The Girl, Episode III

The sun was setting as she spoke with her friend at an umbrella-furnished table outside the cafe. They were talking about work, about recent travels, about what shared acquaintances were up to these days. Glancing up from her conversation and dinner, she saw what she thought was a familiar face moving along the sidewalk. She smiled softly and asked to be excused.

As she approached the little iron fence cordoning off the cafe's outdoor eating area, he noticed her and made his way to her through the evening's pedestrian traffic. He had the headphones on again, had a bass guitar slung across his back in a gig-bag, and was weighted to one side by a large, brown case of some sort. She beamed as she noticed that it was a second instrument.

"You never mentioned you were a musician," she scolded him as he removed the headset.

"Oh," he replied crisply. "I'm a musician."

"Very informative." They both laughed. "But I take it you're on your way to practice? You've got to live somewhere over that way."

"Nice to know you're slowly working out where I live - always figured that, if anything, I'd be the one hunting down a celebrity, not vice versa." She blushed. "But, yeah. I've got rehearsal with two very different sorts of bands across the river."

She pursed her lips and nodded respectfully. "I take it the guitar is a bass," she let him nod in agreement, "but I don't know what the horn is."

"The horn is called a euphonium." He waited for the standard response - a squint of confusion - and then: "It's like a baby tuba."

"And, let me guess, you'd sing the bass part in a choir?" The sarcasm flowed like sweet nectar.

"Hah! Actually, yes, but I can play and read music for any brass instrument you hand me."

"Even a trombone?"

"Yup," he smiled wryly, not knowing how to brag about being a nerd. "Even a trombone."

A few seconds of silence passed before she said, "Well, I don't want to make you late, and my friend's already going to ask me four thousand questions, so..."

He looked over her shoulder to the lone girl sitting at a table, pushing her salad around with her fork. He waved, giving a big grin. She smiled uncomfortably and waved back. The girl with the golden curls at the fence laughed.

"We should definitely stop meeting like this," he said. "But tell her I said hello, and apologize for stealing her conversation time."

"Oh, I will," she laughed again, still smiling her huge, straight-toothed grin. "But how will we stop meeting like this?"

"Well, if you want a phone call sometime, you could give me your number," he suggested shyly.

She rattled her number off and made sure he had it in his phone. "Call me tonight after practice. If you've got class tomorrow and are going to be getting coffee, maybe we can actually plan to sit for a few minutes."

"Okay, definitely," he said. "Sorry to run off, but they'll only accept 'harangued by a pretty girl' for tardiness of less than ten minutes."

She blushed harder, but said goodbye and watched him disappear back into the crowd, heading northeast. Returning to her table, she tried her best to ignore her friend's stare. The silence persisted even after she sat and had started to eat again.

"What?"

"You just talk to random passing guys now?"

"No, that was the guy from the bookstore."

"The giant bugs and politics guy?"

"Yeah, sure."

"You didn't know he played music, did you?"

"Nope," she tried to keep eating, to avoid the questions.

"You think he's intriguing, don't you?"

"Shut up."

Her friend smiled, and started eating her own salad again. When the blonde looked up at her again, the other girl was grinning smugly while chewing and trying not to laugh. She repeated herself: "Shut up."

The Girl, Episode II

"TS?"

He looked over his shoulder in the line at Starbucks, thinking he had heard his local nom-de-guerre beneath the cacophony of whiny-voiced rage and furiously distorted guitars in his headphones. A dark haired girl stood behind him, talking on her phone, her face full of piercings. Behind the girl on the phone stood a tall, smiling blonde wearing a loose grey wool-knit hat. She brushed curls out of her cool blue eyes when he recognized her, beamed brighter as he offered for the girl on the phone to cut him.

"How was the Heinlein?" he asked.

"Insane," she responded curtly. "It wasn't much of an adventure at all."

"Yeah, I know. I tried warning you that it was political."

"It was still good, gave me a new respect for soldiers."

He laughed. "Well, I think that's what he would have wanted."

She nodded, also laughing, and he ordered his coffee. She quickly ordered her own, and she asked him what he was doing in the area.

"Well, I only live a few blocks away and I've got class in like fifteen minutes."

"Oh," she said, "you are kind of a local, then. I thought that because of your accent you were just down here on vacation or something."

"Well, I do summer at a Barnes & Noble whenever I get the chance," he replied, sipping his drink.

She laughed. "Where are you going to school?"

He looked at her somberly, and slowly raised a thumb to point over his shoulder, out the store's front windows. Across the street, a university's campus sprawled to the south and east.

"Oh, I am so dumb." She blushed.

"Nah, at least you asked where I went. Although the next nearest school is, what, on the north end of town?"

"Yeah, that'd be a hike in fifteen minutes."

"It really would be." He pulled out his personal media player and checked the time. "Crap, I'm probably already going to be late. I assume you're super local, too, so I'll see you around?"

"Yeah," she said, watching him open the door.

"Awesome. Maybe next time one of us won't be in a rush."

"Hopefully not." She kept smiling as he waved a final goodbye and leapt through traffic to the university, and hustled away down paved paths.

The Girl, Episode I

He looked down the aisle to see the young woman picking a Heinlein novel from the bookshelf. She wore a cardigan and jeans with high boots and carried a large burgundy purse. Her glasses, helping the floppy, grey wool hat hold back blonde curls, were of almost the same shade of wine as the bag. Her blue eyes scanned the back of the novel. He couldn’t help saying something.

“A girl like you is seriously contemplating a Heinlein novel?”

She looked up at him and smiled a huge, big-toothed grin. “What’s wrong with Heinlein?”

“Oh, nothing’s wrong with him; I was commenting more on how a beautiful girl is reading hard science fiction.”

She blushed, but that enormous, goofy smile remained. “Well, a friend mentioned him. Something about being a pillar of modern science fiction.”

“Well, your friend would be right. Clarke, Asimov, and Heinlein were the big three. But this one,” he said, shifting his own small stack of books to one hand and pointing, “is like ninety-four percent politics.”

“Really? I’d heard giant bugs and battle armor.”

“And you came to buy it? You’re the strangest girl I’ve ever met.” He pushed his own glasses higher on his nose and brushed his dark hair back from his forehead. “I mean that as a compliment. I mean, you’re just not the type I’d profile for a sci-fi novel about the military’s role in conflict between ideology of communism and capitalism.”

“Well, I try to stay recent,” she laughed. “The Cold War seems like a good place to start.”

He grinned and held out his hand. “I’m TS.”

“Well, TS,” she said, pausing to shake his hand, “I’m TA.”

“You know, you look kind of like...”

“Yeah, I know,” she cut him off, blushing again.

“Is that because you are...?”

“Yeah,” her blushing continued, and her eyes twinkled.

“Well, you’ve got good friends if they’re suggesting Heinlein.”

“Thank you!” she kept beaming. Her phone started to ring, and she dug for it. “Gah, I need to take this, and probably need to be on my way. It was great to meet you, though!”

“And you, too. Have fun with the book.”

“I’ll try! Thanks for the compliments!” she said, and turned away, answering her phone. “Yeah. No, the bookstore still. Yeah, a guy I just met said the one I picked out is really good.”

He continued browsing, more excitedly than before. He moved into the philosophy section to ensure that she was out of the store by the time he approached the counter. Purchasing his books, the cashier asked him if he knew who had just come through. He nodded, but kept mostly silent as he walked out of the store into the brisk fall weather. He had just encountered a delightful pretty girl, and that made for a good day.

Twists!

So I've stopped with the serial. I was playing a lot of things too close to the chest, and, because of that, I couldn't really find a voice I liked. Maybe I'll come back to it someday when I'm not so angry about the true subject matter; maybe then it could be kind of funny. Right now, it's simply aggravating and petty. So I wrote this instead! I think it sounds like me, which makes this piece a first in quite some time (if I could count the number of drafts I've started to put together as an extension of Aaron's story and thrown away because I can't stand the tone...). But, for anyone who's heard my twist on a fantasy story - so, Jennifer (who hasn't ever read this blog, to my knowledge) forever and a half ago - this would be very close to the beginning. But the premise is different from anything I can think of in the vein of Lord of the Rings: it's an alternate world (like Middle Earth, I suppose) on which mammal and avian evolution never really got started, so dragons are just the extension of what we have now as cattle or horses or birds or, as evidenced in this piece, squirrels or monkeys. Also, dragons evolving along a humanoid path became Elves - saurian elves! Can you picture that? It's pretty cool. I guess; I'm biased, though. Anyway, there are three "races" of Elves, in the sense that there are Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid humans - I assume they could interbreed, and probably often do - at least between two of the three races. Anyway, in the past, one of the three was a warrior caste and served as a unified, independent military led by an Elf called the Archon. The Archon is like a demigod - he's been directly touched and used as a mouthpiece (thus the name) by the Demiurge, some entity from "beyond" that claims all of creation as its own. So he's like a warrior-priest that won't die because he was used as a freaking conduit by the divine to commune with the Patriarch, the leader of the Moren-dur (or the Plainsfolk, or the Plains Elves), and the Matriarch, the leader of the Barath-dur (or the Forestfolk, or the Forest Elves, Wood Elves, what have you). So, anyway, somewhere along the line the Matriarch and Patriarch decided the Archon was an insane heretic, and formed their own armies to combat his, eventually locking all the warrior caste's survivors inside a peninsula of obsidian and basalt along the southern coast of their main continent (there might be more, but I think I've got an insane idea as to where and what the Continent is, though). The prisoners, the Archon included, vowed to escape - particularly since his heresy was based on his claims of a future threat that he intended to spend millenia preparing for - and eventually do with the guidance of a creature called a Ngyar, which claims its kind to be from "beyond time."

Anyway, that's a lot of unnecessary prologue. Enjoy!

'Twigs snapped as the group of people moved through the forest. Long, bulky rifles remained shouldered as individuals clattered and crouched to tree trunks. Insects buzzed through the damp air, hovered near pools left by the near perpetual rains of this part of the Continent, were snatched midair by leaping forest dragons. Silence fell over the group of people, water dripping and sliding over waxen leaves, gurgling in tiny rivulets down the mossy, vine-choked trunks of the vaguely tropical trees. One of the people stood and tapped the glass visor of his gasmask with a scale of his dragonskin glove. Another tapped his own visor several trees away in a different pattern, lost in the perpetual twilight of the undergrowth. Clicks swept east and west along the staggered line of soldiers, then abruptly ended.

A forest dragon yawned in the low branches ahead of the line. Another rushed past it, hurtling along the branches with singleminded purpose, barreling past its sleepy cousin, its body slung long as it bounded from tree to tree. A flash lit up a small portion of the undergrowth, and a crack reverberated amongst the thick tree trunks. The bolting dragon split in half, blood spraying up toward the canopy, the halves of its body falling to the forest floor. One of the tall, lanky soldiers rushed forward, doubled over, to recover the dragon's body. A scream radiated from north of the line, dozens of creatures emitting a banshee's wail as one. Arrows and crossbow bolts suddenly filled the air of the undergrowth, coming from both the ground and trees ahead. The soldier dashing forward threw himself to the mossy forest floor and rolled to a tree's trunk, clutching a bleeding wound on his chest. No shots returned against the onslaught of aerial wood. The hail eventually stopped.

A figure dropped from the canopy upon the wounded soldier. He tried to raise his rifle, but had it kicked away. The figure stooped and laughed. The soldier grabbed from the chest wound – arrowhead protruding from his chest through the dragonskin tunic – to the ceremonial bone knife on a boot sheath. The figure grabbed the knife from the soldier's hand, forced his arm to the tree, and nailed his hand to the wood with the knife. The soldier's screams were muffled by the mask as the figure grabbed the soldier's face and slammed his skull against the tree several times, pulverizing it.

“Turn back!” the figure barked, its voice echoing into the forest. “You were imprisoned for crimes past, you were locked away for a reason!”

The figure stood tall, sticking its muscular chest out. It was a man, naked from the waist up, loincloth covering its pelvis, blue paint intricately streaked across its chest, legs, arms, and face. Along one leg was a quiver, strung over its back was a longbow. Its ears stuck righteously to the sky, defiantly wide of the earthily-colored quills that crowned its head. It stood in a posture of challenge to the soldiers.

Clicking again reverberated along the vague line of hidden soldiers. One stood, rifle above its head, and walked slowly toward the challenger. As it approached, it lowered the rifle by the stock and removed its gaskmask. She was classically beautiful, with pouted lips and thin lines of browscales and wide eyes. Her long ears were tied together behind her head, just beyond the black, short cut quills of a soldier. She stood, challenged gauging the challenger in the low light of the forest floor.

“I was born into imprisonment. My mother and father were born into imprisonment. Their fathers, and their fathers, and their fathers – surely – were born into that same imprisonment. I was born into a world without natural light. I was born into a world of warrens carved from the living rock of the southern peninsula. I was born into darkness because of the likes of you. You and your ilk have taken from each and every Deru-dur here and still working within your prison the right to a life. You have cast aside your own race's Archon of the Demiurge-”

“You dare,” the man bellowed. “You dare reference that foul creature as my creator's Archon?”

“I reference him as history would reference him: the mouthpiece of the Demiurge, cast aside for alleged heresy. And I fight for him. He fought for him,” she pointed to the dead soldier with her rifle. Then, referencing the soldiers behind her: “They fight for him. And we will not turn back.”

“Then we will fight!” the man screeched again.

“You should surrender,” she said quietly.

“HA!” Laughter sprang from the trees to the north. “We defend Barathoth with our lives, in the name of the Matriarch.”

“You should send word to the Matriarch that you are besieged by overwhelming force, that the Archon has unleashed magicks unimaginable, that his armies shall march unimpeded across this continent once more.”

The man again laughed. “And what magicks are these? The staff you carry, perhaps, is it charged somehow? Do you bring spirits forth from the ground, do you harness the powers of the sky or oceans?”

“So you do not yield?”

“We yield for no army! We yield for no felled Archon of ages past!”

“So be it,” she said softly. A whistle found its way from a pouch at her waist to her lips. She blew, and forest dragons skittered. A flash lit the undergrowth to the east, accompanied again by that sharp crack. The man's grinning face suddenly dissolved into a red mist, his mostly decapitated body slumping to the forest floor. The woman had disappeared back into the brush.

Banshees wailed again in unison, and arrows flew forth in fury. The earth itself rumbled and shuddered as wood filled the damp air. Trees were pushed aside as four-legged machines walked forward to the north. The machines were of different designs: one with a roughly humanoid torso atop the walking platform with one arm shoving aside flora as a shoulder-mounted cannon fired into the forest ahead; another with a plow placed at its front, mowing down trees as masked soldiers followed along at a rapid clip, rifles at the ready; a third hefted dual axes, crushing all before it, hewing a path through the undergrowth.

“What if we come upon a settlement of those new creatures – those humans?” a lieftenant asked of the woman who had accepted the challenge.

“We give them,” replied she, redonning her mask, “the same ultimatum: stand down or be dealt with.”'

Variations on a(n Historical) Theme: Part II

Second Part: “The Spirit of Radio” - Wherein Alex begins his grand adventure.

'The day had just started to drag on as Alex put things in order. His basement bedroom at his parents' house was starting to look more like living quarters and less like the burrow of some large rat. The bed was shoved into the corner with a digital clock on the nearby windowsill, books and compact discs were strewn about the floor and piled onto the duo of lackluster bookshelves at odd ends of the room. There was no order to the books, just a simple, accepted acknowledgment: a couple-three bibles of varying translation and condition mingled with textbooks which touched on Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Daoism; Stephen King and Neil Gaiman novels were cluttered alongside some of Alistair Reynolds' space-opera epics; Far Side collections shared shelf space with Kant and a much-worn double feature encompassing the Mill treatises “Utilitarianism” and “On Liberty.”

Ancient audio equipment shared as much real estate as the bookshelves, speakers that made better furniture than sound production equipment flanked a television stand. Next to these stood a long, thin teardown table made of white plastic. Beneath this sat the behemoth that was Alex's desktop computer tower – atop it, the vast black portal that was its monitor as well as a keyboard and mouse. Keys and a dated-looking mobile phone filled the majority of the mouse pad, and the shattered-but-functional remnants of a touch-operated mobile music device clung by umbilical to one of the PC's several forward USB ports.

“And where are you going again?” Alex's mother was a worrier, which couldn't be said of everyone.

He shrugged, shuffling papers, deciding which manuscripts were worth reworking and what of his prose work was garbage, and responded with a single word: “South.”

“That's a lot of area.”

“Yeah, it's most of the country,” he sighed. “I get the feeling we're headed to Pennsylvania or West Virginia or Tennessee or something. Maybe northern Georgia. Maybe I'll even get to see Blood Mountain, see about finding that crystal skull or cyclopean sasquatch.”

“What?”

He looked up at her, blinked, and realized that he'd just rambled off a good chunk of a Mastodon's third album. “Nothing.”

“No, you said something about a skull. Are you sure this trip isn't about black magicks or ritual sacrifice or anything?” Alex's mother's concern never failed to simultaneously astound, alarm, and – ultimately – confuse him.

“Mom, allow me to recount a short tale for you,” Alex started, putting clothes and books into a duffel bag. “When I was fourteen, my friends and I started looking into Dungeons and Dragons. You told me that the game would end up responsible for my death: that the authorities would pull my half-starved, probably asphyxiated corpse from the maintenance tunnels beneath MSU because we would wander said corridors fighting imaginary monsters. No matter how much I claimed to understand that the monsters only existed in the context of the story on paper, like a book, and that I would be a combating these monsters on paper only to allay your fears, you insisted that we research what can essentially be called the Church's view on the game. And do you remember what finally made you decide to let me play?”

“No,” she shook her head, playing with the doorknob as he slung the pack over his shoulder and pocketed the phone, keys, and MP3 player.

“Your mind was changed by a thirty-something employee at a local hobby shop, who laughed in your face when I told him what you thought of the game, and summed up play sessions as essentially a poker game with less alcohol, fewer cigars, bigger cards made of flimsier paper, and dice.”

“Oh,” she replied halfheartedly.

“Besides,” he kept going, walking past her into the furnished basement. “That wasn't the game you should have been trying to keep me away from. Player characters can be driven insane by occult horrors in Call of Cthulhu.”

“That doesn't make me feel any better about this trip!” she sputtered as he reached the small foyer which branched off to kitchen, garage, utility closet, and laundry room. He put down the duffel and started sliding his feet into pair of old-timey Clarks. After tying the shoes, he stood and held three fingers up near his shoulder in a Scout's salute.

“I solemnly swear not to intentionally kill, or intentionally allow the death, of any person – or of any animal not intended for sustenance.”

“What about self-mutilation?”

“Mom, I'm not even going to acknowledge that one.” With that he opened the door to the garage, waved to his friends in the waiting vehicle, and turned back to his mother. “Bye, I'll see you in a few days. I'll call from wherever we stop tonight.”

“Okay, Allie, I love you!”

“Yeah,” he choked out, nodding. Those were tough words for him to hear, and tougher ones to say. They always had been; not least because he was entirely convinced that no single person had ever meant them toward him.

# # #

“So why are we taking twenty-three?” Alex asked, peering up over the seat backs toward the dash, trying to catch a glimpse of the directions they'd printed off after having watched the I-96 exit fly past.

“Why not?” David asked from the front seat.

“Because it makes no sense. I-75 hooks up with just about everything southeast of Michigan, and we would have taken sixty-nine over to ninety-six, or at least we would have just hopped onto 96 back there if we were headed west.”

“I'm still not entirely sure why we haven't told him where we're going. I doubt he'd know what was going on if we did,” Michael asked through bites of cherry Pop Tart.

“Yes,” Alex played along, “I am ignorant of all things south of Cedar Point, including people who may or may not live there.”

“He has to figure out what he can on his own. He'll get where we're going soon enough, I'm sure, but not exactly for whom.” George was driving and searching the airwaves for some radio station suitable for the drive. He finally settled on a country station, to the chagrin of the other passengers. “This might do us.”

Talk turned to school. David was in graphic arts at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, George was finishing out a history degree at the same school, Michael was waist-deep in a chemistry program at U of M's Flint campus, and Alex was dissatisfied with being three quarters of the way to a Bachelors of Science in Psychology from Central Michigan University. He seemed to be the only one who hated what he was learning, which didn't help his inherent feeling of isolation.

They drove south, eventually jogging several tens of miles to the east to hop back on I-75 just north of Toledo, verbally ribbing each other and being a general pack of twenty-something hooligans. George, while he drove, kept jumping between pop and country stations, as though trying to single one voice out of a crowd. Alex started to doze, and had the strangest dream of sitting on a park bench next to a pretty singing girl. He accepted that the imagery probably had to do with the radio, and let himself fall asleep as the sun sank beneath what had become Ohio's horizon.'

Variations on a(n Historical) Theme - Part One: "Change"

- Wherein the reader is given an exposition of Alex and his circumstances.

'He ground his gears shifting into first like he normally did. The noise and the car's physical reaction made him click his teeth and curse internally. He supposed that he was getting better with the gearshift and clutch, but going into his second week of manual transmission was aggravating. Between school having just ended for the summer, having just moved home, and the continual fights with his girlfriend, the car seemed like just the cherry on top of Alex Ashbourne's perfect start of summer.

In fact, he wouldn't be grinding his gears through suburban Flint, Michigan at this moment if it weren't for the incessant phone calls. Apparently he was incapable of doing anything right in his girlfriend's eyes. He wasn't supposed to have even looked for a job this summer, less yet found one and accepted the position: he was supposed to be on call twenty-four hours a day to come running. He hated that, that his life paled in comparison with that of some girl he guessed he knew pretty well but wasn't entirely sure he wanted to continue being serious about. He sighed as he pulled into her driveway, took a deep breath as he got out of the car. Composure was key.

That was a statement he'd heard somewhere, probably years ago in high school. He doubted that what he thought it meant was even true: nobody seemed to really care how composed you were, they just kind of went on their own way and ran ragged over you if you gave them half the chance. Or maybe that was the Hobbes, still fresh in his mind from the just-finished semester, telling him that everyone was being as deceitful about his or her feelings as he was trying to be. Alex took the walk to the front door at a slow gait. Sometimes every second he wasted was worth the wait.

“Where have you been?”

She, of course, was waiting. She had no patience for his issues; no sympathy for his schoolwork, no will to understand his clinical depression, a willful ignorance of his money troubles.

“What do you mean, 'where have I been?'”

“I called you like twenty minutes ago. Where have you been?”

“Well, it's a ten minute drive and my family likes to talk to me as I leave the house, and the new car.”

“Oh, whatever. Learn how to drive, moron.”

He sighed. This was, unfortunately, usual. Next she'd demand he go get food or something, like he had the money to, and then when he was saying he didn't have money he'd get blamed for never being capable – future tense, mind you – of supporting a family. That conversation made him want to scream. If he wasn't expected to be with her every waking moment of his life, he could get a job and pay for food and then finish school and get a career. Not that she bothered to examine his pitiful life.

“Go get me some food.” He'd called it.

“Don't have any money.”

“Oh, whatever! That's just an excuse. You'll go out with your friends tonight and buy food or rent a movie or something. Don't tell me you don't have any money.”
“Well, I'll start having some money in a couple weeks.”

She was appalled. Huffing, she tried to forge a cogent sentence. Had he actually gone and underhanded her on the job front?

“I told you not to get a job.”

“And I told you I didn't care what you said about it.”

“That's it!” she screeched. “We're through!”

“Okay,” he said solemnly and turned away to return to his car.

“And I've been sleeping with Gerald for the past three weeks!”

He nodded, frowning, as he walked away. “I figured as much. See you around.”

“You can't just walk away from me like that!” she continued screeching. He did, though, and climbed into his car. And then, as she threw sticks and rocks from the yard at him as he stoically pulled out of her driveway, he drove off.

---

“Fucking Gerry?” George laughed, his teeth glinting from behind his full beard.

“Yeah, I guess. Or that's what she yelled at me, anyway. So I just left,” Alex agreed, sipping from a bottle of cola.

“Man, you should be drinking right now,” George said between swigs of beer. “You just got broken up with and found out there's another guy.”

Alex just shrugged. “Too expensive. Broke my last five on the Coke.”

“At least the job's starting in a few weeks, though, right?”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “At least.”

“Plus you can start playing the field again, now. How about that friend of yours up at school?”

“Amanda?” Alex asked, raising his eyebrows. After George nodded, he continued: “Kind of moved into the sister zone. That'd be pretty awkward to start pursuing.”

“Well, let's list off what you need in a girl, see where it gets us.”

“Hold on,” Alex was wary. “So I've been single for all of three hours and we're already on the hunt again?”

George shrugged: “Why not?”

“Because it's been an eighth of a day.”

“And it'll have been a sixth of a day in forty-five minutes; what's your point?”

“Shouldn't I wait?” Alex wondered aloud. His emotional attachment had been thoroughly destroyed over the past month or so, but wasn't there some sort of time restriction or something?

“Listen, you aren't taking some broad home with you tonight. Oh, thank you, honey.” George traded his empty beer bottle for a fresh one the cocktail waitress had brought him. She looked at Alex and cocked an eyebrow – she was attractive enough, but he didn't return the gaze and she moved on. “I'm talking a list: what you want in a significant other.”

“Well, I guess I'd like it if she were pretty tall,” Alex said wistfully, sipping from the Coke again.

“Okay, there we go: pretty and tall. That's two,” George glazed over the distinctions between 'pretty tall' and 'pretty, tall' while leaning over the small table, procured a mechanical pencil from his pocket and began scribbling on a napkin. “What else? Any hair preferences? Other build preferences?”

“Blonde, maybe with curls. I don't know.” Alex hadn't actually thought through this scenario.

“All right: tall, pretty, curly blonde. You like the artistic type don't you?” George was tapping the napkin with the pencil. He wrote the word 'artsy' on the list before Alex could even respond. “This last one was artistic, though. Any particular differences you want?”

“No more graphic design; I don't want to look through edited photographs and be expected to see a difference anymore,” Alex grimaced. “Seriously, I spent like half an hour looking at two pictures of the same damn bee. The filter had been tweaked on one of them. I couldn't tell the difference. There was screaming involved.”

“So what? Music, then? I know you look down on poetry; maybe someone with a shared penchant for prose?”

“Yes, definitely musically inclined. I could take or leave the other two; most people hate writing.”

“Tall, pretty, blonde, curls, artsy, musician,” George muttered, still tapping the napkin. “How about real personality?”

“I'd like for a girl to be both interested and nice to me. That'd be a change of pace worth paying attention to.”

“Okay, but are we talking like candy-store sweet, or more like bakery sweet?”

“Is that like the difference between Hungry Jack-hungry and GI-Joe-beefed-up-after-a-hard-day's-work-in-the-chopper-hungry?”

George actually looked up. “I'm not sure I follow.”

“That was my point. What's the difference between the two?”

“Well, candy-store sweet is the kind where you think you're liable to become diabetic. Bakery sweet is... I don't know; mellower?” George shrugged.

“Is this even a known distinction, or are you just making this up as we go?”

“Little of this, little of that.”

“Well, I'm too cynical for candy-store sweetness, I think,” Alex suggested broodily.

“Yeah, probably. Okay, baker's chocolate is on the list. Any preference in age or sibling number differentiation?”

“Well, legal would be nice, and no; she could have ten siblings, and be any of them numerically.”

“So, then: tall, pretty, blonde, curly, artsy, musical, bakery-style, of-age, smart, puts up with a complete nerd.”

“Thank you,” Alex said, bowing deeply and then bringing the Coke to his lips, “for adding those last two. Ass.”

“Okay. I think I have the perfect girl for you.”

Alex choked on his soda. “Wait, you what?”

“I know who you should date next,” George said simply, sitting back in the chair and taking another swig of beer.

“And might I be amongst those knowing who she is?”

“I'm sure you know of her. I'll see if she's interested in meeting you, but we'll have to take a road trip to pull this off. Be ready to leave in the next day or two.” With that, George stood up, put money down for his drinks, patted Alex on the shoulder, and walked out of the bar.

Alex just sat in his chair, shocked. He knew he was getting into trouble somehow, but he also guessed he'd go along with the plan – for a while, at least. After all, George was his friend, and a road trip surely couldn't mean leaving Michigan. Maybe he'd even have some fun before work started. Maybe he'd even meet a nice girl.'

The Enemy.

The parachute flare hissed as it roared into bluish starburst. Geoff sat in the muck of the trenches, his rifle propped against his trenchcoat's shoulder. A sergeant rushed down the lines, knocking kevlar helmets with a gloved palm, making sure the soldiers were awake to go over the top. The war had lasted longer than the entirety of Geoff's adult life. Then again, as far as Geoff could tell, he had been going over the top, lunging forth from trenches, longer than the entirety of his adult life.

Having grown up in the shelled remains of what had been a vast city named Chicago, having survived on leftover rations of soldiers and the what few materials fit for human consumption the enemy carried. Trial and error had proved a harsh mistress Geoff's childhood and early adolescence, but she had also proven a great instructor for his later life. That was assuming one could call going on eight years in trenches, being hustled over a third of the North American continental landmass in rickety underground trains, stopping every twenty minutes or so to let a supply train pass by, any means of a later life.

Whistles blew along the line and soldiers in ragged trenchcoats, soldiers with ragged haircuts and unshaven faces, leapt up sandbag steps to the allegedly smooth plain between trenches above. Although the sergeants and captains promised a clean run, the run was anything but. Craters, both earthen and glassed, interrupted the storm of soldiers across virtually ancient streets, beneath ruined expressway overpasses. Trenches were distinctly not part of the enemy's repertoire of cover. The enemy hid behind walls erected of metal, sloped outward to help prevent climbing.

Geoff scrambled out of a glassed crater, left from enemy bombardment, and threw himself up the wall. Grabbing the top of the embankment with his right arm, gripping his rifle with his left, Geoff rolled down the wall's inner side. The enemy was much thinner on the ground than were Geoff's comrades. Two of the little, apparently mechanical ones were operating a mounted rapid-fire weapon, leaving neat little holes, cauterized perfectly though the advancing soldiers. Geoff gripped the rifle to his shoulder, and fired two rounds. The head of the nearer little one disintegrated, in a puff of blue and white. The second caught the bullet in its bulbous shoulder, and spun into the ground, whining and screeching. Geoff pounced the distance between it and himself, and stomped its head, feeling the metal or stone or artificially calcified skeleton or whatever was in these things. And that was when he heard it.

The apelike grunting of one of the big ones echoed down the metal trench. Geoff panicked. The big ones were terrifying from a distance, and he had no interest in seeing one up close ever again. Trying to scramble back up the metal wall got him nowhere, and the pounding, reverberating steps of the big one were approaching quickly. He used the butt of his rifle to try and jostle a portion of the wall to no avail. Suddenly, it was upon him.

It howled as it rose him, gripping his trenchcoat, and glared into his eyes. The rage burning in its inhuman pupils made Geoff flinch. It huffed, staring Geoff down from less than an arm's reach. Its face was just as the other's had been, except of a lighter hue: it had visible eyes, no hair of any sort, no visible nose, no mouth. It had gill-like structures to either side of what Geoff would call its chin, which scintillated and flared in the dimming flarelight. The gills seemed to be where it breathed and made its grunting and howling noises.

Geoff fired the rifle, still in his hands. The round missed, but it startled the big thing enough to release its catch with enough force to send it sprawling over the wall. Geoff caught his shoulder on the metal, and was flung into the asphalt below. Pulling himself to his feet, he dove into the nearest crater he could, trying to avoid the strange, invisible projectiles of the enemy. He hugged the wall of the crater, his shoulder screaming. The flares hit the ground, throwing failing light over the craters and bulletholes. The flares died one by one, sputtering out in the blackness of what might once have been called a Pennsylvanian spring's night.

He breathed relief within the crater, knowing that soon enough he could sneak back to his own trenches. He closed his eyes and rubbed his shoulder through the thick fabric of the trenchcoat, resting his rifle over his lap. Laughter found its way softly over his lips. He felt his eyes start shaking in their sockets. A low hum rose over the field, and suddenly bright spots appeared on the field, moving back and forth. Chattering drones floated from behind the enemy's lines out over no-man's-land, looking for survivors. One focused on Geoff, swooped down on him, and its camera rotated in its vicious, swooped skull. Geoff suddenly wished he hadn't let that laugh slip, and then he felt the electric shock. And, then, he felt nothing.