I listen to the agony of screaming mutants howling at the sliver of Moon, glowing white, with a fuzzy outline, through the molten dust clouds, hanging like a lounge chair, waiting for an archangel to swing on her in the night sky.
It was either mutants or howling wolves and I'd just relocated, preferring the former. Marcus Tempus, my new name.
I put a shingle out and stop in at all the joints. Places creaples go for gin, jolly, and juice. Some things hardly change and people never do. I put the word out and soon enough some lost soul will wander in looking for a savior.
On this evening it's a dame. Brown curly hair and green eyes, she's dressed for some UpWhen, a nostalgic age, more civilized than now, but with its own form of barbarity.
I chomp on a wooden pipe, a gift from Cicero before his hands were nailed to the Senate door. I offer her a toke but she pulls a pack of sticks, 20th Century, I guess.
"You're the new dick in town I hear." Her eyes burn into me like one of the night creatures crawling above ground among the wreckage of Reloj, looking for human flesh.
"That another name for a dark deed?"
"Call it what you want," she says, taking a long drag on the camel stick. "We all know by now there are no gods."
"Yet here we sit beneath Hades." I wait a minute while she smokes. Hoping she'll be more forthcoming, but I blink first. "I wore a cloak for the Consul and sometimes carried a spear." I set my pipe down and lean forward. My best effort at selling myself.
"Why'd you leave?"
"Caesar was dead and soon enough someone was coming for me," I say, wondering if she might be the dick.
"You chose a hell of a place to move to," she says, glancing at my office and scrunching her nose, as if the stench makes her sick.
"The train was broken."
"Only on the forward track."
"Maybe I like apocalypse."
"Then you're gonna love what I have to offer," she says, beaming those glowing eyes at him a second time.
"What offer is that?"
"I need your spear. With or without the cloak."
"Trouble in the city?"
"UpWhen problems, but here."
"Wanna be more specific?"
She arches her back and I know the problem must be a man. Only not the drunk kind who throws punches or lays on the sofa all day without paying the rent. Men do a lot worse up-track. Given this dame was not only UpWhen but UpTown, the guy is probably more trouble than he's worth.
"Whatever bright minds came up with this whole thing didn't account for all the chaos that would come after," she finally speaks, but still hasn't answered my question.
"What makes you think they accounted at all," I say. "He's in Reloj?"
"Yes, but not now."
"When?"
"Up the track. Doesn't have the papers to go further but he'll get them."
"How's he gonna get papers to the twenty-second century?"
"He's a barbarian not an idiot. Everything is for sale."
She's right. And who am I to call him a barbarian, sitting in a bomb shelter five years after humanity saw fit to kill a billion people.
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Wicked Prompts
Science FictionThis is a collection of short-stories and flash-fiction. Each narrative is complete and independent, and can be read in any order. Although varying in length, they are all relatively short, to present a quick and fun read, while you're on the go. Ea...
