not! What do you think this is, Star Wars? Anyway, there's a fairly prominent university in Orbus, and I applied for you, and because I'm an alum they have admitted you."
"I still don't understand." Simon said, "Why doesn't anyone on Earth know about Orbus?"
"Well, they have a hard time remembering. It's like you tell them, and they can't really hold it in their heads, so they just pop in any old place as a placeholder, see? All my co-workers think I'm from Colorado."
"I thought we were from Oregon." Simon said, taking a bite.
"Dear God, no."
"Oh."
"Have you ever heard of the Old World?"
"Like merry old England, that sort of thing?"
"Just imagine that this is like finding out that one of your ancestors was from Russia, and happened to be the Czar."
"That easy?"
"That's the best I can do, son." His father looked stern.
"Go on."
"Anyway, I came here because the economy in Orbus was bad, and it's a lot easier to get a job. I told them I had a degree in Piracy, and somehow that took that as sociology."
"You have a degree in Piracy?"
"Well, to be specific, I did my undergraduate work in Plundering and my master's degree was in Looting, but it's in the Piracy department."
What kind of University had a major in piracy?
"What other majors are there?"
"Well, dozens, really." Simon's father got a misty look in his eye. "I remember as a bright-eyed freshman, I went in wanting to get my degree in Ninjutsu. Never worked out, of course. I failed NIN 212, introduction to basic assassination, so my advisor recommended I take a weekend and go to the annual pirate games. Glad I did. And those sideline wenches." He drifted away for a moment  before shaking himself. "Anyway, you'll be glad you went."
"I was planning on going to Harvard," Simon said, "For anthropology."
"But you can go to Saint D's for Alchemy and enjoy yourself far more, son. Plus they have a fantastic study abroad program."
And that was how Simon went to Orbus.









Chapter one


Simon found himself in the airport with his father a few months later, bags packed, backpack ready. He hadn't been able to find any of the books needed for his general education classes, which were Introduction to Decision Making, Foreign Word Pronunciation, Overview of Orbusian literature, General Survey in Hutmaking, and Mathematics. (Every university requires mathematics.)
Though he had been to the airport many a time, Simon's father turned a corner that he had never seen and they were suddenly in a practically deserted but highly futuristic area. A couple gates bearing the names of airlines that Simon had never heard of stood waiting. Simon's father saw someone he knew, waved, and then strode over to the gate and up to the cashier.
"One ticket to Valentina, Orbus, please."
The lady struck a few keys and the machine spat out a chit.
"That'll be two thousand, seven hundred toridos."
Simon's father handed her a couple dozen notes of a currency he hadn't seen before, and she handed him the chit.
"Have a safe flight."
"Well son, here we are." Simon's father said, when he reached the gate. "Best of luck to you."
"Thanks dad." Simon suddenly felt choked up. His father must have sensed it and looked away for a moment. When he looked back his own eyes were damp.
"Don't worry, the flight's safe as houses. I'll see you at Christmas."
"I'll miss you."
"I'll miss you too. Stay safe, and for crying out loud, stay away from the Drinking majors. They'll get you in trouble."