Archive for the ‘Luc Reid’ Category
Clever Ways to Make Do
Friday, November 2nd, 2007
He had finally given up on trying to fashion tubes for the water, and instead had made a long aquaduct of split saplings with their centers stripped out. It lost much of the water that went down it, but when after nearly three weeks of rigging it up, he stepped into the woven branch enclosure he had made and pulled the vine, water poured down on him, and for the first time in eight years he had a shower. The cool water splashing down on him through the tropical heat that seemed to be the island’s only season made his skin practically sing, it was so refreshing.
The last three months had been a nightmare from which he was slowly emerging. Before the Interruption, he had been resigned to living on the island–had even liked living on the island. Since then, though, he had been having bad dreams, and he couldn’t relax in his hammock or really enjoy surfing on his bamboo surfboard. Nothing felt right. Now things were starting to fall back in place.
He gathered crabs for dinner and simmered them in coconut milk. The sun was throwing the sky into a riot of reds and purples, and he decided to eat at the little stone table he had set up on the western side of the island.
He had barely sat down when he saw something not far out from shore, black against the setting sun, a head rising out of the waves. It was followed by shoulders, and a chest and arms. He left his dinner on the table and ran.
“Please!” The shadowy thing shouted to him. The voice was almost human, but he could hear the electronic hum at the base of it, just like with the robots that had come before.
“Go away!” he shrieked.
“We can take you off this island. We can bring you a boat, a plane, please–”
“Go away!” He turned and ran into the jungle.
“But you’re the only one left!” the robot wailed, and he wished it would shut up. He hated robots, the robots who were immune to the plagues, the robots who were desperate for someone to tell them what to do.
Among the trees in the thickening darkness, he ran into something hard at the height of his head. It cracked, and he slipped and fell to the ground with it. Standing and squinting into the darkness, he could just make out a section of his little aquaduct.
That would take time to fix, he thought. He should take the whole structure and make it higher, so that it was above his head wherever he went.
It would take at least a week.
Jakob Black-Thumb
Wednesday, October 24th, 2007
A demon of pestilence and a demon of fear emerged from the rough road through the forest into the sleeping village. The demon of pestilence was called Jakob Black-Thumb, and the demon of fear preferred not to have a name.
“Why do you always go first?” rumbled Jakob. “Your thing isn’t even real.”
The demon of fear turned a cold glare on Jakob, and Jakob felt a familiar chill trickle down from the base of his horns to the tips of his talons.
“Well, I’m … I’m going over here now,” said Jakob, and he headed for a large house fronted with neat flowerboxes full of pink and blue pansies. He began looking for a rat to infect. Minutes later, he was interrupted by a scream.
Near where the fear demon lurked in the shadow of a doorway, a fire had broken out, and two men were struggling in the street, scrabbling for each other’s throats. That demon of fear was a fast worker.
The screamer was a young man, or a nearly-grown boy, and he was running through the hard-packed dust of the village street, straight toward the demon of fear. The boy had one of those monocles in his eye, the ones men made sometimes by imprisoning an executed murderer’s fleeing soul, and through this he apparently could see the demon of fear. What made no sense was why he was running toward it instead of away from it.
The demon of fear drew itself up and roared, its mouth distending into a slobbering, iron-toothed muzzle, its skin rippling with flames and unidentifiable, writhing masses. Jakob flinched involuntarily, and the boy screamed again, but he flung himself at the demon of fear and … hugged it.
Jakob would have liked to think it was a tackle or some kind of wrestling, but the boy wasn’t squeezing the demon hard, and he wasn’t trying to force it down: he simply wrapped his arms around it and hugged. Jakob’s gorge rose.
The demon of fear, defenseless against the hug, howled desperately as it broke into pieces, falling to the ground like chunks of a burned, rotten tree.
The boy wasn’t screaming any more: now he was breathing hard and gritting his teeth. His chest and arms were badly burned, but he still had the monocle and he had a fervent gleam in his eye. The men in the road stopped fighting. The boy smiled at Jakob.
Jakob ran.