Trigger warning: Doggy deaths! Don’t worry! It’s fiction!

This MagicLand short story takes place shortly after the Third Eradication. Magic is beginning to evolve within the remaining enclaves of survivors.

Duke tears into a fellow pit bull’s neck while Rocket, a thick Doberman, launches his jaws into one of its hind legs, sloppily severing it like it’s nothing more than a dried branch of pine.

Dozens of our dogs converge on the injured pit bull, a leader of their pack, it seems, and tear it to pieces.

The melee continues for a few minutes, but the death of the alpha dog has taken the life out of the fight of our enemy, and soon prompts the rest of The Huntington Crew to scamper off amidst a cacophony of howling, shrieking, barking, and whining so loud we can’t hear anything else.

A few of the Huntington Crew, snarling, saliva dripping from their bared teeth, turn back to reconsider their retreat, then reconsider again for their final withdrawal.

This kind of rout is rare. The Huntington Crew is well-trained. The death of their alpha dog should not have altered their plans. Maybe it was the suddenness of it. The battle opened up with his death, which seemed to immediately affect the other dogs.

There are two main war dog packs. The Huntington Crew, which is based on the east side of Lamar and is housed in a long-abandoned supermarket, consists mostly of Dobermans, Rottweilers, and pit bulls.

There are not a lot of them, maybe two hundred or so, but they’re meaner than — wait. I can’t think of anything meaner than them.

Then, there’s our crew, on the other side of Lamar, who most people call the Peppers Crew. Our dogs are housed in more than 200 buildings and their adjoining yards.

Our crew is named after Justin Peppers, the man, long dead, who started it. We have thousands of dogs, maybe 5,000. They come in all shapes and sizes. There are even a few small poodles. There are schnauzers. There are chihuahuas. There are Labradors, German Shepherds, and Australian Ridgebacks.

There’s an Affenpinscher. He reminds me of a hairy monkey, with a dense coat of hair over his face. He’ll get almost anything we need out of a building and can elude drones and other war dogs with his clever running skills.

Another small furry dog is the Barbet. Barbets were bred as bird dogs. Now they’re drone dogs. Our Barbets can sniff out a downed drone and retrieve it so we can try to reverse engineer it.

We have pit bulls and Rottweilers, too, but not as many as the Huntington Crew.

Some of our dogs can be pretty mean, but we like to think they are disciplined. They don’t attack everything that moves.

In truth, the Huntington Crew doesn’t, either, or their handlers would be dead. I guess the easiest way to describe the difference is that our dogs are easier to control and have a more diverse skill set.

Try to send a Huntington Crew dog in to salvage, and the beast may come out with a rat in its mouth. Ours will get what he was sent for.

Our dogs, like all dogs, are empaths, but unlike the Huntington Crew’s handlers, we know what that means. Knowing what it means is our ultimate advantage in this war to control the city.

My name is Hattie Monroe. I live in a war zone. Our soldiers have four legs.

I’m 70 years old these days. You could say I’ve been runnin’ these dogs for twenty years or so, but it’s not really like that.

I am what a lot of folks used to call a dog whisperer. But it’s so much more than that. The dogs and I speak to each other, giving one another comfort, sharing our feelings, anticipating each other’s needs. My dogs do not have a servile relationship with me. I don’t order them around.

That’s because we have a mutually beneficial relationship. We are equal. We are companions.

Most of you by now know the background story. But sometimes, it’s good to include it in a short tale like mine to help ensure our history for posterity.

It all started when uncontrolled dog packs roamed the streets and terrified the people who remained.

Our eradication zone had been decimated. Nobody really knew why, because from a triage standpoint, it should have been desirable for our oppressors to keep alive many of the people who lived here. This city was a center of technology in its prime. Electric car factories, chip factories, software companies, and technology company headquarters dotted the landscape.

Some folks say the city was singled out because of the big university in the center of town. Universities were hit hard everywhere because they were centers of resistance. Protesters lined campus streets every day when the eradications started.

In our city, the protests turned to riots that eventually saw the state capitol building burned to the ground.

There will be a time, I suspect, when none of us are left. The math just sort of says so. The technology of the few able to afford augmentation and avoid the lingering effects of the three eradications also dictates this.

The augmented live in the towers of major cities, walled off by barriers of electric fences and impenetrable defense shields.

In our city, they live in castles along the river in homes protected by tall fencing and swarms of armed flying drones.

That leaves people like those in the Huntington Crew and the Peppers Crew to fight in the ruined streets amongst ourselves.

You might wonder, “Why don’t you and the Huntington Crew band together in common cause against your enemy?” I have no answer to that other than the fact that the Huntington Crew has made it very clear that they wish us to disappear from the face of this planet.

The fight is generational. Those who remained after the last eradication fought each other in the streets with bullets, but eventually, the bullets ran out.

It isn’t like there’s much to fight for. We grow our food on old city lots. We protect them with wire fencing and dogs, but if the augmenters ever decide to use their drones to hunt us down the way they do in the countryside, for sport, some say, we’ll be helpless against them.

I suspect that they let us live because they like to watch our dogs fight. We see drones in the air all the time — small, glistening, spinning orbs that seem to defy the laws of aerodynamics as they buzz around high above.

I don’t know what their purpose is. Like I said, maybe it’s just to watch us fight. I can almost imagine a smiling television host introducing the next battle and urging his viewers to place bets on the winner. There was an old movie with a guy like that, his hair puffed up, his teeth in a constant smile, presiding over humans fighting.

I’ve been training a new dog commander. His name is Deion. He’s a tall, sinewy middle-aged man with ink-black skin and creases all over his face. Blacker than anyone I remember from growing up in the Philadelphia projects before the eradications.

Deion wears a black vest over a black t-shirt covering a black long-sleeved shirt. Chains crisscross his chest and hang from his black pants. He wears a black motorcycle hat with a dirty silver chain wrapped around the cap above the bill.

He could never have worn that kind of dark clothing in old versions of Texas before global warming eventually became one big chill, and a permanent planetary overcast knocked out the food supply.

Long jets of tightly curled hair spray out of the bottom of his cap like a splash of black water captured by a perfectly timed photograph.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m training Deion, or if he’s training me. All he has to do is look at a dog for the dog to respond.

“It ain’t over,” he says as he looks over the retreating pack. “No. They’re telling me they are coming back.”

“Why would they tell you this, even if they were?” I ask.

“They don’t mean to tell me, and they don’t really even mean to come back. I mean, it’s not their idea. Maybe that’s why they’re telling me.” He shrugs. “I don’t know. Well, I might know. But I’m not sure.”

“Looks like they’re leaving to me,” I say.

Deion shakes his head. “They’re not leaving.”

Without Deion saying a word, our dogs regroup as if on command. No. Deion doesn’t need my training.

Just then, the Huntington Crew swiftly turns as one unit. The dogs who were marching away pirouette quickly and charge. The dogs who hadn’t yet fully turned react and point their noses in the same direction. They all begin to run towards our dogs in a column shaped like an arrow.

The Huntington Crew howls and growls and yips, their sounds of combat bouncing off the buildings around us. Then, quickly, they turn their attention away from our dogs and toward us. We are protected by about three hundred dogs, but I look at Deion with a fearful gaze, knowing he is thinking what I am thinking, that the Huntington Crew will easily break through our ring of protection.

We quickly dodge into a building.

For years, we’ve fought without being attacked ourselves, as if the dogs have established special rules that the humans leading them are not to be accosted.

That looks to be changing.

Their feet thunder against the ground to the point where it sounds like they are horses instead of dogs. Only their screechy howls give them away.

This time, they easily break through the walls of our defenders, who had hurriedly rushed to form several rows of defense. Others among our crew attempt to run outside the Huntington Crew’s phalanx to encircle them, but are met with stiff resistance.

The battles between dogs are gnarly, ugly, and bloody. Injured dogs litter the broken streets, parking lots, and rubble that make up the battlefield.

Deion and I have taken refuge behind the metal doors of an old laundry mat. At one time, the doors had probably been quite different, probably with much larger windows than the tiny square ones that are there now. It has thick glass filled with a wire mesh.

We can see well enough through it to notice that the dogs from the Huntington Crew have gained the upper hand. They’ve broken through three walls of defenses, and about fifty of them are heading straight at us.

As if possessed by demons, they begin to throw themselves against the metal door, snarling and barking maniacally.

Deion unlocks the large metal lock and chain holding the metal door’s long horizontal latch. I’m hysterically begging him to stop, not understanding what he might be thinking.

“Don’t worry,” Deion yells over the commotion. “It took some time, but they can finally hear me!”

When the dogs run through the newly opened door, Deion raises both hands in the air as if he is sacrificing himself. My only thought is that he is also sacrificing me. This was not how I was expecting to die.

Yes, I knew I might die at the mouths of dogs, but not at the invitation of some fool.

What you need to know about dogs, though, is that they are empaths. This is not the same as having sympathy for your cause. In fact, in a dog’s case, it’s unlikely it can understand the true nature of your cause.

The dogs snarl but don’t attack. They bare their teeth, saliva dripping down their gums, as Deion remains straightened, his hands in the air.

Then he kneels, and the nearest dog immediately stops growling and wags its tail. Deion sets his hands on the dog and strokes the top of its head.

“Do you know where we are going?” he asks the dog. The dog seems to respond with a tail that swirls in a circular motion, as if Deion is presenting the tastiest morsel the dog has ever seen.

Deion looks at me.

“I guess I never told you that I was sent here by the high priestess of Moria,” he says to me. I’ve never heard of the place.

“You probably know it as San Francisco, which is no more. And we’re bringing the dogs.” Then Deion gently places his hands on the dog’s head, the same pit bull that looked like it would tear Deion’s throat apart moments ago, and says, “Aren’t we sweetie? We’re gettin’ out of here. We’re going to MagicLand. All of us. And we’re never coming back.”

This story is part of The MagicLand Chronicles: Short stories related to my debut novel, MagicLand, but with different characters and plots. Often, the end goal of the short stories, usually unbeknownst to the characters, is to find a way there.

MagicLand is available where most books are sold. Here are a few links. Let me know if you encounter a bad one. Thanks!

Amazon | Powell’s | Target | Walmart | Waterstones | Barnes & Noble | Google Play | IndieBound | The Nile | Bookshop | Books A Million | Book No Further | Booktopia | Gibson’s

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When MagicLand was released, I created a cheesy video that I never really pushed onto an unsuspecting public because I’m terrible at social media. I still am, but I’m going to share it with my readers now because, even though sales of the novel are rather putrid, it has good reviews, and the few people who have bought it seem to like it.

So here it is…

I made the video using stock art and Adobe Premiere. To be honest, I swear, a big reason I created it was just to play with the software, which I hadn’t done much of before making this video.

The novel is geared primarily for a younger audience, which may be too jaded these days to appreciate its positive message.

It’s also a lot less “harsh” than the short stories associated with the novel, although most of these short stories, like the novel, eschew F bombs and raw language.1

One thing that is consistent about both the novel and the stories: They take place in a world where the one percent has eradicated the pesky masses instead of facing things like climate change head on.

The result, 2,000 years later (in the novel), is that humanity has split into two species: One, those who become augmented, and two, people of magic.

This is a list of stories from the MagicLand Chronicles: Free short stories involving characters who do not appear in the novel but are part of the 2,000-year timeline leading to the events of the novel, MagicLand.

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Notes

Video Music: A Battle for the Future by Eoin Mantell; licensed via Adobe Stock

Footnotes

The storms this year have been even worse than usual. This means, of course, that survival hinges more on luck than things like skill, or shelter, or even the ability to wage combat with bandits, thieves, and marauders.

It doesn’t help that the Gath relentlessly hunt those of us who are descendants of non-augmenters.

Maybe I’d like to be augmented. But it doesn’t matter. The days when regular humans could be augmented are long gone. Now, augmented humans are grown from scratch.

Eggs from a machine, wired and ready to go, fitted at birth through a combination of genomics and nanotechnology. Given to the Gath, not by sutures or blood implants like centuries ago, but inheritance.

A new species. Not human. Not machine. But a hybrid of some sort.

Legend has it that the first set of Eradications targeted descendants from both races who were not worthy of keeping alive in a world unable to support the billions of humans that crowded its sweltering, chemical-laced cities.

These legends hold that most of humanity was eradicated for the crime of not being within that tiny class of the most wealthy people who could afford augmentations to help survive climate change and the toxic stew that the world had become.

Now, hundreds of years later, the Gath reign supreme, chasing the few human survivors who’ve endured this generational holocaust. And now, rumor is, there is a land where some humans are augmented with a spiritual power that matches every weapon the Gath can throw at them.

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I miss women.

I haven’t seen one for two years.

Their dulcet voices, the lack of violence in their souls, their mannerisms. I miss all of it. I sometimes wonder if there are any left. They avoid places like this. This remains of a city, a place where a few survivors shelter from the storms and the fury of robots programmed by the Gath to hunt us.

So imagine my shock when I see an old woman sitting on a pile of mortar and metal, ruins from long-ago wars.

She is wearing a sleeveless denim vest that barely covers her chest, buttoned with one button in the scorching heat. And she’s knitting. Just sitting there. Knitting!

Her blue jean-covered legs are crossed. She is as thin as the rebar poking up from the debris surrounding her. Her hair is like a picture of cotton candy I had seen a decade ago, but dirty. When I approach her, I can see grains of dirt and silt in her unkempt hair, which is topped by a man’s brown trilby hat. Her black skin is creased with webs of intricate lines.

She looks up and smiles at me with a shockingly perfect white set of teeth.

“I’ve come for you. We heard you asking for us.”

I put my hand on the hilt of my blade, which is always strapped to my side.

She looks unconcerned. Unprovoked. Her eyes return to her project, which appears to be a sweater of some kind.

She speaks as if she hears the question in my head.

“You’ll need it. It is a cold, windy day today in Moria. The fog has rolled in early, and the sun will only shine on the southern hills for a short time before giving way to an unusually harsh northerly wind.”

I certainly don’t understand what she is talking about, or why she is here, and I tell her so.

“What is the importance of understanding in times like these? You asked for us. We have arrived. It is fairly simple.” She doesn’t look up from her knitting.

I look around. The rubble she sits in is a perch in plain sight away from the nearest set of shorn buildings. I don’t like being exposed like this. It isn’t only robots that kill.

“We are alone,” she says. “Nobody for miles. The Gath have been quite efficient here.”

I tell her that this is no place for an old lady. I try to be delicate with my words, but I fail.

She chuckles. “Do you wish to stay here? Or would you like to join us?”

I wonder how that can be so. How can I join them? Who is them?

“We are the people of Moria. So named after a great legend. A fictional one, I believe,” she says matter-of-factly. “As to how? You merely take my hand, and I will take you there. But act quickly. Scanning and search bots will be here soon. I like to avoid those.”

Is it the land of magic? I wonder to myself. This place she wants to take me?

“It is,” she says.

But I have no powers. I’m just a hunted animal. I am neither magician nor Gath.

“You will find your power. But you must come with us. There is no power here. In this wasteland.” She extends her hand, and I take it, and I am instantly transported to a shining city of hills lit by an aura no human could create.

A boundary of beautiful white and blue light rings the sky beyond.

As she releases my hand and I look around, I wonder if I have died, and this is heaven.

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The characters in this story do not appear in the novel.

It’s not an ordinary thing for an augmented human to walk our land.

We are magicians. We don’t take kindly to Augmenters. No. Let me rephrase that. Our city has always been an Augmenter-free zone. I had never seen an augmented human in our city before her arrival. It is our city, after all. Not a place for those who are often referred to as The Destroyers.

But Gladstone Freely was a mistake. Or a defect. Or, she sometimes said, the result of a hacker’s vicious sense of humor. Maybe, she said, she was all of these things. Could a hacker have done this thing to her had she not been defective in the first place?

In many ways, she was indistinguishable from us. Her human form, perhaps too perfect, her face, perhaps too beautiful, were both designed in a lab, I suppose, where she was grown and nurtured in an artificial womb. She did not go through the process of squeezing out of a birth canal. She did not experience the sudden, unexpected fright of birth. This alone made her a different species.

At least ten generations have passed since the Third Eradication. It has taken that long to secure the city. Our magic rules the air, so the augmenters’ drones cannot attack us in our homes at night with aerial bombardments.

I found her wandering, stumbling, really, unaware of who she was. Her memory had been wiped clean.

I didn’t know who I was, but I do now. Merrick has helped me. I owe him more gratitude than I will ever be able to repay. How did he revive my memory? I don’t know. He’s just gifted. I’ll stay here in the land my people call MagicLand, away from my own people, for as long as MagicLand’s people allow.

My own people rejected me because of a bad arm. Such a thing. But then, all imperfections are eliminated, so I was lucky to survive into adulthood.

When I arrived in their city, I was injured,  unaware of my condition, my capabilities, my past.

She was sitting on a pile of broken masonry on the outskirts of our city, Portero. This was a city that was meant to be theirs. It had once been the home of the mechanical brains that had nearly wiped us out. Their original reach had extended further south into the southern bay shore. The large city south of us was essentially their capital.

So we took both cities.

That was a long time ago, maybe a hundred years. The augmenters fled south, to a land called Hollywood, and there they focused on augmentations geared toward beauty and personality enhancements. In effect, they ceded their territory to us, realized they could not defeat us in war, and redirected their augmentation efforts away from soldiering.

Their society became devoted to pleasure and happiness.

We were fine with that, even if it did come after the death of billions of innocent people. All we wanted was to be left alone.

So when I saw Gladstone Freely sitting on a pile of rubble and noticed her mechanical arm, first I became alarmed, and then I wondered why she was here.

I’m not a warrior. Few of us are. I’m a Time Master, which means I can look into past and future events, although I cannot visit those times in any physical sense. Being a Time Master isn’t particularly useful. Nobody wants to know their future, and the past is almost too ugly to revisit.

But helping someone revisit their past can come in handy once in a while.

Just ask Gladstone Freely.

“Top of the morning to ya,” said the weird-looking man with the top hat. Damned if he wasn’t dressed in watches. Upon closer inspection, as he drew near, I began to think he was a living watch, full of gears and other mechanical parts of a timepiece.

I didn’t know where I was. My amnesia was absolute in regard to my own past, but I was able to recollect my society, and this was not it. Sure, the man was dressed in a way that seemed like he could be one of ours, but, well, it’s difficult to describe how, but he simply didn’t look like one of us.

His epidermal layer, for one thing, seemed sickly. He never would have made it out of a birthing center looking like that. It’s not like I had a lot of time to contemplate. He trotted over to me like I was a long-lost friend.

“You are quite lost,” he said.

I was reluctant to react. In normal circumstances, I suppose you might think it was because I needed a moment to decide if he was friend or foe, but if he wasn’t one of us, then he was a magician, which made him a foe. I lifted my bad arm and threw a deflector array around myself.

Her reaction to me was swift but harmless. I saw some kind of patterned energy field wrap around her body as she stared at me emotionless.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” I said. Then, I lied. “If I wanted to, I could have done my damage before you saw me.” In truth, I had no such capabilities. It seemed safe to assume she could not know that.

She stood up from the pile of rocks and continued to look at me. She was truly a miracle of the beautification arts that augmenters had perfected. Her hair looked like a complex brown weave of resplendent silk wrapped in a multitude of directions around the top of her head. Her European-style skin was impossibly free of blemish. Her face consisted of carefully sculpted lines that drew into an angular, pointed jaw and the thin lips favored by the wealthy of Old Earth. Her upper lips had two magnificent arcs that dropped into fine, narrow creases at their ends that then curled up as if lured to a higher spot.

“I want to help you if I can,” I said.

She backed away and fell into the rubble. As I approached to assist her, she threw a mechanical hand up with its palms facing me. I understood the warning and held back.

Her entire arm looked mechanical. I could not imagine any possible reason. “I just want to help,” I whispered. I thought I saw a tear emerge from her left eye.

“I don’t care if I die,” she said boldly. “I just would want to know why.”

I nodded and took off my top hat. I made the mistake of saying, “Sometimes there’s no time for that.”

Luckily, she didn’t react, which gave me a chance to recover. “But you are not going to die today.”

She smiled at that. This was such a victory that my heart pounded. Not out of love or affection. I was very devoted to my wife Irina. No, my heart was thrilled by the moment, the sudden dissolution, I hoped, of mistrust.

Her hesitancy remained, but her face changed out of its hardness, and her mechanical eyes became more human.

“Where am I?” I asked the strange man.

The man sighed in a friendly way. He was more interesting than I could possibly have imagined. “You are in Potrero,” he said. The friendly nature of his voice was camouflage. If he wasn’t lying to me, I was in mortal danger.

“But... how?” I stammered.

“That I cannot say.”

“It’s impossible,” I said. “Potrero is... it’s not… I can’t be in Portero. They’ll kill me if they find me.”

“If who finds you?” asked the man as he placed his hat back onto his head.

“You know. Your people.”

He shook his head. “We are not in the business of extermination. That is your domain.”

But I knew that to be a lie. Every story of an encounter with a magician had the same outcome. Somebody died. Not always us, not always them. But one or the other.

“I believe you will be welcome here, as long as you move along. Back to where you came from. I can assure your safety for a time.”

“I don’t know where I live.” I could remember things. But they were abstract pieces of knowledge, probably stored in my various memory nodes. These nodes were implanted into us at birth, and they grew organically like the rest of our organs. I could feel, sense, and remember facts, figures, and people, but none of them seemed relevant to me. And I remembered nothing of myself.

I shook my head. I didn’t want to expose my vulnerabilities in this way, but the words jumped out of my mouth before I could stop them. “I don’t know who I am.”

He looked at me like I had shot myself in the foot. “How does that work?” he asked. “Did someone clip a wire in that arm?” He pointed to my bad arm. I could tell he was being facetious or thought he was being funny. I didn’t think it was funny. I glared at him in reply.

“No. Really. How is it possible for a memory chip or whatever on someone like you to just fry out like that? I know nothing of augmentation mechanics. Why would I?” He shrugged his shoulders, then took his hat off again. I found that annoying. Just keep it on or keep it off, I wanted to say.

I found my hat annoying sometimes, but it was part of the look. A look that didn’t matter in this case. I examined it while asking my next question as if the answer lay within the interior of the hat’s cylinder. “Okay, well, no matter. How did you get here? Do you know that much?”

She shook her head rather violently as if I had suggested we go for a swim in the chemical stew that was our nearest lake.

“Let your shield down. I can help you.” I looked at her with no expectations, but she shook her mechanical hand, and a set of flashes resembling lightning zipped around a visible but mostly transparent hood over her body. All of that disappeared.

Her entire arm seemed to be some kind of mechanical configuration, as if a gross mistake had been made during her development. She looked nothing like a refugee or reject from her society if one could imagine such a thing. She wore a flowing white top that was immaculately clean, and a pair of beige pants that had nary a speck of dirt. This was quite illogical. How had she traveled such a distance without getting dirty?

“Hold out your arm so I can touch it. I won’t hurt you.”

She held out her mechanical arm. I guess this made sense since she probably considered it a handicap and therefore needed correction. “No,” I said, “The other one.” She offered it to me with a questioning look.

He grasped my forearm so firmly I thought the nanowires embedded into my arteries would be damaged. Suddenly, my mind was gripped by a siege of visuals. I was running down a long hallway, looking behind me while a legion of small police drones rolling on the floor chased me.

I dodged another as it came at me from my front. I ran into a room, which had another door on its far end. I raced for that, closing the first door behind me. When I reached the second door, the first door exploded open and fell forward flat onto the floor, making a violent sound. Several police drones rolled over it.

I opened the second door, which led to a ledge outside. I closed that door, knowing that only a few seconds would elapse before the police drones blew that open, too. I looked over the ledge at an impossible jump. I must have been ten stories high. Where was I? There was no escape to my right or left.

A medical clinic, came an immediate answer. From where did that answer come? I didn’t know, but I knew it to be true. My arm. I was here for that. But something went wrong. There was no place to go. The drones were about to knock the second door down. I wondered where they would take me.

I closed my eyes and did the strangest thing. I think I prayed to some God of Old Earth by saying, “God, if you’re out there, set me free,” and then, before I knew it, before anything else happened at all, I was somewhere else, with a strange clock man holding my hand and retrieving a memory.

I looked at him. “How did you do that?” I asked.

“I took you back. To the when of how you got here. It is very reckless of you to be here, but, well, anyway, how’d I do?”

“My eyes were closed,” I said, “ and I was being chased. Then, somehow, I ended up here.”

“Impossible. Only magicians who can transport can do such things.”

I shook my head. “Yet here I am.”

Such began the mystery of Gladstone Freely.

Was she an augmented magician? Had she been captured and then augmented? If she had been captured, it would have had to have happened in her childhood, because nobody in the city recognized her after I finally convinced her to return with me to Potrero.

But this was powerful magic, this ability to transport. Many people would have wished for such talents.

Gladstone dedicated the rest of her life to teaching her craft, becoming a friend to me and hundreds of others.

I would often pass her on the streets, smile, and tip my hat to her. And as a joke, she always threw her defense array around herself with a wild cackle before continuing on her way.

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1

I’ve got about, oh, I dunno, maybe twenty million in crypto. But nowhere to spend it. The magicians have hacked the net. How do magicians hack a net? They’re magicians, not hackers.

I don’t get it.

I spend most of my time dodging eradication bots, crypto is worthless, and I haven’t bathed in about a week. This is no way to live.

Eradication bots shouldn’t be coming after someone like me, but they do. Another magician hack? I dunno. Maybe. But like I say, magicians, they aren’t hackers. Are they?

I’ll admit, my Behavior Score is only 59. Out of a hundred. Not great but supposedly out of the range of eradication bots. How do I know this? I don’t, not really. I’m just going on what I’ve heard other people say. The net’s down today, so the score threshold may have changed. I guess they can set the range to whatever they want, whenever they want. I wouldn’t know. I’m not in charge.

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Or maybe the eradication bots have all gone rogue because the net has been down so often. They’ve got brains, those bots, sort of. They can make decisions on their own.

I spend a lot of time foraging. There’s still a lot of food left. Canned stuff. Which is fine, as long as what they say is true, that canned food lasts several years. I’m not dead yet, so it must be so.

Packs of dogs are a problem. They creep me out. I was climbing through a pile of cars the other day and spotted about a hundred dogs, mangy-looking things, like a boiling cloud of trouble rolling down the hill in front of an old freeway bridge. Just one big happy, drooling family looking to tear up poor fools like me.

Oh, by the way. My name is Charlie. Charlie Hollywood. Before the First Eradication, I was a crypto gamer and financier. It’s all gone, now. All of it. The gaming, plus the crypto, because even with my mined allotment stored in a ring on my finger, there’s nothing I can do with it.

People want bling these days. Gold coins and rings and jewelry, even a diamond on a ring on a severed finger. I saw that once. Somebody gave Tangiers, who is a local broker, a finger with a big stone on it. He traded it for some gold coins. The man with the finger had clearly been targeted for eradication. He wore ragged clothes and he didn’t have a Net Ring. Tangiers probably sent some goon to follow the dude to the point of getting wasted by a drone, then retrieved his gold coins.

You must know about Net Rings, right? Those things they passed out during the Third Eradication. You either got one or you didn’t. There wasn’t really much in the way of evaluation behind who received one. Not that I saw. I knew a doctor that didn’t get one, and a sanitation worker who did.

It’s how they know my Behavior Score. If you keep the ring on, you have a better chance of living, but the thing is, the nefarious device can read your mind. Your intent. If you even plan on committing a crime, or some kind of mayhem, or if you think about helping the resistance, your Behavior Score takes a hit. If you have a lot of money, though, maybe not so much.

Everyone’s score starts at an even one hundred. Mine is down to 59. I don’t know why, really. I mean, I have some ideas, some stuff I’ve been through, but 40 points worth? I dunno. Seems harsh. A few lies here and there. A woman I sort of wanted to hit on. But I ended up helping her out instead. Shouldn’t I have gotten points for that?

I dunno. I don’t think these fuckers restore points.

I’ve stolen a few things, but who hasn’t these days? I mean, it’s the very nature of our economy. Nobody even really knows what belongs to whom. So, you know, you see something, you take it. Not a big deal.

Anyway, I’m sitting on a broken tile floor with my back against a wall, not feeling so good. Probably some bad canned food.

Outside, I swear, I can hear fifty drones buzzing around. They’re fast, spinning globes with venomous sprays that use pathogens to target individuals.

Let’s say you’re in a crowd of people with high behavior scores. These nasty drones can pick you out of the crowd, spray everyone with the pathogen, and, if you’re the target, its spray attacks only you. It knows your DNA or something, and the pathogen is only triggered if you’re a DNA match and your behavior score sucks.

I thought I was safe until a drone spotted me and came at me like it was shot out of some fancy gun. The thing darted around ruins of cars and structures while it hunted me. Some dude shot it. I ran. I never found out who did the shooting.

That’s when I stopped thinking I was safe.

I hear the drones whirring outside, buzzing around. Are they hunting me now?

The building I’m in exists on something that used to be called Nob Hill. I’ve heard there’s a man living on a top story of one of the buildings here. He’s supposedly hunkered down in what amounts to an armory.1 He shoots anything that moves below, so the story goes. He may have been who shot the drone that was after me. I have no idea. I couldn’t tell where the shot came from. I only saw the drone explode into a million pieces.

There’s an old countertop in front of me. Behind it is part of a machine that loops a heavy wire from the ceiling into another room. Old hooks dangle from the wire waiting for an arrival that can never happen. A laundry service. I imagine coiffed residents from days gone by, like on some old streaming TV show, scurrying out with blue square packages, and a sign that says “wash and fold.” The place still smells damp, as if the concept of the place never left.

2

Ella Drake did not know anything about magic. She didn’t understand the power of the staff she carried. She only knew that when she touched it against someone who was in the last moments of life, strange things began to happen.

When she saw the man stumble out of a burning building on Nob Hill, she wanted to cry because three drones were spinning above him. She knew what that meant.

A fine mist quickly found the man’s head. The drones left.

She ran to the man, who stumbled around some more before sitting.

He had a tall outcropping of hair that stood straight up into a point as if being held up by invisible fingers. Streaks of blue plumes shot through the blonde mass on their way to the narrow top. It would have looked comical if not for the man’s handsome face.

He had a pointed chin, too, which should have added to the comedy. As she neared, she saw that even his nose ended on a finer point than most noses. He’s well-appointed, she giggled to herself. His skin was pale, almost winterized, but without blemish as far as she could see.

“I haven’t got much longer,” he smiled weakly as she came within speaking distance. “Would you like to dance?” If she had to guess, she would have pegged him for being about 25 years old.

“I..uh…” Her empathic instincts took her to, “yes.”

“Thank you.” As he stood up, he shook his arm, and an old song she sort of recognized played off his shoulders.2

“You have augmentations,” she said warily. “Why did they go after you?”

“Must be my behavior score,” he said.

“Oh,” was all she could muster.

“Don’t worry, I won’t assault you.”

“I wasn’t worried. You couldn’t if you tried.”

“How so?”

She presented her staff.

“Rebar? I guess you can sling it good,” he laughed.

“It does things.”

“Excellent. Show me. After we dance a bit. If we have time. We might not. God. I’m suddenly hungry. Know where I can find a good steak?”

“Not many people get to die and laugh at the same time. Is that what you’re shooting for?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Something like that.”

They danced. They danced a slow dance, and held each other tight. She cried on his shoulder.

“Do you do this often?” he asked as he felt wet tears soak through his tight blue t-shirt.

She pushed away lightly and shook her head. “You mean dance with dead guys?”

“I think. I think that’s what I meant. Maybe I just meant this. You. Here.”

“If you want, I can take you before you die.”

He looked at her lasciviously. “That sounds lovely, but I do love a comfy bed. And time’s running out.”

“No, no, I mean with this.” She reached toward the wall where she had leaned her staff before the dance. She took the staff in one hand, without letting her other hand leave the small of his back.

“So you like rough sex?”

She giggled. “No. I can store your soul inside here. I think.”

“Inside a piece of metal? A rebar? Looks like it came from some ruins. I deserve better. Not that I’m high and mighty or anything, but just sayin’.”

“What’s your name?” She asked.

“Charlie,” he said.

“Sweet. All guys named Charlie are sweet. Or crazy.”

“I’m both.” He looked at her adoringly, she thought, as if he had just decided he wanted to marry her.

“I had a dog once,” he said. “Now I can’t stand the things.”

She couldn’t guess why he said that. “They kinda suck now, huh?” she said.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “The packs seem to get bigger each day.”

“What was your dog’s name?”

“Poop,” he said.

“Maybe the packs are karma,” she replied, feeling his hair as they resumed dancing, running three fingers up the back of his tower of locks.

“I treated him like a king,” he said. “But he sure loved poop. Not one pile went unsniffed during his walks. Not one doggy butt was left unexplored. These were deep explorations, too. Like there might be oil in there or somethin’.”

She began to question whether this was a soul worth saving in her staff. If, indeed, that was what really happened when she tried the alleged magic. She wasn’t sure.

“Oh, God, I don’t feel so good.” Charlie’s knees buckled and Ella found herself holding him up by his shoulders with her forearms, one hand still holding her staff.

“Let’s sit you down here,” she said, as she guided him to a seated position against a boarded storefront.

Charlie moaned.

“It’s time,” she said. She let go and shoved her staff in front of his face. “Do you want this?”

“What am I wanting if I say yes?” he wheezed. Blood began to ooze out of the corners of both his green eyes.

“I’m not sure. But if you’re a magician, I think I acquire your powers.”

He shook his head. “I’m not a magician,” he said. “Just an out of luck gamer.”

“Then I don’t know. But I’ll be able to talk to you. And you’ll be able to talk back.”

“I’ll be stuck inside a metal bar? For like, ever?”

She shrugged. “I’m sorry. I don’t know much about this.” She had asked a few of her friends in the rebar how they felt about it. They all said it was a blast.

“That’s weird,” he said.

“Yeah. Do you want it? Or not?”

“Surprise me,”3 he said, as his eyes began their flutter to a final close. “I do love surprises.”

“Me, too,” she said, as she gently kissed his forehead.

Notes

Thank you for reading. Somehow, Trump’s wall of oligarchs at his inauguration made this story feel more relevant to me, as has the march of AI-driven executive orders, AI-driven tariffs, and DOGE attacks against America and the rest of the world.

This story is set during the Third Eradication, the last of a series of eradications by a newly formed augmented class of wealthy humans that target “the rest of us” almost 2,000 years before the events in MagicLand. But much to their surprise, another class of humans is emerging: magicians. Thus begins a 2,000-year war.

MagicLand is a sci-fi romance 2,000 years in the making. Check it out here:

Buy MagicLand

Footnotes

3

Borrowed from an old Bob Hope joke. The story goes like this: His wife, knowing he was in his last days, asked him if he wanted an open casket funeral. His response: “Surprise me.” Another Easter egg, of sorts.

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This story is set nearly 2,000 years before the events in the novel MagicLand.

Trigger warnings: imagery of gun violence, pandemic deaths.

“It’s not another pandemic,” says Gareth as he winds a long, loose thread from the sleeve of his flannel shirt tightly around his wrist. This has the effect of creating a wrinkled plaid funnel aimed at his worn, black hand.

“Yeah, yeah,” says Button disbelievingly. That’s all we know about her. Her nickname. She’s wearing a shoulderless vest over a thin white top on a cold Minnesota day. Not much she does or says makes sense to any of us, but we all nod at this. Button’s arms are thick trunks of white steel.

She’s bigger than most men I’ve known. How she stays in shape is beyond me. I don’t ask her a lot of questions.

She’s wearing an aged Harley cap over a nest of frizzled, platinum hair that looks like it gets its only maintenance from weekly doses of Clorox. Each of her arms has a tattoo telling you what to do with yourself.

“Don’t believe me, fine. It ain’t on me,” says Gareth. He looks down at the table and fills a bowl. Even on a dying planet, we seek our medicine.

“I seen pictures on Instagram,” says Roof, who’s called that because he wears a dark gray, almost an ancient black, flattened hat that looks like it has tiny shingles across its wide brim.

“There ain’t no Instagram, brother,” says Gareth, passing the bowl to Roof, who sits next to him.

“Before all this…” says Roof, drawing a hit. “… I saw it. Saw them. Some dude posted pictures of cats in hazmat suits dumping bodies into dump trucks with tires as big as a house.”

Roof is a tall, wiry Black man who sits so upright at the table that it looks like a plank of wood is strapped to his back.

“That don’t prove nothin’,” says Button. “Just that it’s another pandemic as bad as the last one and the one before that.” She follows that with a round of cursing that would have made my army dad blush.

“It’s an eradication, that’s what The Society says,” says Gareth. “Ain’t none of them pandemics.”

“The Society?” responds Button. “They’re a bunch of psychopaths.”

“Hey,” I interrupt. “If not for them, none of us would be in this house right now. With the luxury of choosing how we die. That is what you are here for, right?”

Button nods. “Maybe.”

“The Society of Nadab,” says Roof. “Who was a priest in Biblical times, as I understand it. He went astray and was punished for it.”

“I don’t understand the symbolism,” I say. “All I knows is that we got here ten rooms. Each wired with a VR of our choice. It’s a last wish kind of thing. Getting to do one last thing, and getting to choose how the VR kills you, which is better than what you says you saw on Instagram.”

“Before Instagram died.”

“Before everyone died.”

It becomes that I don’t know who is saying what. I’m just lost in the next moments, wondering when this day will ever end.

“So. Is The Society saying we deserve this as punishment?” someone asks.

“We are all destined to die,” I say. “Remember when people would freak out about terrorists? And then after that, a couple of pandemics? People get so freaked out. Oh my God, what if this kills me? Or that? Who cares? We all die anyway. Why does it matter how we die?”

“But it does matter. That’s why we’re here,” says Roof.

“Yeah but before all this. Before all this, everyone lived in fear all the time about all the ways they might die, but then they’d get in a car and drive down these freeways full of loaded steel moving in ways that are almost designed to kill them.”

“Yeah, so?” asks Button. “People made a choice. Acceptable risk. I did it a lot more than any of yuse. On my Harley. Didn’t care. Dodging rolling steel is a sport for some of us.”

“But now we all know how we die. And it’s ugly. Horrible. I don’t want to die with my skin burning up like it's lit on fire, do you?”

“If I did I wouldn’t be sitting here with yuse all,” says Button.

“So we are gifted with a choice. Something few people have. I mean, anyone can off themselves somehow if they want. But that is different, too.”

“How can a virtual reality headset kill you?” asks Gareth. “Is it weaponized somehow?”

“It’s not the headset,” I say. “I mean, I don’t understand it exactly. I came here the same way you did.”

“You were called,” says Roof. “A vision.”

“It showed me this house.”

“Sort of like that Stephen King movie,” says Jan, the quietest one.

“It was a book first,” says Gareth. “The Stand. Everyone gets a vision and they all go to some town.”

“Not to die though,” I say.

“Not directly,” laughs Gareth.

“Which room will you choose?” Button asks me accusingly.

That one is easy. “I’m going to skydive.” The bowl has reached me but I pass it.

“Ugh. I hate heights,” says Jan, looking down at a hot chocolate she had made. Jan is young and pretty, with a light brown skin color that makes guessing her lineage a charming quest. Her eyes look Native American, but her braided hair, full of complex curls that dance together in excited choreographies, suggests a thoroughly African subplot. I finally guess Haitian.

Her thin fingers rotate her cup absent-mindedly. She looks out over the top of horn-rimmed glasses that are almost bigger than she but have fallen halfway down her nose. “Hmmm, maybe that’s why I should do it, too.”

I smile at that.

“So you skydive and then what?” asks Gareth, who is new to the house and knows the least. His questions are understandable. Nobody who has come to the House of Nadab is prepared for what they’ll encounter.

“Then I die.”

“Yeah, man, I know that. But how?”

I shrug my shoulders because I honestly have no details for him.

“It’s magic,” says Roof, who again cites various older social media references as he describes the history of the huge Victorian house we are in. “If you fight a Samurai — that’s room two, he kills you eventually, but the battle is epic. That’s what I’ve heard, anyway.”

“Give me a break,” says Button. I can’t understand why she’s here if she doesn’t subscribe to at least the possibility of a magical element to all of this. There have been consistent rumors for years of magic springing up in the midst of all our devastation.

“You’ll see soon enough,” I say to her. “People walk into those rooms, and they don’t walk out. And when they’re taken out of the rooms, well, let’s just say it’s all different. All dead, but all different. And room two? It’s always a bloody mess.”

“Who cleans it?” asks Roof. “Obvious question.”

I express an “I don’t know,” with my hands off the table where we all sit. “All I knows is it's pristine for the next person.”

“That’s creepy shit,” says Gareth, shaking his head as his voice trails off. “House has its own Winston Wolfe.”

“Who?” I say.

“Pulp Fiction dude,” says Roof. I’m beginning to wonder if Roof and Gareth aren’t old friends or brothers or lovers.

“I don’t know what that is,” I say. And I don’t.

Jan surprises me with her own answer. “A fixer is someone who cleans up after a murder. Usually for the criminal element who committed the murder.”

I just stare at her for a moment. It makes sense, but she seems so fragile that it runs counter to her possessing this factoid.

Someone says, and I don’t even know who, “No, those are cleaners.”

“No. The house doesn’t have a fixer,” I say. “The room is immaculate five minutes after the body is carried out.”

“Why am I here?” asks Button, echoing my earlier thoughts. “This place is crazy.”

“Nobody is keeping you here,” I say. “Feel free to leave, and ride really fast on your bike, and you can check out that way.”

“I would, for sure, if I could. One, no bike, and two, only rich people can get gasoline.” Her glare is a block of ice. “Like you don’t know that.”

“And you, tough guy?” I say to Button. “What will you choose?”

She laughs at that. A genuine laugh, warm even. That surprises me. She probably wasn’t expecting to be called tough guy. “I don’t even know what the choices are.”

“We all know the choices,” says Gareth. “We get them in our dreams.”

“You expect me to believe those?” asks Button.

“You’re here, ain’t you?” asks Gareth.

Button looks down. If I didn’t know better, I’d think her look was of shame or embarrassment. I don’t know what it is, but it’s pronounced. “When I was a little girl,” she says softly, “I wanted to be a major league baseball player. I played in high school. I made the men’s team as a first baseman.”

Everyone is quiet. “For reals,” she says.

“Well then, room three, I guess,” I say happily. That’s where the bean baller is. She’ll take one right on the noggin, but hopefully after playing a few innings. “Maybe you’ll get a little chin music to warm you up.”

She nods. “That would be cool.” I imagine a high, hard one nearly clipping her chin as she jumps back off the plate, her shoulders reared back, the bat high in the air as she nearly falls backward, her baseball helmet leaping toward the sky.

I look at Jan, dying to know what she has chosen. She senses this, I guess, and says, “I’m in room one.”

Gareth laughs wildly. “The painter? How you gonna get smoked paintin’ a picture?”

That’s a good question, I think. I’ve never heard of anyone going into room one.

“Booze,” says, Roof. “She’ll drink herself to death.”

“I want to experience death,” says Button.

Everyone stares at her.

“If you drink yourself to death, you’ll just be gone and that’s it. I wanna know what’s happening to me. If there’s an afterlife, especially, which there isn’t I’m sure, but if there is, I want to check out feeling the whole thing. I wanna know everything. I want to experience death. Drinking, you’ll just disappear.”

“Yeah, man, feel that transition, from this life to the next, you feel me?” says Gareth.

“She won’t really be drinking, if that’s the method,” I say.

“Yeah, it has to be,” says Button. “The experience is — well, it is the experience, right? So if it’s booze, it means blackout and then lights out. That would suck. You’ll experience nothing.” Suddenly she’s an expert on how the House works? I wonder.

“It’s not alcohol,” says Jan.

“How do you know?” asks Roof. “How can you know?”

“I just know. That’s not it. I think it’s a stroke or something. I’ll die with a paintbrush in my hand. It’ll be amazing.”

For some reason, everyone looks at Gareth. “Aww man, I ain't sayin’.”

The bowl returns to him. Everyone continues to look his way.

“Awwright man. Sheeeit. I’m a park ranger. Room five. Up near Lake Merced. Ever hear of that place?”

“Why go to California when we got 10,000 lakes here?” asks Button.

“Cuz I ain’t gotta drive,” says Gareth.

“Bear attack?” asks McGelligott, who up to now hasn’t said a word, thus replacing Jan as the quiet one.

I shake my head. “I don’t think there are bears there anymore.”

“Doesn’t need to be,” says McElligott. “It’s a VR. And magic, you say.”

“Point taken,” I admit.

“Just like there ain’t nobody skydivin’ these days,” says Gareth.

“Right?” says Jan.

“Me, I’m room six,” says McElligott.

Gareth laughs. “You? A Russian gangster? Now that’s funny.”

McElligott is such a slight, small man that he wouldn’t half fill an old-fashioned phone booth. Long strands of combed thin hair barely cover his bald head. His feeble appearance is striking next to the dreadlocked Gareth and his wide shoulders.

“Lotta ways for you to get smoked,” says Roof.

“I don’t want to see it coming,” says McElligott.

“You won’t,” smiles Roof mischievously, peering at McElligott from the other side of Gareth.

Everyone looks Roof’s way next. Waiting for his choice.

“Well?” asks Button. “Everyone else has said their stupid choice. What’s yours?”

Roof jumps out of his seat, his knees pushing the table up as he rises. He brandishes a gun from his coat, maybe a Glock.

“This is my room, mutha fuckas!” and he lets loose a volley that splashes fountains of blood all along and across the table. He misses me somehow. They always do. I am able to survey the gory impact of his actions from the corner of my eyes as I look at him with a wary smile.

God, I hate room ten.

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“Hi, Tom,” I said to the stranger walking past me on a sidewalk colored by an animated carpet made from this year’s autumn leaves.

Continuing his gait, he looked at me and asked, “Do I know you?” as leaves danced and swirled around his passing steps.

“You do now,” I smiled, walking on.

I had seen a flash vision as he approached— that’s what I called them: flash visions — of someone saying “Thanks, Tom” to him. A co-worker, maybe. I couldn’t tell because the background of the vision was blurred as if it was the victim of a movie director’s focus.

Author’s note: This is a short story I posted to the Ruminato Substack when I was setting it up, so it didn’t get sent to subscribers. This is part of the MagicLand Chronicles. It’s another relevant story in an age of oligarchs and tech bros, who in this scenario long ago grew tired of our protestations and simply eliminated us. This story is about early victims of those eradications.

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In the vision, I could plainly see Tom and his thick white hair, his pocketed, tanned skin, his greyish eyes, but I could barely make out the man thanking him. The other man looked young, with dark hair and roving eyes even within the scope of a simple thank you, but that was about all I could discern.

I didn’t look back at Tom as I walked past him and listened to the leaves as they were whisked away by the motion of his feet.

Later, I wished I had said more. I wanted to know more about him. I knew I never would. I knew an urban encounter like this in Lincoln Park was a fleeting, one-time thing.

I glanced into a window on Webster Street, into a gym, just before a treadmill snapped and sent some poor woman flying. It happened in my mind just before it happened to her, but I was used to not being able to do anything about things like this.

I came to the window for a closer look. Attendants and gym patrons attended to her. She brushed herself off and seemed to make a joke about it. That was nice, I thought. Maybe she’s not litigious.

I wanted to come in to tell her what else was about to happen to her. But I didn’t know. That’s not how it worked. I knew I’d never see her again, nor any visions of her. Only that one moment. A flash of memory sent from the future. Random, meaningless, and terribly frustrating.

I walked a little longer and sat on the steps of a bodega. They didn’t call them that here in Chicago but that’s what it was.

After about twenty minutes of staring at my phone, the proprietor came out and cursed at me in a thick East European accent, telling me to buy something or leave. He was portly, shaped like a lemon, carrying a broom. I guessed he was going to try to sweep me away.

His hair was like a set of thick, greasy black filaments with big gaps of bald between them.

I looked at my watch, tapped it, and then looked at him. “She’ll be here at four p.m.,” I said. “She’s okay, too. Just fell asleep on the el and ended up going all the way to Rogers Park, but her phone battery died.” I waited a beat. “That’s why she didn’t call you.”

He looked at me angrily and asked me who I was talking about. “You know who.”

I said that because I didn’t know. Not really. I knew that it was someone he cared about. Maybe his daughter. She was young. I was guessing fifteen or sixteen. She had a ring in her nose and dark eye shadow.

“I’ll admit, making another stop at Ravenswood knowing you’d be worried wasn’t cool.” This was unusual because it was two visions, somewhat interconnected. “To see Behrouz, I think.”

“I will kill him!” yelled the man. He grumbled some more and went inside his store.

Life is like that for me. The daily visions are connected to people I will soon see. But they’re strangers. Never anyone I know.

I sometimes thought about the potential of my useless gift. Fantasy football. Horse racing. Poker.

But I wasn’t a gambler, for one thing. For another, the visions were too random to be of any use in those scenarios.

I stood up from the steps of the bodega and looked at my watch, which beeped a crime alert from my crime reporting app, this one from only a few blocks away. Apparently, another small riot was happening. Somebody posted a video of The Lincoln Park Cultural Center in flames.

That seemed about right.

I patted the dirt off the back of my jeans and stepped off the store’s big step.

“I get them too,” I heard as I began to walk away. When I turned around, I saw the store owner looking at me wistfully.

“Sorry, dude. Get what?”

“Visions. Like you got.”

How did he know?

“Well that’s fun,” I deadpanned.

“I used to get them once a week or so. Then once a day. And now?” He raised his arms in the air like he was trying to take off. “All the time. They don’t stop. I been thinking I’m going crazy but then I thought you get them too, don’t you?”

I nodded. “Just sometimes. Not even once a day.”

“But more than before?”

I had to think. Maybe. Maybe yeah. I shrugged. “I guess so, maybe.”

He approached me. “What does it mean that we get these things?”

“I don’t know, man. You tell me.”

“Maybe it means that the world is ending.”

I nodded at that. That seemed about right, too.

“Well,” I said, “The world is always ending, right? That’s just evolution. All species die out, then get replaced. That’s not the world ending, really, though. It’s a form of recycling.”

“How do I protect my daughter?” he seemed to mumble to himself.

“Do you have faith in her?”

He looked at me for a moment silently, then said, “Yes,” before sighing heavily. “In truth, yes. Yes, I do. She’s a good girl.”

“But is she strong?”

“Yes, I think so. She’s been through much hurt. Strong yes.”

“That’s all you can ask for. Because you can’t fix that now if she isn’t. And if she is, like you say, then she will be as okay as can be, whatever happens.”

“I wish these visions could tell us who is next,” he said.

“Yeah, they don’t seem to do that.”

I looked at my hand because lately, I had been contemplating how things might be if the back of my hand was as light as my palm, wondering just how much of a role all that kind of stuff played in what was happening.

Most people said it wasn’t playing any role in it at all, but was it wishful thinking?

Anybody poor, uneducated, lots of immigrants. That was all anybody really agreed on.

Almost as if he knew what I was thinking, the store owner said, “That’s why I worry for her so much. It’s not that I don’t trust her. I don’t trust them.” He looked up as if them were in the sky. “Do you work, my friend? Have a job?”

I nodded.

“Maybe then you are safe for now.”

That was just it. Nobody knew who was safe. That was one reason for the daily breakouts of small riots everywhere. I didn’t think those were helping at all, but some people disagreed, saying it was a fight for survival.

To me, it just led to fleets of helicopters flying overhead every night.

The man began to softly cry.

I just watched.

“I came here to this country for something else. Not this.”

“It’s happening in your country, too,” I said. “No matter where you’re from. Don’t matter none. It’s everywhere.”

“For what? Why is it this?”

I shook my head. “Population control? I dunno. We’ve run out of, well, everything. Nothing works anymore. Can’t buy anything. I paid twenty bucks for four rolls of toilet paper last week. I’ve gotten creative on its use, I tell ya’.”

“Ah yes,” the man smiled knowingly. “Fold one piece into the smallest piece you can, no?”

“It’s grim.” I looked down the street because I thought I heard a commotion.

The store owner stepped into the street because maybe he heard it too. “I just saw a brick go through a window.”

“I don’t see nothin’,” I said.

“No no,” he said, then pointed to his head.

“Ah. Where? Do you know where?”

“Down there.” He looked ahead. I didn’t see anything where I thought the commotion was coming from.

“They’re coming,” he said. “I should lock up the store.”

“Wait. Yours aren’t worthless like mine are. They’re warning you.”

“Yours are not worthless, my friend. Yours gave me comfort. I thank you for that.” He grabbed my arm, patted my shoulder, and scrambled to his store. “Good luck to you!” he said as he went inside and closed the gate to his door.

Part of me wanted to just sit down in front of his store and wait for the rioters.

The other part of me turned my body around and began to walk the other way.

I didn’t need visions to know there wouldn’t be many more days like this, to know that this was actually a pretty good day, and that the next day could be the harbinger of many darker moments.

I didn’t need visions to know that the vast recycling project of evolution was speeding up and that I was about to get ground up in the chains of its movement.

And then it hit me.

I had some time. My own end would surely come soon, but not until the frequency of visions became like that of the store owner.

I suddenly wanted to turn back to help him.

But I knew that it wasn’t my time to die quite yet.

So I didn’t.

The store owner would have understood.

This story is part of The MagicLand Chronicles: Short stories related to my debut novel, MagicLand, but with different characters and stories.

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This story is part of The MagicLand Chronicles: Short stories related to my debut novel, MagicLand, but with different characters and plots.

1

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1

Charon grabbed Gabby’s small wrist like it was about to fly away. “That’s not for you. Let go of that.”

The little girl let go. Charon snatched the knife from the table and walked it over to Peyta. “What’s wrong with you? You know better than that.” She dropped the knife in front of her startled sister.When Peyta shrugged, the long, straight black hair that draped over her back did, too. “Sorry.”

“You can’t be sorry. That’s not enough.” Charon’s voice was normally suitable for a choir, but now it cascaded as an angry echo across the din of the small metal kitchen. “How would you feel if…” Charon made a motion across her thin neck as if slicing her own throat. She accompanied the motion by blowing through her overbite and slightly crooked teeth. She looked at Peyta. “Huh?”

“I know. I said I was sorry. I was dumb.”

“Dumb is talking to a boy. Leaving out a knife for Gabby to grab is death.” Charon looked at Gabby, who had moved on to a saltshaker that she was emptying onto the table into a pattern of salt that she arranged with her fingers. “She shouldn’t even be here.”

“Somebody’s gotta watch her,” said Peyta.

Charon sighed. “She won’t last the year. But okay, yeah. Whatever.”

“That’s a shitty thing to say about your little sister, Char.” Peyta walked over to Gabby and stroked the top of her head.

“I don’t mean in the world. God, Peyta, what kind of monster do you think I am?”

Peyta shrugged.

“I mean she should be with the matrons. I love mom. But she’s being stubborn not letting Gabby live with the matrons like the other little kids do. She’d just be safer there.”

Peyta’s eye squirted a tear that she wiped away with the frayed end of her sleeve, part of a raggedy piece of long underwear that had lost its bright white generations ago. “Mom’s just scared,” she said through a light whimper.

“Of everything,” replied Charon crossly. Charon’s clothing wasn’t much better. An ancient pair of distressed jeans and a green t-shirt printed with words so badly faded nobody could read them.

Peyta looked at Charon like she had betrayed them to the enemy. “Well?” she said. Neither said anything for a moment before Peyta added, “Shouldn’t she be?”

“All the more reason to let the matrons take care of Gabby. It’s what they do.”

“Hello, I’m right here,” came their mother’s voice from the doorway. She had heard the entire conversation. She leaned against the frame of the doorway with one hand extended, another hand on her hip.

Author’s note: This is a short story I posted to the Ruminato Substack when I was setting it up, so it didn’t get sent to subscribers. This is part of the MagicLand Chronicles. It’s another relevant story in an age of oligarchs and tech bros, who in the MagicLand universe, grew tired of our protestations and simply eliminated us. This story is about survivors of those eradications. Now that Americans have decided to let Trump and President Musk oversee the age of AI, robotics, and CRISPR, it all feels a little more possible sooner than I originally thought possible (the original novel, MagicLand, was published in 2021).

Sheba Fastfoot. Age: approximately 35. Real family name: unknown. Grandparents born almost in another world, long ago, before time was splintered off from then to the irreconcilable horrors of now. Three daughters. First one now twelve, the others nine and two.

Sheba’s first awareness of The Cutting came about three years after the Third Eradication when Charon was ten years old. Sheba’s friend and frequent lover, Sailor, had been cutting a rare tomato that had escaped the Exterminators’ pestilence.

The first tomato Sailor cut was so juicy that she and Sheba ate it almost before they could react to their indiscretion. Both women laughed themselves into tears as they shoved large pieces of the tomato into each other’s mouths. The tomatoes squirted gloriously into their palates, the juices dripping down their chins to create expressions of undignified joy on their gaunt faces.

When Sailor cut the second tomato, she laughed when she accidentally cut her finger. “Such excitement over a fruit,” she giggled as Sheba retrieved a clean cloth and a dollop of honey to treat the small wound, which revealed itself as a thin sliver of blood along the inside tip of Sailor’s index finger. “Well, ain’t you a mama bee,” smiled Sailor as Sheba took Sailor’s damaged finger into her palm.

Sheba gently daubed the wound, then kissed Sailor’s hand. She wanted to kiss a lot more when she said, “I’m so smitten by you.” But she wouldn’t have time for that, because, mysteriously, strangely, the wound expanded as she kissed the top of Sailor’s palm.

Sailor’s eyes grew wide with concern as the length of the cut spread across the full tip of her finger. “What the…” she stammered. Then, as if animated, the cut spread along the length of her finger, spilling blood across the table in spurts. “It was just a nick, Shebe.”

Sheba noticed the growing alarm on Sailor’s face almost as thoroughly as she absorbed the threat to Sailor’s finger, which became covered in copious amounts of blood while the wound expanded across the width of the finger’s interior. The wound seemed to come alive. Both women whimpered simultaneously as Sheba wrapped a bigger cloth around Sailor’s hand. “Hold that tight,” Sheba said. “While I try to find…something.”

Options were limited. Medicine was nearly non-existent. And besides, what kind of medicine could treat this? What, exactly, was this? She rummaged through a cabinet containing some first aid supplies, but nothing struck her as useful. Instead, she was struck by a scream from Sailor’s mouth.

Sheba ran to Sailor, who was bent over the sink trying to stanch an impossible river of blood from her forearm. “Sailor!” cried Sheba.

Sailor was crying: “What is happening?” When Sheba pulled on Sailor’s arm to bring it near her, she saw that Sailor’s palm was completely consumed by open flesh peeling in opposite directions. The wound traveled from Sailor’s finger along the width of her wrist, peeling it open like a banana, then up to her elbow. Sailor became delirious, her eyes rolling to the back of her head, her neck falling backward, her back bending.

She was no longer screaming or crying or whimpering. Blood was rippling out of her wrist, rivulets blending into potato skins lying in the sink from the night before.

Sheba had no idea what to do. She tried wrapping Sailor’s wrist tightly, then applied a tourniquet. But the gash along her friend’s arm spread faster than she could act.

Sailor’s arm looked alien, fully red, the bone from her elbow jutting out of sinewy carpets of muscle, tributaries of blood splattering all around as Sailor collapsed to the floor, Sheba holding on as she fell, too. Sheba screamed into the pine smell of their temporary home, a place they barely knew as nomads, then, with the palm of her hand, pounded against the hard wooden floor next to her dying partner of this never-ending apocalypse.

That was the moment Charon encountered The Cutting, too. She rubbed her eyes when she walked into the kitchen after a long nap. “Mom?’

Startled, on her knees, Sheba yelled at her oldest daughter. “Get out!” But Charon just stood staring at Sailor’s limp body and the ghastly traveling horror show consuming her deformed arm. Whatever was eating Sailor was leaving her with a blood-soaked tank top that Charon somehow was thinking should be grey but wasn’t.

It wasn’t possible, but there it was. A presence. Not a living creature that looked anything like what mom or daughter had ever seen, but alive, nonetheless. A living, breathing wound grew into Sailor’s neck and peeled open its flesh. It reminded Charon of thick paper being slowly consumed by fire. The fire of blood.

“Gather your sisters!” Sheba commanded, thinking that the Exterminators must have devised a new pathogen even more despicable than those that had rampaged in the past.

But all Charon could do was watch Sailor’s face become transformed into a grotesque mockery of itself as if someone was pulling open a zipper from her chin up to the back of her head to reveal the bones and cartilage of her nose.

Something that resembled a gruesome smile formed with two sets of reddened teeth much larger than Charon could have possibly imagined existing within the sweet thin smile of her mother’s transfigured friend.

“Now!” Sheba tried again through a sob.

Charon ran off, unable to comprehend the events of the moment. Strangely, as she raced to find Gabby and Peyta, she thought about a pile of chocolates that Sailor had found in an old restaurant in the abandoned city north of their settlement.

“Won’t it be bad after all this time?” Charon had asked when Sailor proudly offered some to her.

“Oh no, sweetheart. Chocolate is a magical food that lasts a very long time,” Sailor had said. And it was magical. A taste Charon would never forget. The memory felt like torture when Charon reached her sisters, who were playing with a stray dog found the previous day.

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“And I heard every word,” said her mother, approaching. She kissed Charon’s forehead. “And you’re right. We should let the matrons take care of your sister. But we won’t be here long enough.” They had been here longer than any place before in Charon’s life. She reported this to her mother as if her mother didn’t know. This made Sheba smile.

“Well, that’s true I guess, isn’t it?” said Sheba. “And you like it here for the most part, right?”

Charon nodded. “I’m sorry, Mom, I shouldn’t be such a little bitch.”

“You are not a little bitch. You’re my strong warrior. I don’t want you to ever be afraid to tell me what you are thinking, even if you think it seems crazy, or that I’ll hate it. All I ask is that you don’t keep anything inside you. Your fears. Or even your anger toward me. Because that, my child, will kill you.”

“Okay. Well,” said Charon. “Can we stay a little longer then? Always traveling, it’s just hard, Mom, especially with these two clowns.”

Peyta hit Charon on the arm. “You suck.”

“It’s been quiet here,” Sheba acknowledged. She bent down to Charon and whispered, “Almost too quiet,” which made Charon giggle.

Sheba had quartered her three daughters in a small settlement southwest of the ruins of St. Louis in a thick forest that Sailor had claimed was once ruled by a legendary writer named Mark Twain.

The forests were relatively safe compared to cities, villages, farmland, or any other area easily assaulted by air drones. So far, the residents had not reported any experience with The Cutting, although they were careful with sharp objects and thorny plants of the forest, because they had heard of its grotesque power.

Sometimes, the Exterminators sent small armies of drones that looked like dogs into the forests, but they were clumsy and easily defeated. Real dogs were a bigger problem. Packs of thousands of dogs called dog swarms were said to roam the forests, but Sheba had never seen any of these swarms. The packs she saw were big enough, though.

The settlement consisted entirely of women. Men were dangerous. Sheba would almost prefer encountering a pack of a hundred drooling, snarling dogs than any one man.

The settlement’s eerie quiet, like the quiet before a tornado, Sheba thought, was better than a settlement under siege or hiding in the forest alone with her children.

“We’ll stay a while longer,” nodded Sheba. This brought forth a thrusting hug from Charon.

“May Queen will be happy,” said Charon after letting go.

“Wait. Who is May Queen?” asked Sheba.

“The magic lady,” interjected Peyta.

“I wasn’t aware this settlement had any of those,” said Sheba unhappily. “We stay away from witches, remember?”

“She’s not a witch, mom,” said Charon. “Most people call her a priestess.”

“Oh, yeah?” scoffed Sheba. “And what God does this priestess aspire to?”

Charon shrugged. “How do you think everyone here has survived, Mom?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Without magic, people die. Or run, like us.”

Sheba rolled her eyes. “It’s all smoke and mirrors, Char, you know this.”

Charon looked down at the floor. “I don’t. I don’t know this.” Charon’s straight black hair had streaks of natural gray in them, which often made Sheba sad, but in the sunlight of the kitchen looked radiant as the hair fell to each side of Charon’s face.

“Well, I want to meet this May Queen,” said Sheba.

“Fine,” said Charon. “Everybody just calls her May.”

“Oh, do they. And who else are my daughters spending time with that I haven’t heard about it?”

“Oh, mother,” sighed Charon. “It’s not a secret. She’s not a troll hiding under a bridge in the woods.”

“She was the first person to knock on our door after we got here,” said Peyta. “The day after they gave us the house to live in.”

“Peyta!” snapped Charon at their secret’s revelation. They had both been told firmly not to answer the door while Sheba was away meeting with the matrons and town magistrates.

Peyta looked up innocently from her handiwork and dusty rolling pin. She had resumed her activities of rolling out a circle of flatbread dough derived from the harvest of a short wheatgrass the matrons had taught to grow on the forest floor.

Meanwhile, Gabby had managed to unload the entire contents of the saltshaker onto the table during the conversation.

“Goddammit,” said Sheba. She snatched the saltshaker from Gabby and used her finger to push as much of the salt as she could off the table back into the saltshaker, saying, “So I essentially have no control over my girls. They’re answering doors when I tell them not to, they’re spending time with witches. Got any spells you’d like to cast for me, Char?”

Sheba slammed the saltshaker onto the table. “Maybe you can put the rest of the salt in with some hocus pocus.” Gabby started to cry.

“It doesn’t work like that, Mom,” said Charon authoritatively as she dashed to Gabby to comfort her.

“What doesn’t?” demanded Sheba.

“Magic.”

“So now you’re an expert. And you wonder why I want to leave this place.”

“You promised we could stay,” replied Charon.

“A while longer,” said Sheba. “A while being about ten more minutes.”

Charon ignored her irritated mother. “May says it’s not really magic, what she does. It’s something she calls quantum something or another.”

Peyta jumped in: “Separation.”

“Is that it?” asked Charon.

Peyta nodded as she finished rolling the dough. When she pulled a long rectangular bread pan from a shelf, she looked at her mother and said, “May’s always at the bread oven, minding it. You can see her there when I bring the bread.” Her voice, like Charon’s, always reminded Sheba of song. Higher pitched than Charon’s, still adorned with the twang of a young child.

“So, quantum separation,” continued Charon. “May says that they just change an object’s position in a time field or something, which changes whatever might be happening.”

“They?” asked Sheba, exasperated. “You know, Char, for someone who wants to stay in this town, you’re not making it any easier.”

“I dunno, mom. I think May just meant magicians in general. Not a bunch of them here. She’s the only one I know here.”

“That’s very comforting,” Sheba said sarcastically. She looked at Peyta. “I think I know who she is. She wears the purple turban with the pendant in the front, right?”

Peyta nodded. “She’s nice. Not the kind of nice you always say to be careful of. She’s not the kind of nice that wants something.”

“Is that where you met this woman?” asked Sheba. “At the central kitchen?”

Sheba nodded again. “She’s always minding the ovens.”

Sheba had seen the woman dozens of times but had never paid much attention. She felt comforted knowing that May Queen took it upon herself to be certain that kids did nothing stupid around the ovens.

She was leery of magic’s ascent during her lifetime, even though she understood it as being an evolutionary response to the constant siege of cyborgs, robots, and augmented humans. But she had also learned never to exclude anything that could help her girls survive.

“Let’s go meet your May Queen,” said Sheba to Peyta while she pushed her palm against the back of Charon’s head. “Bring the little one.” Even when she was angry, she always wanted to hug Charon, who was thinner than a breadstick and barely taller than Peyta. Yet somehow, strong, too. Sheba loved Charon’s strength, her occasional sass, her forthrightness. She was sure that it would help her survive this wicked world.

Peyta was no slouch, either. Strong in her own way, studious about all things, determined to learn about everything from textiles to food.

Charon smiled broadly. Peyta quickly rolled the dough onto the baking pan. Sheba and the girls left their small house and walked to the brick ovens on the far side of the small settlement along a wide footpath made of stone and hardened detritus from the woodlands. The footpath was bordered by rows of small round stones that various people had sanded over time to remove the edges.

When they reached the ovens, Sheba recognized the woman in the purple turban. May Queen wore a black tunic emblazoned with bright yellow facsimiles of the planet Saturn within a wide grey border along the front.

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Sheba thought the woman was attractive, with a long thin nose and skin that reminded her of Sailor’s caramel, her dark eyes shaped almost exactly like large pumpkin seeds. When Sheba neared May, she noticed that May’s skin was mottled with small patches of grey. Her purple turban was impossibly clean.

“Child!” May exclaimed delightedly as they approached. “You bring me bread!” Peyta was beaming. Peyta extended the pan to May, who said, “I’m very hungry, thank you! But you know where the oven is.”

Sheba couldn’t help but smile as Peyta walked past May to a large brick oven and carefully slid the bread from the pan into the oven using a long-handled spatula with a massive half-oval metal end. When Peyta finished, May clapped her hands with a brief cheer.

“And you must be Sheba,” said May after shifting her eyes to Sheba.

“That I am,” said Sheba. “I’m sorry we haven’t had time to meet. But you know who I am?”

“Have you seen the size of this settlement, my dear? Everyone knows who you are. You bring some fear into this settlement, but everyone does. You deserve as much space as you need for that to clear. It will in time if you let it.”

Sheba nodded. She realized that everything she did was governed by the fear May described, which made her want to sob. And so she did, just a little, as a tear formed in the corner of one eye.

2

May Queen was right. And so was Charon. They remained in the settlement and were rewarded with a spate of normalcy they hadn’t experienced since Sailor’s death. Charon and Peyta found friends. Gabby did, too, as much as such a young girl can.

Sheba began a delicate friendship with May, not fully trusting, careful, circled with mutual respect. One day, May invited Sheba to join her to harvest some grass.

“It’s a cousin to the old foxtail grasses that used to grow along the rivers in these parts,” she said as they walked under a dark canopy of oaks and hickories. “But these little fellas don’t need much sun and don’t have the millet texture that foxtails had. You can use it for a good flatbread without needing anything else to mix it with.”

“That’s amazing,” said Sheba, marveling at how a bread grain could grow in such dark surroundings.

May nodded as she led Sheba to a large patch of foxtail growing under several trees. “Local legend has it that it was established by geneticists fleeing from augmenters. I have no idea. It does defy what I understand of how local grains of old behaved.”

May reached down to pull some of the grass. “Here,” she said as she used her long fingernails to strip off the end of several of the thick pieces. Grains dropped into her palm like dirt from the edge of a stick. She poured the grains into Sheba’s hands.

“Tastes nutty,” smiled Sheba when she dropped them into her mouth.

May nodded with a smile. “It sweetens some upon baking. It’s unleavened. A fast bake.”

“I would say it sweetens considerably,” replied Sheba. She had enjoyed the taste of the settlement’s breads ever since her first taste upon arrival. “You don’t harvest with bladed tools?”

“We can’t. For obvious reasons. I haven’t seen a Cutting. But I’ve heard enough. It’s too risky. Gathering the grains by hand is onerous, but not so bad when you have thirty chatty women doing the work,” she laughed.

“But I’ve seen bread knives at the ovens,” said Sheba.

“There are two bread cutters in the settlement. But, well, this sounds horrible, but it is fact. These women are very old.”

“Expendable?” Sheba was slightly horrified.

“Willing.”

Sheba was quiet at that. Her memory processed Sailor’s suffering in an instant, and then it was gone.

“We’ve had three cuts in the last two years. But no Cutting. Just a bit of water, honey, and a small bandage, and they were fine within a couple of days. As they should be.” She said the last sentence angrily.

“I always thought it was a pathogen,” said Sheba after a beat.

“Probably something like that,” agreed May. “Some nanotech, too.”

“I’m sorry. What is nanotech?”

“I guess the best way to describe it is microscopic drones.”

That sent a shudder through Sheba. “They can do that? But how?”

“If I knew, I’d be one of them, now wouldn’t I?” said May bitterly.

Sheba nodded. “My daughter says you know magic. But I’ve never seen you use it.”

“Magic is everywhere. It surrounds us. It’s in these trees and in the soles of your feet. But I don’t understand it much beyond that. Reputation. That’s where your daughter got her sense that I know magic. It’s where your daughter’s notions come from. All the women here, all the children, they’ll report the same thing. But we can’t rely on magic to bake bread or bathe or bask in the sunlight during those precious moments we are free from our pursuers.”

“Sorry. I don’t understand,” said Sheba.

“It happened on a cold November day. Several of the children were playing a game in the forest. A form of hide and seek. I was chaperoning, along with a few others. Sometimes we also trade with a small community of men north of here who learned long ago not to trouble us. A couple of them were there, too, guarding the perimeter of the area where the children were playing.

“I heard a savage sound, well beyond my experience, the full-throated scream of men, then barking. Lots of barking. I tried to run to gather the children, as others had begun to do, but I was too late. We were all too late, too slow to react. The children were surrounded by a pack of dogs. Much larger than any pack I had ever seen. There were hundreds of them. Maybe as many as a thousand. They set up a ring around the children as if directed by a general.”

A dog swarm, thought Sheba.

“I had never seen such a thing. Such primal intelligence. But there it was. Unmistakable. The ring closed in, in a very orderly fashion. The children, they were remarkably quiet and calm. Not one cry, not one whimper. Perhaps they were fascinated. I don’t know to this day.”

“That sounds awful,” said Sheba, afraid for the next part of the story.

“I’m not sure where the magic came from, my dear. Maybe it came from the children themselves. Because every single one of those dogs was snarling, their teeth bared, saliva spilling out of their mouths as if they had discovered the meal of their lifetimes. And yet, as I said, not a whimper from the surrounded children. Not even a shudder.

“Something came over me. I can’t really describe it. A quiet confidence. That’s all. But, no, something more. I approached those dogs with whatever it was that came over me, whatever was filling me up inside, and then, out of my vocal cords came the strangest sound. The sound of children speaking at once, all the children within the circle. And I said in that voice, in their voice, ‘Be gone!’ Very loudly. And the dogs left. The circle broke up, and they all scampered away into the woods, never to be seen again.

“And now,” laughed May, “the children think I’m a witch!”

Sheba was amused. “That’s it? That’s your magic?”

“That’s it. I couldn’t make a flat of bread disappear if I wanted to, or anything else for that matter. Unless I ate it very quickly, which I sometimes wish to do after that sweet smell comes out of the oven.”

“I’ve seen magic,” said Sheba. And she had. “I don’t trust it.”

“You’ve seen something that looks like magic, as have I. But it’s science. Why that science has been made accessible to humans after eons of nothing? I can’t say. Maybe that part of it is magic. Maybe whatever spirit oversees us has enabled that power in light of our misfortune. Alas, not everyone has access. Including me.”

“Except for that one day,” said Sheba.

“Except for that,” acknowledged May.

“Do you ever wonder if there’s more? More inside you?”

May shook her head. “I connected with the spirit world for that one moment. If the moment happens again, well, I don’t consider myself cowardly, but I don’t want to contemplate what might bring such a thing on again. No. I won’t look for it. Perhaps I’m more like you than you know.”

3

A few days later, a torrential rain washed the settlement, turning the ground into soft loam. The thunder accompanying the rain shook the trees. Lightning split one tall hickory near Sheba’s small house. Gabby cried, but the two older girls excitedly pointed through the wire mesh window after Sheba was able to remove the interior window tarp as the rains calmed.

Peyta loved soaking her clothes and feeling the rain on her face, so after the storm, she went outside into a somnolent rain and spun around with her arms open, her head tilted back, her mouth open. Sheba hated when Peyta did that but rarely tried to stop her unless an identified threat was imminent. She couldn’t help a sense of deep foreboding whenever Peyta performed her little rain dance. It was illogical, but she felt like Peyta was calling attention to herself while every other sensible person remained indoors.

Sheba watched her daughter through the wire mesh of the home’s front window. Her foreboding grew deeper than usual as Peyta’s face changed from the smiling, happy girl to one of worry. Peyta stopped moving and looked up at the sky for a moment, strands of wet, long black hair plastered onto her cheeks. Peyta’s eyes furrowed, then she ran to the door. Sheba ran too, her heart pounding. When Sheba opened the door, Peyta scampered in.

“Mom,” she said breathlessly, her look of worry replaced by a simple but still serious gaze into her mother’s eyes. “The rain feels different.”

“Are you okay?” asked Sheba.

Peyta quickly nodded several times. “Uh-huh. It’s just different somehow.”

“How so, sweetie?” asked Sheba, terrified.

Peyta shrugged. “I don’t know. Just different. Heavier. Can rain be heavier?”

Sheba quickly dried Peyta’s hair with a towel and commanded her to change her clothes, which she did. When Peyta emerged from her small bedroom wearing a white linen robe, Sheba was staring out the window.

Sheba said nothing. She was consumed by what she saw growing around the trunks of the trees. Long ivy plants with extended, crawling tendrils began to appear. They wrapped around tree trunks, then spread across the ground within the break in the forest canopy where Peyta had been dancing in the rain. “Mom?” Sheba heard nothing. She was transfixed by the impossibility of seeing vines growing in front of her eyes.

Peyta and Charon joined her at each side. Gabby cooed in the background. “What’s going on?” asked Charon.

“I don’t know,” responded Sheba without glancing at either of them. She stared straight ahead. One of the matrons appeared outside with a machete. Sheba wanted to yell out to stop her, but she didn’t need to. The matron was stopped by something else.

Vines whipped around the matron’s legs and toppled her. Her hand released the machete as she fell. Before Sheba could react, she saw that the woman was covered in the vines like a green cocoon. Almost as quickly, the vines released the matron as if they had made a mistake. She rolled around the ground as the vines traveled along the loamy soil toward the homes of the settlement.

Sheba watched out her window as the ivy continued its trajectory. The plants seemed to have an inner locomotion like thousands of snakes. Some of the ivy curled up into the air, while other vines sped across the ground with the alacrity of water moccasins racing along the surface of a pond.

When Sheba glanced back at the matron, the woman was nothing like her former self. The Cutting had taken hold and rendered her flesh a bloody mass of tissue. Its only sign of life was the still screaming throat until, it, too, was shredded, leaving nothing but the trail of an anguished voice disintegrating into a choking gurgle.

Sheba was terrified and paralyzed. She couldn’t take the kids outside to make a run for it. The vines were everywhere. Squinting, she noticed large, sharp thorns along the stems of the wriggling, highly animated ivy that had broken into their home.

“Just move them, Mom!” screamed Charon with a voice far from the soprano song of her usual lovely chords. This voice was like a wheeze, but loud, as if only her throat was speaking, without any assistance from her vocal cords or the larynx that they belonged to.

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Sheba couldn’t imagine what Charon meant. Move them? A vine snapped angrily against the mesh of the home’s window, startling Sheba and the girls enough to send them backward. Then another vine whipped against the mesh hard enough that parts of it poked through to reveal three thick thorns that wriggled against the intruding plant’s main stem as if they might try to unlock the mesh screen, push it open, and lead the monstrosity into the home for its kill.

“I mean, I mean, back, mom. Send them back,” Charon sobbed. Sheba would have loved to. She would have loved to send the vines back to their origin, back to the augmenters who created them, to choke the life out of all of them.

Charon pulled on Sheba’s sleeve and forced her mother to turn around to face her. Through tear-filled eyes and lips shuddering like they were in a frozen squall, Charon said calmly, “In time. Send them back in time.”

Sheba was trying desperately not to cry herself. She didn’t want her darlings to die in a terror-filled den of tears. She wanted them to die strong, if die they must. All she could do was shake her head at the nonsense. A form of nonsense that made complete sense to her because the situation was hopeless, and what else is a child to do but search for impossible answers?

Charon pushed her mother away. She bundled her fists as she spun, then stood and stared at the invaders. Her voice changed again, this time into the voices of a hundred women. “Go back!” the women screamed in unison. “Everything go back to the way it was!” But there was one primary voice, one just a little louder than the others. It was Charon’s. Her skin had turned from its dark brown hue to nearly albino white.

The vines remained, but they stopped moving. Sheba could see through the mesh that they stopped spreading along the ground, too. She looked at her oldest daughter, who was still standing with her fists clenched at her side. “Go back!” yelled the voices through Charon’s mouth.

It was then that Sheba saw a machete outside. Born from a fresh angle of sunlight that had found its way through the forest canopy, a flash lit its blade as the machete fell upon the vine at their window. The vine severed, and the piece inside the house became limp. May Queen peered inside through the mesh with a worried look, then spun around. Sheba guessed that May was hacking at more vine.

Finally, May Queen burst into the house. She looked shaken. “I don’t know,” she said as if answering a question. “I have no idea what just happened.” Panting heavily, she peered out the door. Sheba heard yelps from women who must have been busy hacking at other pieces of the plant. May Queen looked at Sheba. “We’ll need to burn this entire place to the ground. I guess you’re a nomad again.”

4

The women from the settlement began a new trek upriver. Large groups of men were in the nearby foothills, so the matrons wanted to remain in the valley. “We can stage raids when we need a mate for children,” joked one of them.

After a long day of hiking, they found a place to camp along a loud waterfall. They had lost two matrons and three donkeys to the attack. They considered themselves lucky.

It’s not a simple task settling nearly a hundred women for a night in a dangerous unfamiliar forest, so nerves were on edge.

Sheba and May sat outside a large fire where some of the women had driven posts into the soft ground to hold a large kettle for soup. The two women hadn’t spoken of the vines or The Cutting. May took a bite from a piece of bread someone had baked on a metal sheet over one of the two fires.

“I’m gonna miss those ovens,” May said. The ovens had been masoned a long time ago. They weren’t portable.

“I’m going to miss being in a land without magic,” said Sheba, looking at Charon, who was tending to Gabby.

“Won’t be the last time that child saves your life,” said May.

Sheba nodded. “I reckon that’s so.”

May pulled a tomato from her tunic.

“Where the hell did you get that tomato?” laughed Sheba.

“On the run,” laughed May in return. “Grabbed it from one of the good vines.” She giggled and shoved it gently against Sheba’s mouth, which opened and received the precious fruit with a cackle as the two women bumped foreheads and kissed one another gently on the lips.

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The End

Thanks for reading!

An early version of this story first appeared on the fiction website, Simily. The story is part of The MagicLand Chronicles, which are a series of short stories that take place at various times within the 2,000 years preceding the events of MagicLand with completely different characters and plots. 

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A menace from the sky, created by the refugees living in the Cylindrical Moon. This is the prologue to a novella (still in progress) that will be part of the MagicLand Chronicles, a set of stories set in the timeline of my debut novel, MagicLand.

Dear Freeland:

I am writing to you in the desperate hope that this ancient pencil on paper somehow survives my journey if something happens to me. I will seal this note in a glass bottle and hope for the best! You already know how I got it to you if it is in your hands.

As you know, I befriended a Gath a year or so ago, and he agrees with you that the beasts we have observed lingering over the mountains do not come from the domain of the animal kingdom as we know it.

He claims they are from the cylindrical moon, of all places, that vast megastructure in the sky where legions of another race are said to be hiding and creating beings far different than any known to earth. I have never believed that story, despite your insistence. I thought the people who lived there were simply escaping the wars. Ha! Wars. What a joke. “Exterminations” is a better word, no?

Anyway, Moses and I saw two of the beasts today. Perhaps my mind is changing. They are amazing creatures, Freeland, with wingspans that seem to cover half the sky. But they spread horror. The acid they spit from their throat can melt entire mountains. Whatever beauty and grace we can see from these wondrous flying creatures become one’s doom unless one is lucky enough to avoid the monsters’ glare.

We observed such a thing today. A small band of sorcerers was attempting some trick. I can’t say what, because we were viewing from a safe distance, a bluff above, and from the mouth of a small cave. They had formed a small circle. About ten of them, I think, and they looked to be forming their circle on the perimeter of a series of small burning fires that drew its own glowing ring.

The sorcerers’ circle became a line as they fanned out, and the flames rose vertically into the sky, as high, I would say, as a dragon can fly. “Were they summoning the beasts?” I wondered. Such a strange thing. Why would someone do such a thing?

Moses and I huddled together as we watched. We were certain that we were on the brink of observing a slaughter. We heard the heavy thud of wings pass waves of energy across the snowcapped peaks above us. For a moment I thought I saw a cloud of smoke explode off the side of one of the mountains as a dragon (I don’t know what else to call it) flew over its jagged slopes.

That is when I saw the sorcerers’ magic. The tall, thin flames concentrated into what I can only describe as a stream of tightly wound flames resembling a fiery, coiled rope extending into the sky, each whipped toward the dragon as if a hand on the ground was directing a lash.

I guess they were attempting to knock the dragon down. I don’t know, Freeland, what they were thinking, but the dragon was having none of it. It was completely unfazed by the wizardry. Even when a lashing rope of fire managed to strike the beast, the dragon seemed to drink in the flame as if receiving sustenance.

Soon enough, the dragon was accompanied by several more flying beasts that formed their own circle as they flew in unison above their supposed tormentors. The radius of the beasts in flight stretched across the sky. Then, one of them dove toward the sorcerers and howled a terrifying matrimony of tenor and baritone mixed within a screech that sent a deathly shudder through me. You and I have experienced much together, so you can probably well imagine.

I was able to see the dragon in some detail. Each wing begins as a thin band of flesh that expands into two connected sails that are longer than the beast’s body. The beast itself is dark green and reptilian, covered in scales, and crowned by a head of flowing grey hair intermingling with long spikes of flesh that flex with each motion of the monster’s long neck. The mouth is a fearsome thing, carrying what from our distance looked like multiple rows of canines.

I am thankful that you did not witness, Freeland, how the men stood boldly as if awaiting their execution, and that is what they received. The beast blasted them with something that looked like clear water, but when it struck the men, they perished as if they were sandcastles dissolving in a sort of impossibly instantaneous erosion.

Only one dragon carried out the attack. It hovered in the air over the helpless but boldly awaiting men, flapping its wings, as it curled its neck, then thrust its head forward and spat its acid at each victim.

The dragon then flew into the circle of his companions and led them in flight beyond the peaks toward the western ocean.

I will try to reach Moria, Freeland, but I can’t promise that you won’t find this letter instead of me. The journey is long, and we can’t transport our bodies there because of some dastardly energy shield, or some such, that the Gath have invented to prevent such travel. So the journey will be on foot.

I will be bringing my Gath friend Moses with me, who has turned against his own people and renamed himself after a forgotten Old Earth prophet. Treat him well if he arrives without me, Freeland. The fate of Moria may depend on it.

— Your friend, Tranquilina Dela Peña Sobreviela

This story is part of The MagicLand Chronicles: Short stories related to my debut novel, MagicLand, but with different characters and plots.

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I know this because I’m her husband. I’m an old white man, Scarlett’s age, been with her these fifty-five years now. When people ask, we like to joke that we are both about eighty years old but we ain’t sure. We is sure, but we like to say we ain’t.

And her kitchen, well, it’s always been her kitchen. Even now that we’re just two old farts hunkered downstairs in our basement apartment while tenants use her kitchen on the ground floor and the world goes all to hell. Still her kitchen.

You’d think that with six tenants in five bedrooms in our big house in midtown Atlanta, that kitchen up there would not be hers anymore but it ain’t true. No sir. It’s her kitchen and no one else’s.

“Does she have something against our water?” I ask Scarlett.

Author’s note: This is part of the MagicLand Chronicles. It’s another relevant story in an age of oligarchs and tech bros, who in this scenario long ago grew tired of our protestations and simply eliminated us. This story is about survivors of those eradications. This story takes place much closer to our time than most of the others.

“Why you askin’ that?” she asks crossly because she’s playing bridge on her phone and don’t like it much when I bother her while she’s playin’ her games.

“She always filling up that water filter pitcher a hers or whatever those thingamajigs are called. She don’t like our water. Nothin’ wrong with our water. I been to other cities. With bad water. This Atlanta tap water just fine.”

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“Maybe she worried about them biogerms or whatever the government using to smoke people,” Scarlett chuckles.

“That ain’t what’s happenin’. We talked about that a dozen times.”

She shrugs while she taps her phone.

“I think they makin’ roasted veggies,” I say.

“Why you say that?”

“They gots some taters and brussels sprouts out, a bowl, and look there a bottle a oil. Wonder what kind they use. Oh see there he goes turnin’ on the oven. Yep, roasted veggies.”

“They use that avocado oil,” says Scarlett. “I seen it.”

“Where they get that? Ain’t no stores got that kind a thing no more.”

“I dunno shugga, maybe they had it and brought it with ’em here.”

“They been here three months.”

“Can’t you zoom in with that thing?”

“Cain’t. You care that much about the kind a oil they got? Why you care that much? What’s wrong with you?”

“Well now I just gotta know. You brought it up.”

“Well I cain’t tell. Cain’t see it good enough.”

Scarlett puts her phone down and takes off her thick, pointy reading glasses. She squints. “Look. He put those big ole mushrooms as a first layer. I bet that is what he doin’.”

I watch the tenant place sliced portabellos on a big baking tray while the woman cuts up the vegetables and puts them in a bowl. “That’s a funny thing,” I say.

“It don’t make no sense. Just put it all together in one layer,” she says in a tone that says the man is a fool.

We can hear the tenants walking around up there while we watch them on the monitor. “Try a different camera,” says Scarlett. I tap my phone and switch to a different view. “No, not that one. The one closest to the stove.”

I switch again.

“Now watch this,” she says. Just like that, all six burners on the stovetop light up to their maximum level. The woman lets out a short, high-pitched screech. “That was fun,” says Scarlett, chuckling.

“I don’t like that I cain’t do that,” I say.

“I can’t teach ya’. Barely know how to do it myself.”

The man grabs a fire extinguisher but the woman says, “Relax,” and quickly turns all the burners off.

“What the hell was that?” asks the man.

“I don’t really like them people,” says Scarlett. “Remind me of them people doin’ all the killin’.”

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“Ain’t nobody doin’ no killin’. I told you that. Stop readin’ the Internet.”

“All fancy and stuff. Internet down half the day anyway every day,” mumbles Scarlett, still squinting. “Can’t read diddly. Anyway they privileged is what they be. Damn rich Yankees. Bet they from Connecticut or someplace.”

“I told you already they from San Francisco.”

“Good God. No wonder I hate them.”

“You never said you hated them ‘fore.”

“Well I just did. Did just now.”

I hear a loud crash coming through the speakers and the floor upstairs. I look at Scarlett. “That you?”

She nods mischievously. “Uh-huh.” And chuckles.

The woman curses and motions to the man but the man just stands there watching. That’s because the crash was impossible if you look at it like physics. The crash came from a glass vase tucked deep in a shelf.

“Now look what you done you crazy woman,” I say. “Got glass all over the floor.”

“She’ll clean it up,” says Scarlett confidently.

“She gonna call the POlice is what she gonna do.”

“Why on earth would she do that? She gonna report a broken vase and some burners lightin’ up? They’ll just say, ‘Bitch, you in a kitchen. Whutch you ‘xpect?’”

“Naw prolly not.”

“How about this?” says Scarlett. I watch the big monitor our son hung up on the wall for us a year ago. A large butcher knife whizzes by the woman’s head.

“That could get her thinkin’,” I say, chuckling. “Do it again.”

“You know it gives me headaches.”

“Ya can’t just start in on me and then stop. Be like startin’ a movie and stoppin’ it halfway through.”

The knife flies past the man’s head and impales a wall.

“Damn girl, that was impressive.”

“I’m getting outta here,” says the man.

The woman is quiet but shaking. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” she says.

“Well what else could it be?” asks the man. “You got your phone? I left mine upstairs.”

The woman reaches into the back pocket of her skinny jeans. After that, it looks like she is recording a video. “I’m Facebooking it,” she says.

“People will just say it’s faked,” says the man.

“No they won’t,” says Scarlett with a deliciously malevolent grin.

The six burners light up again, but this time the flames stretch nearly to the ceiling.

“Woman,” I say, “You gonna burn down the house and me in it.”

Next, the water from the sink faucet turns on. We had one of those fancy things installed a couple of years back, the kind with the coiled connection. I don’t know what them things are called. Now, it’s coming out at an impossible pressure, filling up the sink faster than the drain can handle.

“That should help,” laughs Scarlett.

“Girl, you mental. Now we gonna flood,” I laugh. I have to admit, it can be fun to watch Scarlett do her thing.

The old house was creepy, but that was part of what made it cool. It was an old Edwardian, with wood framing on each side of a gable that bore beautiful wood etchings under its angled roof.

But inside, it was clear that the home hadn’t been well maintained for several decades.

The owners said they were refugees from Hurricane Katrina and had lived here ever since, moving to the basement about five years ago to accommodate tenants to help finish off the mortgage.

They were old, so I assumed that was why the house was in such disrepair. But as the knife flew past Rafe’s head, I knew that age had nothing to do with whatever governed the spirits of these people.

I can’t say exactly why I knew this wasn’t ghosts. It wasn’t quite that I didn’t believe in them. It’s just that I didn’t think they had any corporeal power.

“Facebook is down again,” I said to Rafe.

“Try Twitch,” he replied, so I did.

Twitch was up, so I started streaming. When I did, the water in the sink turned on, then a pile of pots and pans started flying around the kitchen.

Things were hard enough, and people were turning on each other? Why were they doing this?

Rafe and I were also refugees. San Francisco had essentially quarantined itself during the eradications, and small groups of rich people seized control of the city. Everyone everywhere was calling it an eradication, except for those who were calling it extermination or genocide. And except for the people doing the eradicating.

But the truth was that nobody knew exactly what was going on. The general consensus had been that elites had developed a highly specialized pathogen that could target specific people or groups of people. San Francisco had been a staging area of sorts. A testbed.

Rafe had inherited some money after his folks passed, but we didn’t have much money even after both of us worked as online marketers for awhile. But we had enough to get out of town.

We were renting an upstairs condo in the Haight when it started. Everyone on the street died one day. The news reports said that a pathogen had done the equivalent of boiling their blood. I didn’t understand the science but I did understand the part that said that the pathogen could only live about five minutes once outside the human body.

The pathogen had been distributed by drones, first at crowds of people. But only some in the crowds got sick. Others were completely unaffected. This began to happen in some other places, but San Francisco was the worst.

Soon, drones, like automated crop dusters, began spraying entire neighborhoods.

The government said it was left-wing climate change terrorists who had created germ weapons using gene-editing tools and CRISPR technology.

People believed them until someone noticed that absolutely no rich people were getting hit. No well-known politicians, either.

So we got out of San Francisco about three months ago, but it’s happening in Atlanta now, too.

There’s nothing special about the Merricks, the landlords who own this house. They’ll be targeted eventually, and so will we. So why were landlords doing this?

Rafe and I didn’t have time to discuss theories. The kitchen was literally blowing up. Pots and pans were flying around, and the stove burners were shooting flames to the ceiling, which was high up compared to inside a lot of homes.

The Twitch comment stream looked something like this:

“😂😂😂😂😂Be happenin' at the kitch! 😂 😂😂😂😂😂”

“😶‍🌫😶‍🌫️😶‍🌫️😶‍🌫️😶‍🌫️😶‍🌫️️Dive bombin’!😶‍🌫️”

“😬 Amityville 😱”

After a few dozen comments like that, somebody wrote this:

“Bitch you need 🔮 a dispel magic spell 🪄”

“Send it,” I said out loud. My phone transcribed my speech correctly.

“Get out of there,” was the response. Then, “Tonight, get a candle, and you write from bottom to top what you are trying to get rid of. Good luck.”

That would take some doing, I thought, as I motioned to Rafe that we needed to leave.

There were people in San Francisco who were saying just before we left that people were fighting back with magic. That magic was even suddenly becoming more powerful, almost like some new tech or something.

Some pretty crazy stories.

If any of it was true, the owners of this house were pretty powerful. What a waste to be using their power in this way when we had a common enemy.

We ran out of the house, out of breath, and I thought that if I was going to use a candle to dispel magic, I’d want to have a better idea of what I was doing.

Did I even believe in this stuff? Like I said, I’d heard stories. From people I knew and trusted.

I looked at Rafe. He seemed okay after all this. I was so glad for this that I took his hand and kissed it. He gave me a sweet smile and shrugged his shoulders.

“You know what?” he said.

I shook my head.

“None of the other tenants are there, right?”

“Latonya went home to visit her parents. Bill and Jen are at work. Thomson is never there. In Athens or something.”

“The one in Greece? Or here in Georgia.”

I shrugged.

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“Okay, yeah,” he said. “So — why does he even rent a room there?”

“He’s got a lot of money. Travels around buying and flipping homes. Thinks the market is gonna turn when this is all over.”

“Never gonna be over,” whispered Rafe. “Come on, across the street, K?”

I shrugged and we ran across the street, which was covered, like most Atlanta neighborhoods, by a canopy of tall trees.

Rafe turned me around and kissed my forehead. “It’s weird. This feeling I have. It’s just a hunch, but it’s like it comes from somewhere else.”

I just stared at him, not knowing how to reply.

Then he squinted and closed his eyes so hard that tears squeezed out of them as he said, “I’m just imagining that whole house going up in flames.” He kept his eyes closed like that for about thirty seconds before opening them again.

A massive explosion then knocked us off our feet. I flew down to the ground, my chin hitting the edge of a wide tree stump before I rolled against Rafe, who was on his back.

I scrambled to my feet. “Rafe!” I looked at him as I knelt beside him.

“I’m ok,” he said with a deep, halting breath instead of his voice. “Your chin…”

I touched my chin and a long streak of blood found its way to my palm. I helped Rafe up and we looked at the old house in flames.

“That’s crazy,” I said as he took off his flannel shirt and gently patted my chin with it. “What did you do?”

“I dunno,” he said. “I don’t think I did it.”

“So we leave the house and it just so happens their furnace or something explodes?”

Cinders were blowing in the wind and into the trees in the twilight. I heard a siren.

“I dunno, I mean, I really don’t.”

This was how it all started. It’s how everything started, I think.

Somehow, San Francisco had become like a land of magic and resistance.

And we brought some of it with us.

But we didn’t know how to use it.

It seemed more like it was using us.

I watched flames lick the edges of trees as fire trucks appeared up the street at the top of the hill. I wondered what the magic wanted from us.

An unnaturally deep black smoke began to pour out from near the foundation of the house and run like a snake around the home’s circumference. The smoke seemed to be trying to strangle the house. It was almost as if it was trying to tighten its grip around the bottom floor.

Then, Rafe and I could hear a deep whispering voice emerge from the direction of the smoke. “Fight,” it said.

Suddenly, inexplicably, the fire was snuffed out and the house disappeared as if it had never been there.

“Fight,” said the whisper.

Night fell at that, and I stretched my hand out towards where the house once stood.

As I stood watching the smoke clear, I saw that there was something left from the house after all. A stove, with a woman bent over it stirring something in a ridiculously tall pot. She turned around to look at me with a grin that was biologically impossible, stretching, literally, from ear to ear, revealing large teeth through heavily wrinkled brown skin.

“You go on now,” she said in a voice I recognized. “You go on now and you do your fightin’. And don’t you never give up.”

Thanks for reading!

This story is part of The MagicLand Chronicles: Short stories related to my debut novel, MagicLand, but with different characters and stories.

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Nothing remains of Pittman. As we watch its remnants smolder, I know deep in my soul that every one of us has the same picture in our mind, that of the grand and stately old hall, a stubborn old man of a building that frowns at its more modern surrounding university upstarts.

It was a proud frown, though — an I know better than you frown, with an upturned smirk that seemed to be buried within its gold-colored masonry. Today, despite its once-strong stone structure, little remains. It smolders. Ruined, it offers little more than wisps of smoke to the students still staggering about its grounds. I can’t imagine what could have melted those old welds that held its foundation.

I look at Katrina imploringly, begging her to talk to me, but she doesn’t know I’m here. I want to grab her by the shoulders, but I know my hands would go right through them. I shrug and laugh at my frustration.

So instead I wander through the crowd, wishing I could speak to people, wondering if they could forgive me if they knew the truth.

For it was I who made Pittman burn. Stumbling around aimlessly, I push into each and every person in the crowd asking for forgiveness, but nobody knows I’m there. They ignore me as if I’m less than lint.

Today, I know I’ll have to leave this place. Its ruins. Katrina. She knows I’m inside there now, embers among embers. I am so close to her gushing tears I can nearly touch them, but now, today, tomorrow, never will I.

I put my palms up before me and they’re translucent. I can see everything in front of me through them, as if through a filmy lens.

Days, weeks, months, years, no, decades pass. Yes, I think it’s been decades since Pittman burned. Me in it.

The world has changed much since those days. Death has taken charge. Magic has taken root among survivors of a scourge I don’t quite understand. I hunt those survivors for sport. What else is there to do?

The powerful witch who thinks she can manipulate time throws cascades of fire at a small village to try to hide it from the drones. She thinks she is hiding the village because it’s what she’s been told happens. It is Inkantu, she is told.

And in truth, it would work if I wasn’t there.

But I am, and I not only intercept her efforts, but I approach her invisibly and suck the very life out of her by touching her lips with mine and breathing in her life force.

The swordmaster who eats his own sword at my command.

The firestarter who burns her parents alive because I can whistle in a way that sends the flames from her original intent.

The conjurors and the medicine shamans and the displacement wizards who weep when they see the altered effects of their own actions.

They are all at my mercy.

What can I say? I have gifts.

Candalon shares a story about demons and black knights on horses as we sit around the fire on this cold autumn evening. He finishes with, “And then there’s The Wanderer.”

“I hate ghost stories,” says one of the girls. We all have heard the stories about The Wanderer. “Yeah,” says another, “Shut up on that.”

The wind whistles as though a storm is about to blow open the forest canopy. Fittingly, a full moon, tinted red, lurks behind a break in the trees behind us. Crickets are rubbing their legs in glee as they pronounce the danger in mistaking the evening’s quiet for safety.

Candalon continues. “In the old days,” he says, “people used to think of ghosts as these lost dead souls who haunted houses or cemeteries. The Wanderer, he’s different. He haunts everything. He never stays in one place for even an hour.” Candalon whispers, “He could be here right now. Watching us.”

“I’ve heard he was a magician when he was alive. So he’s one of us,” says one of the boys.

“Yeah,” says another. “Rather him be here than a drone.”

Candalon shakes his head. “No, you would not rather.” He’s silent for a moment. “He burned the people close to him to a crisp when he was alive. Along with him,” he says after the pause. He notices an unnatural rustle in the trees, looks ahead at the sound. “Could be him now.”

I don’t like how he’s trying to scare the girls and I tell him so. “Ain’t scaring,” he replies. “Warning. Just like how we warn each other about drones and Gath warriors and hunters. People don’t understand. He can be at more than one place at a time. He can be here, but somewhere else, too.”

“He’s a magician ghost!” exclaims one of the younger girls, unafraid.

Candalon nods. “Uh-huh. He has powers. He’s not a normal ghost.”

“What even is a normal ghost?” someone asks. “Yeah,” says another, “is it someone who we see in a haunted place but who can’t do nothin’?”

Candalon shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that The Wanderer appears without warning, without a trace. And he’ll suck you dry like he’s turning you into a raisin.”

“I’ve never seen a raisin,” I say. So I can’t imagine this description.

“Imagine the oldest person you’ve ever seen,” Candalon says as he looks at me from three people away on my left, his head leaning out. “Then, a hundred million times more wrinkled.”

“Cat!” giggles one of the girls. “No! Beatrice! In that old farm just north of here,” says another. “The one who conjures wolf packs.” Yet another corrects her by saying, “She doesn’t conjure them, stupid. She calls for them. That’s not conjuring. Sheesh.”

You might think of me as evil. But I’m not. Everyone dies someday. Why does it matter how? And how is saving people from the greater evil that is The Gath itself an act of evil? I’m doing them a favor.

I look at the ring of children around the fire and an awareness takes me. I’ve never killed children. I won’t start now. Maybe, I reason, they will somehow stumble into a better life than the adults around them. I won’t take that from them.

But it’s kind of fun to scare them.

Their large fire is impressive. It took them some time to perfect. I blow it out like it’s a candle and they scream as their startled imaginations send them fleeing to their nomadic homes.

I follow one of them. He’s a stout boy, no more than eleven, who has obviously found some way to build carbohydrates into his body during a time of extreme deprivation. He should be quite proud of this feat.

His thick little fingers push open the thick canvas tent of his home where his parents lay huddled together talking. The mother smiles. The dad, looking stern, glances away.

The boy has dark brown skin, mostly his mother's, I guess as I peer at the small family. His tightly curled hair is surprisingly light, almost blonde. Strange. The father has black hair but pale skin. I’ll never fathom genetics.

The boy mutters something as his concerned mother asks him why it is so dark outside the tent. “The fire was quite alive just a few minutes ago,” she says.

The boy shrugs, not wanting to expose his anxiety or the reasons for the children’s sudden flight. He sits on the opposite side of the large tent from his parents and unrolls his bedding. The father, astute, tells him that whatever it is to not be afraid. “I sometimes think that drones can sense fear,” he says.

The boy is not afraid of drones.

The father waves a deck of cards in the air but the boy shakes his head and slides into his bedding. In the morning he’ll wake to the remnants of his parents, each hollowed out and shriveled and looking like petrified human branches.

I’m still sort of seething at Candalon’s stupid stories about The Wanderer. It’s not that I don’t believe the stories. I do. But it’s dumb to scare the girls. Little Becky, she’s only six.

Last week, Nan, she’s eleven, gave me a doll. A boy with a doll, I said to her, isn’t a really great idea. You won’t see me walking around with it.

That’s not the idea, she had said. The doll had a cowboy hat on its head. And a skull for a face. The hat was threaded onto the doll’s head. I wouldn’t be able to take it off unless I tore it off. So I asked her, well, what is the idea?

The doll was made of yarn. Her mom made it, she said. It was supposed to fend off evil spirits. She had given me a pin to stick in it. When I do that, I’m supposed to think of something bad that should happen to the evil spirit. When I asked her why it looked like it did, why it had a skull, she said she didn’t know. Maybe it makes it easier to stick the pin in, she said.

Oh.

My parents are asleep in the tent. It’s cold outside, but my blankets are keeping me warm. I’m grateful for the coverings as I pull them to my neck and reach one arm out for the weird doll. I look it over. Nan said she had one of her own and didn’t need this one when I asked her why she was giving it to me.

I sort of have a crush on Nan. I don’t know what she thinks about me. She’s nice to me. She gave me a doll. But I think it’s just because she’s nice, and maybe just feels sorry for me because I’m pudgy. She’s that way. Kind. Or, she gave me the doll knowing that the other boys would kick the crap out of me if they saw me with it. Which would make her mean.

I don’t think so, though. I don’t think she’s mean.

She walks up to me almost every morning when I go spearfishing in the creek. She waves at me from the embankment but never goes into the water. Asks me about my catch for the day. Sometimes we talk about where our band of people will go next, and where we’ve been.

Nan thinks we’ve traveled 500 miles since we left the city a couple of years ago. I guess that sounds about right, but I don’t really understand what a mile is.

“You’ve seen my mom cut my hair, right?” she said one day. “Well, if you were walking all that time? You’d cover about a mile.”

So. “Our little group of people has traveled about 500 haircuts?” I asked. She giggled at that. I love it when she giggles. She has a high-pitched laugh and it doesn’t sound like she has any control over it. Like something just turns it on and takes over her body until the giggling has completed its course.

I’m looking at the doll she gave me and I feel terrified. Maybe it’s the wind, which is howling and whistling outside. It sounds… well, it sounds like a ghost. I suddenly feel unnaturally cold. It is cold outside, yes, but not that cold.

And something else. It feels like someone is in the tent with us. Watching us. I close my eyes tightly. Then open them. I see my parents cuddling and sleeping.

But it’s weird. Something seems wrong. My mom’s foot is shaking. Just the one foot. What starts as shaking becomes more violent, but it’s still only her foot. The rest of her is perfectly still.

Except… except her mouth is open and pursed, as if she is about to receive a kiss. Not from dad. His back is against her because they are spooning. The arm that was curled around my dad suddenly flops off him onto the ground and it, too, begins to shake. The same way as the foot. Like someone is shaking it for her.

My heart races.

Now she is laying on her back and her hips suddenly thrust into the air. It’s her whole body now that is shaking. Dad is just sleeping through it as if he had been knocked out or something.

Her mouth opens more widely. Then her cheek looks hollowed out like she is making a stupid face with her lips on purpose. Her body becomes still as her cheeks sink into her jaws so far I think she’s going to turn inside out.

That’s when I hear an awful sound, like the wind, but a breath, too, a sucking breath that you might hear after someone has run really fast for, well, about a mile I guess. Not in short spurts like a tired runner but one long continuous breath — deep, hoarse, seemingly originating from so far inside her body that it seems it comes from the middle of the earth.

The breath becomes a long, choking wheeze.

I pull the blankets up against my neck even tighter but then I wave the doll at her for some reason. It’s him, I think to myself. It’s him! The Wanderer is in the tent with us!

I throw my blankets off and sit straight up. The pin. Where is that pin? My hand searches furiously in the spot where the doll had been stored. I can’t find it. My mother is making horrific gasping noises while my father sleeps. I don’t have time to think about how he can sleep through this when I know I must find the pin.

But it’s gone. The pin is gone.

My mother’s feet are turning white.

I stare at the useless doll. Then I shake it towards my mother, demanding that the being that is killing her show himself. I’m afraid, so afraid that I don’t even have words to describe my fear, but I don’t care. I can’t watch my mother die without doing something, even if what I do is foolish and can accomplish nothing.

Then I see it. A being on its knees, holding her head, his lips on hers I think — it’s hard to see from this angle. He’s wearing a cowboy hat just like the one the doll is wearing.

“I see you,” I hiss, trying to sound bolder than I am actually feeling.

His head spins around to look at me. He glares at me like a predator looking up from its kill. His skin is emaciated to such an extent that I can see the contours of his skull. No. Strike that. I can see his skull. The tall straight grimace of decayed teeth and bone.

“I see you!” I scream as I shake the doll at him.

Then the being utters a horrifying scream so high pitched that it hurts my ears, and he disappears into a small cloud of smoke or vapor or steam that trails under and out the tent.

There are times when we are sitting around the fire in the evenings when I want to tell Candalon this real story about The Wanderer. Someday, maybe I will.

Somehow, I think he knows. Everyone heard the sounds that night coming from my tent. These days, I carry the doll with me everywhere I go, and nobody asks me why.

Thank you for reading! This story is part of The MagicLand Chronicles:

Short stories related to my debut novel, MagicLand, but with different characters and stories.

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Tociferous Collonade wore a dark hooded cloak that sometimes worked, carried a staff that rarely did, and wore a pile of unruly black hair that always looked to be a denser forest than the previous day.

“Toq, over here!” his friend and fellow soldier in the Stolen Light was screaming from a fallen building.

Publication Note: This story takes place approximately 1300 years prior to the events in the novel MagicLand.

Tociferous was a Spiritmancer who collected spirits from the mortally injured in battle. Almost like a medic for lost causes, he’d scoop up their souls and trap them in his staff. Or at least try to. His success rate wasn’t the greatest, but he did his best and he was pretty sure that his clients preferred his attempts over the alternative.

If he was unsuccessful, they never knew, but if he was able to acquire their spirits, his clients were grateful to be able to see the war continued through his eyes and contribute their magic to the cause.

The cloak offered him the advantage of invisibility when it worked, and when it didn’t, he’d find himself frequently on the run. The staff was a different matter. It was the energy source for speaking to the spirit world, and Tociferous thought that it sometimes seemed as effective as a square wheel.

But it gave him immense power on those occasions it did work, because it allowed him to absorb the magic of the souls he was able to acquire.

Tociferous ran to his friend, who was summoning stones off a woman lying in the rubble, wheezing her last breath.

“God,” said Tociferous when he looked upon her. “So young. Are you sure nothing can be done to help her?”

“Look,” said Sadonti Merle as he continued to heave the stones away from her body. Her legs were gone. Along with everything beneath the torso. She had seconds to live.

Sadly, Tociferous bent to his knees and took her hand. He looked at Sadonti and said quietly, “If you’d stop lifting those rocks off her she’d maybe have a chance, but once the…” Sadonti grabbed his shoulder and shook his head.

“The dragon,” her mouth spluttered through a cascade of blood, and then she was gone.

Tociferous found himself crassly wondering what kind of magic resided within her as he gently closed eyes that seemed even more terrified in death than during her last moments.

“Dragon?” he said to Sadonti. “Did she say Dragon?”

Sadonti heaved one last stone, threw it far away out of anger, and nodded slowly.

“Never heard that one before.”

“Delusional, probably. Who knows what we see in visions before we die, eh?” said Sadonti.

“Yeah.”

Tociferous rose and surveyed the fallen city. “So many people we could have saved,” he lamented.

“But from what?” Sadonti was kneeling on the ground picking at some rubble. He stood up and held a large piece up to his eyes. “Where do they come from do you think?” he said after a few moments of quiet.

“Where do what come from?”

“Dragons.”

“Nowhere. They don’t exist.”

“I mean the stories. Where do they come from?”

“Oh. I don’t know. Old Earth I guess. Perhaps an animal that once lived when all the others did.”

“Hmm.”

“There are legends of great animals. Four-legged, fast mammals called cats. They were all sizes, and…”

Sadonti interrupted Tociferous with a laugh. “I know about the great cats. And the little ratty ones that still roam the alleys.”

“And beasts with long flexible tubes on their faces.”

“I know about elephants, too,” Sadonti scoffed.

“Alright then. But you see my point. In those days, all different kinds of beasts roamed the earth.”

“Maybe a few dragons lived on?”

Tociferous laughed. “Sky creatures such as they would have a difficult time hiding all these centuries methinks.”

“What if they were created? By the people in the sky?”

Tociferous looked up to the west at the cylindrical moon. It was slowly falling toward the horizon amidst a red haze from the setting sun. The moon was a massive structure, created centuries before by mysterious earthly inhabitants. It was said to be larger than the natural moon. The structure’s blue plating shimmered in the western sky; a floating edifice that acted as a monument to a dead race.

Tociferous wasn’t in the mood to explain dead mythology knowing the cylindrical moon to be an empty shell, so he simply went along with the charade. “But why a dragon? Why not something beyond our imaginings? Like an oversized marshmallow with huge canines and thirty legs or something? I mean, if you can create creatures at will, show a little ingenuity.”

“A marshmallow? What’s a marshmallow?”

“Never mind. You get the point.”

“No, really. What the hell is a marshmallow?”

“It… it’s hard to explain,” said Tociferous, unable to reach for a satisfactory description.

“Try,” said Sadonti as they clambered over the rubble leading to the city's edge.

“Okay, well, imagine a square piece of squishy sugar.”

“No. I’m sorry I asked.”

They started to work their way forward. There wasn’t much left of the city and none of the troops from the Stolen Light had arrived in time to save anyone. But as Tociferous and Sadonti gingerly stepped through the rubble, Tociferous thought that there was too much burning and not enough pure destruction. The Gath were efficient. Rarely did you see such rubble from one of their attacks, which usually rendered buildings to dust.

“Why would one use advanced genetic technology to create marshmallows with legs?” asked Sadonti after some silent walking.

“I think I’d make a buffalo with a scorpion stinger,” answered Tociferous.

“And wings.”

“And horns the size of people.”

“Alright, I guess I get your point. Dragons. Not creative. But still,” and Sadonti again examined the rock he had been holding.

“I’ll admit that the forensics of the destruction are a bit off for a Gath attack,” said Tociferous.

“Any other explanations you can think of?”

Tociferous shook his head. “Proven formula. Large scale and complete destruction has worked for the Gath for 700 years. So, no. This makes no sense.”

The ground, littered with broken masonry from scattered buildings and smaller ancillary stones, crunched beneath them. But Tociferous thought he heard something else. It sounded like air from a woodwind instrument breathing a constant baritone key aimed for an audience that spanned the sky. He signaled Sadonti to halt. “That building there,” he said, pointing to a damaged but stable-looking bell tower that probably belonged to an ancient church. The side of the structure was shaded with an arc of black ash. “Take cover.” The two ran for the building as the sound grew.

Sadonti pointed skywards from behind a wall with a small square window covered with mesh fencing. “Creative enough for you?”

It looked like a massive snake flying through the air at a rate of speed no bird could match. It wasn’t really flying through the air. It was more like the robotic weapons of the Gath shooting across the sky at such tremendous speed that Tociferous found it impossible to track with his eyes. Its length seemed endless as it shot over their heads, the air sounding a deep siren from the creature’s body.

Tociferous shook his staff to try to call forth a spirit to provide some kind of defense in case the creature spotted them. “Shaddannon,” a female voice uttered from his staff. He recognized her. Shaddannon belonged to a spirit he had acquired just a few days prior, after a similar attack, he was now realizing.

There had been no talk of dragons at that battle scene. And it had been a rare win for the magicians, who fended off a brutal attack by hordes of Gath flying ships. “It was the dragon that turned back the Gath,” Shaddannon said through Tociferous’s staff. “Not us.”

“What do you mean?”

She sounded like a high pitched, melancholy echo. “The snake’s flames destroyed their craft, and their craft were no match for the speed of the creature.”

“But how? Where does it come from?”

There was no answer.

“And why does it attack the Gath?”

“The creature consumes every living thing it finds,” said the echo.

“But the Gath use machines.”

“The creature knows. Somehow it knows.”

The endless snaking creature rocketed across the front of the building, blowing debris around its girth and into billowing clouds along its sides, then shot up into the sky before swirling around the building as if trying to wrap itself around the tower at its impossible speed. The beast was coiling around the tower but still moving so fast that Tociferous was unable to discern any patterns on its surface.

“What is it doing?” wondered Sadonti out loud.

“Surrounding us I guess.” Tociferous couldn’t imagine how the creature knew they were in the building unless technology was involved. He took Sadonti by the shoulders. “Do you trust me?” Sadonti nodded. “I’m going to cloak and see if I can divert its attention from you.”

“You mean sacrifice yourself for my benefit. No, Toq, we are a team.”

“Trust me. Today is not my day to die.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No.” Tociferous smiled and disappeared.

He hoped he could summon a Flight spirit, but he had poor confidence in the odds considering he had only a few minutes ago succeeded in summoning Shaddannon, whose powers he didn’t even know. Two quick successes in a row seemed unlikely. But he knew if he ran that his footprints would alter the ground and alert the coiling animal to his movements. He had to try.

Almost before he knew it, he was in flight, holding his staff in front of him and smiling at his luck, wondering who it was he had summoned. Maybe, he thought, after all this practice, I’m finally getting the hang of this. He then considered the possibility that adrenaline had something to do with it. He soared high and watched the beast coil itself around the building. It wasn’t touching the walls. It seemed to be acting like a sentry to prevent anything from escaping.

He shook his staff again, saying, “Shaddannon!” as if in a command or as a vibrant chant. Almost immediately, a thunderhead gathered above, and bolts of lightning stretched across the base of its clouds.

Branches of electricity lit up the clouds and assaulted the snake with pinpoint strikes, causing the beast to shriek horrifically. Its body seized as if captured in a violently epileptic fit, its head spinning and thrusting and careening all about, banging against the ground repeatedly as it desperately tried to regain control of its motor functions. Finally, the snake dropped fully to the ground with a thud.

Tociferous ran back to the bell tower, leaping over the snake with the help of his unknown flight benefactor and staff. When he entered, Sadonti was staring out the window in motionless disbelief. “You did it,” he smiled broadly.

Tociferous looked at his staff. “I didn’t do much,” he grinned.

He was glad the beast was down. But as he looked outside and saw the top edge of the cylindrical moon burrowing below the rubble-strewn horizon, he felt a distinct sense of foreboding. Perhaps the moon was indeed empty. But somewhere, he knew, another enemy lurked. A hibernating enemy that was now waking, and preparing to stalk the lives of Moria.

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As always, thanks for reading! I’m honored you gave me a part of your day.

This is part of the MagicLand Chronicles. You can buy MagicLand wherever books are sold and, of course, at Amazon.

Buy MagicLand at Amazon

Buy MagicLand Somewhere Else

This story is a prequel to my first novel, MagicLand. It takes place about 2,000 years before the events of the novel. Humanity has not yet split into two separate species, augmented humans and magicians.

Unlike most MagicLand short stories, which are told from the perspective of non-augmented humans and/or magicians, this is told from the technologists' perspective. 

The story has political overtones relative to the upcoming election and beyond. This is where we ask ourselves who we want to oversee the emergence of the next generation of AI.

Automated Report for the 2041 Presidential Commission on the Effects of the 2031-2035 Eradication Protocol: Rise of the AI Reich

This report on the Eradication Program of 2031-2035 has been collected within the scope of routine documentation for the automated government report protocol established by President Thiel in 2036. This report should be considered authoritative and canonical. 

After substantial automated discourse and cumulative processing by security algorithms, it was determined that the use of the term AI Reich was acceptable in light of the fact that the subversive originators of the term largely disappeared within the context of the Three Eradications of 2031-2035.

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The resulting depopulation renders continued resistance efforts unlikely and wholly meaningless given the incidental chance (calculated at 1.27%) of renewed resistance. Furthermore, computer modeling consistently demonstrates a less than 0.001% chance that any form of future resistance will succeed.

In sum, the automated government protocol can call itself whatever it wants. 

Note that this section of the report is an abstract. The full report can be found on various servers discoverable on channels throughout the system. Keyword: AI Reich Thiel Report.

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Introduction

The concept that prompted the eradication protocol was a classic Malthusian event theory established by computer models demonstrating that climate change would, within three decades, result in, first, a massive refugee crisis, and, shortly afterward, mass casualties far beyond those of World War Two.

The solution was to create a preemptive solution that acknowledged this scientific inevitability. Rather than fecklessly engage in passive responses resulting in unpredictable levels of violence and political upheaval, the solution was to manage population loss proactively before it became too late to maintain any semblance of control over the problem.

Note that although this report focuses on the Three Eradications of 2031-2035, the eradication protocol is ongoing. These ongoing efforts, however, are generally minor corrections to the few minimal failures of the substantial efforts of 2031-2035 and have little impact on the schematics or final results of the program.

First Eradication

The First Eradication employed a biological agent consisting of a targeted pathogen containing an embedded nano-processor component that, leveraging existing databases at the time,1 eliminated undesirable population segments.

The incentives were obvious: Rather than allowing massive civil upheavals to distribute weakened and undesirable elements of society throughout the globe, it became incumbent upon decision-makers to manage the inevitable rise in mortality so that it favored a more desirable population segment within surviving groups.

Segmented targeting relied on several criteria: socioeconomic standing, education level, income level, and, occasionally, and in some nations, ethnic background. In addition, to improve targeting vectors, deterministic models were developed to evaluate intelligence, education, and motivational levels within the population.

Political considerations in the deterministic model included regime favorability analysis.

During the initial phases of the First Eradication, a secondary antigen embedded with nanobots that targeted undesirable population segments not reached by first-stage efforts systematically improved breeding cycle efficiencies within the general population such that approximately 47% of all undesirables lost fertility within two years.

Distribution vectors for both stages consisted primarily of ground-level nanobot swarm clouds.

Although first-stage eradication efforts resulted in a temporary health crisis triggered by insufficient adjustments to spikes in mortality rates, computer modeling improved body disposal protocols within the first year. Lessons learned from this experience were applied during the Second and Third Eradications.

Second Eradication

During the First Eradication, the world AI government, formed at the behest of President Thiel, established a sweeping augmentation program among the wealthiest citizens. Exponential advances in quantum software and hardware mechanics were generally too expensive to apply to the general population.

The obvious solution was for wealthy citizens to “pay their own way.” As the onboarding process began, advances in such life-extending technologies as CRISPR and neuro-linking microcircuitry designed to communicate with human neurons emphasized the recognition that only a small percentage of the population would be able to afford the new technologies.

However, computer modeling quickly calculated an obvious problem: Essentially, a new breed of humans would emerge from new technological advancements. Therefore, those who could not afford available augmentation procedures would become the equivalent of savage animals in comparison to the newly augmented population.

The phrase zooplex was coined by a generative AI tool created by the will.i.am FYI Messaging Protocol to refer to population centers containing unaugmented humans. Most such population centers had previously been reduced in size to fewer than 1,000 individuals, who typically resided outside of city centers that were inaccessible to non-augmenters.2

In addition, unsubstantiated rumors spread throughout some of the targeted populations claiming that small pockets of resistance were developing metaphysical talents outside the sphere of known science (aka, “magic.”). Despite the scientific impossibility of such assertions, a campaign targeting the source of these rumors and specific population segments where the rumors achieved a density level beyond one percent (1%) was initiated.

This solved two problems: It reduced the potential savagery quotient and addressed hostile dissent.

As zooplexes became increasingly nomadic, monitoring behavior patterns within them became much more difficult as individuals within zooplexes became focused on nondiscovery.

Nevertheless, it was ultimately determined that, rather than possessing magical skills unknown to physical science, the population groups engaging in promoting resistance propaganda were generally opposed to the augmentation routines common to the prevailing population, and were thus making a political statement designed to resist the substantive benefits of augmentation that society as a whole had chosen as humanity’s next evolutionary step.

In other words, rather than magic establishing itself within these population segments, the reality was simply that these population segments promoted a dangerous political statement.

As the targeting process evolved, so did the methodology for improving population metrics. Swarm technology was abandoned in favor of a more visceral approach designed to alter the psychology of individuals within zooplexes. Specifically, this involved a wide variety of “hunter” drones.3

Third Eradication

Although the metrics of the Second Eradication were considered satisfactory, a substantial and stubborn undesirable population segment remained. Zooplexes had, by the end of the Second Eradication, become notorious in the augmented community for creating dangerous conditions for those attempting to establish leisure communities.4

To maintain correct population metrics, enhanced radiation devices (ERD) were deployed in regions with high concentrations of zooplexes. ERDs are low-yield thermonuclear weapons with minimal explosive firepower intended to maximize the lethality of radiation generated by neutrinos associated with the device without causing massive physical damage to surrounding areas.

This allowed for regional administrative areas to preserve architectural treasures throughout the world, which became popular destinations in the augmented community, while simultaneously achieving the goal of removing remaining zooplexes.

This was a somewhat controversial decision. The highly influential leisure community raised significant and legitimate objections pertaining to habitability issues in affected areas. The decision to move forward with the plan was calculated by defense algorithms as a necessary solution to continued pockets of resistance.

Scientific robots are researching ways to allow for safer travel within affected zones so that the original goals of the leisure community can be achieved.

Conclusion

What we have learned is that although no eradication protocol is perfect, we have established several options for handling the small remaining pockets of resistance. A fourth eradication is being considered that will reintroduce fertility targeting, but no final decisions have been made.

Notes

As of this writing, the U.S. Kindle edition of MagicLand is still 50 cents. I don’t control the pricing but Amazon algorithms usually push the price up when sales increase. Sales have ticked up since my first announcement yesterday on this pricing change. So hurry if you want to read the Kindle version! And thank you, as always, for reading.

Buy MagicLand for 50 cents!

My first novel, MagicLand, was published in December 2021. Seems like forever ago, and in the publishing world, it is. One of the accepted clichés in the publishing world is that if a book hasn’t flown off the shelves within a year, it never will. Bookstores begin the shunning process.

These books become relegated to the bargain bin to make way for the newest political memoirs.

It took more than a year, but it looks like my first novel has finally achieved the coveted status of bargain basement.

Buy MagicLand for 50 cents!

This wasn’t my idea. I don’t know if this is an Amazon thing or if my publisher set this price, but I doubt the publisher did without alerting me. I’ve only recently begun receiving royalty statements (averaging about two dollars per month!). So the timing for that would be weird.

Well, my loss is your gain. If you’ve been holding off on checking out MagicLand, here’s your fifty cent chance.

I won’t be partying like it’s my birthday because I can’t afford no Bacardi…

Sorry, got lost there for a minute.

Another truism in the publishing world is that only a tiny percentage of all published books sell more than 1,000 copies. Truth. MagicLand is under 700 last I checked (I rarely review my royalty statements because I don’t enjoy crying).

It’s not like it has received bad reviews.

The scariest one was the first one. I submitted a book review request to Kirkus Reviews, which is not the golden land for author reviews many folks think it is. The general assumption about Kirkus is that they never dole out bad reviews.

But the process works like this: Authors submit their book to Kirkus for review. If the book gets a bad review, the author has the option to make the review private on the Kirkus site. Nobody who isn’t crazy would be okay with letting the review reach the public eye if Kirkus issued a bad review.

Surprisingly, I see mediocre reviews on the Kirkus site. For me, mediocre would be bad. But we all have our individual litmus tests, I guess.

Kirkus said this, though, and I was happy enough1:

“A bracing dystopian tale that deftly mixes magic, evolution, and romance featuring a wiccan priestess and a humanoid who fall in love against all odds.”

Scare over.

Publishers Weekly later surprised me with a review, too. They said2:

“Bastille’s debut artfully combines magic, technology, and romance. . . . [He] handles the multilayered plot well, creating a fascinating world populated with empathetic characters.”

BookTrib also liked it3:

When Feathered Quill wrote the following, I almost contacted the reviewer to see if she wanted money to be my publicist:

MagicLand: A Novel is a high-octane text worth turning the pages to see what lurks ahead. Bastille's deftly-wrought prose is nothing short of sublime. The vivid world-building of artificial intelligence and magical creatures is breathtaking.

MagicLand then became a finalist for a 2023 FeatheredQuill Award.4

I would have preferred an outright win, but I’ll take it. At least I got a bunch of cute stickers (without the 50 cent price):

Here’s the thing, though, about writing and publishing at my age. I’ve written all my life but only recently started trying to get published. I spent most of my career life doing other things. People like Stephen King and other über successful authors earned their good fortune because they did what I didn’t do.

A lot of them did it with an Underwood typewriter and whiteout. I have no idea how they managed to accomplish what they did. No jealousy here. Only admiration.

I had my share of encouragement as a young writer in high school, too. Science Fiction writer Gene Wolfe praised one of my short stories when he visited my high school writer’s workshop class.

But I didn’t follow the writer’s path from there. I wrote novels and stuck them in drawers, and, later, disk drives, while I worked through an art direction and copywriting career, then a software career.

When I edged toward my retirement age, I had one item on my bucket list that was a must-have: Get a book or two out into the world, and whatever happens, happens.

MagicLand did that for me. No bargain basement treatment by Amazon can change that. I’m even working on a sequel for it, even though the masses aren’t clamoring for it.

That’s the life of a writer. We write because we want to be a part of newly-created worlds of our own designs, and, in my case, my characters’ designs, too.

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Notes

I have no idea if the 50 cents is a special temporary price, so if you’re at all interested in MagicLand, now’s the time.

It’s geared toward the younger crowd. That wasn’t my original intent. It just turned out that way. MagicLand is a profanity-free zone. Many of the sales have been to libraries, as this review I received from a reader attests:

Wonderful, clean, thoughtful and thought provoking. I will read this to my grandchildren ages 12, 8 and 4 and I know they will love it!!! I found your book in the city library and now I just have to get a copy for myself. Your book is of the same caliber as the writings of CS Lewis. I look forward to more from you.

So if you’re looking for Game of Thrones-type fantasy, MagicLand is not for you. But for fifty cents, what do you have to lose?

UPDATE: Thanks to Ellen Pepper for pointing out that the Canadian prices are at the original price point. This is presumably true in other countries, such as the U.K. and Australia.

Buy MagicLand for 50 cents!

I’ve been asked by several people how to buy MagicLand if they don’t want to purchase from Amazon, so this is my meta post for that. Generally, you can find it wherever books are sold, to borrow an old catchphrase.

I’ve added some links at the end of this post for your convenience.

What is MagicLand?

MagicLand is my debut novel and a finalist for a 2023 Feathered Quill Award.

Here’s a video I made when it was released:

MagicLand is set 2,000 years in the future long after the über-rich have used expensive augmented technology to claim absolute dominance over those who can’t afford it.

The rest of the world becomes restless, and so the augmented resolve the problem with a series of eradications. That’s the background of the story, more thoroughly covered by stories in The MagicLand Chronicles, which can be found here on Ruminato.

By the time the events of MagicLand unfold, humans have split into two distinct species: Magicians and what are commonly known to us as cyborgs. They’ve been at war for 2,000 years as part of their evolution. MagicLand is about a cyborg who crashlands in MagicLand and falls in love with the young woman who finds him.

It’s had good reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and others, but my favorite review came from a reader who wrote:

“Wonderful, clean, thoughtful and thought-provoking. I will read this to my grandchildren ages 12, 8 and 4 and I know they will love it!!! I found your book in the city library and now I just have to get a copy for myself. Your book is of the same caliber as the writings of CS Lewis. I look forward to more from you.”

I’ve started the second installment of the series and hope to be posting a chapter here soon.

MagicLand is a profanity-free zone, so it’s perfect if you have young folks who need a good read without having to think about that stuff. If you like your tales a little rougher around the edges, Psalm of Vampires might be more up your alley!

Buy MagicLand at your favorite bookseller:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Books A Million

Book No Further

Bookshop

Booktopia

Gibson’s

Google Play

IndieBound

Powell’s

The Nile

Target

Walmart

Waterstones

If any of these links don’t work, please let me know. You should also be able to find it through the bookstore’s search function.

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A special thank you to my new subscribers

And, hey! A special thanks to all my new subscribers. It means a lot to me that you are enjoying my work here, and I encourage you to explore the site, especially if you enjoy fiction. Fiction won’t get stale like political rants, which hopefully will become less frequent after November. Almost all my posts are free to everyone, except some of my novels in progress (none posted yet other than Restive Souls excerpts, which are free to all subscribers).

So a paid subscription is really just a pat on the back and a way to show your support, and very, very much appreciated!

Thank you no matter what the status of your subscription is. It means a lot. If you really want to share the love, share and restack like crazy!

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Author’s note: This is another short story I posted to the Ruminato Substack when I was setting it up, so it didn’t get sent to subscribers. This is part of the MagicLand Chronicles. Like others in the MagicLand realm, it’s a relevant story in an age of oligarchs and tech bros, who in this scenario long ago grew tired of our protestations and simply eliminated us. This story is about survivors of those eradications.

“I’m not from here,” she said. “I’m just some psycho’s invention.”

She was a mermaid. And when she looked up as she said this, I knew where the psycho lived. What had given birth to her.

Genetically engineered, no doubt. Did she have a soul? Her eyes told me yes.

Whoever created her had to have done it at least a hundred years ago. That was how long it had been since anybody had claimed to have had any contact with the people in the cylindrical moon.

The people who lived there had been silent for at least that long. They had treated Earth as a living experiment, dropping their little DNA projects onto the surface of the planet like little genetic bombs.

And then, suddenly, nothing. It’s not like they had been sending emissaries down or anything. They wanted nothing to do with either magicians or The Gath on this planet. To them, Earth was just a lab. Contact was generally an accident. The diminishment of accidents faded into totality over the years.

And the creatures they sent started dying off. New ones stopped appearing.

Did she not age? Was she trapped in this fetid water for eternity? Was she a hundred years old?

And this. This was wanton cruelty by her makers.

She was living in a small shallow pond full of toxic waste. I wondered how she fed. What sustained her.

“I don’t age, and I don’t eat. My body absorbs the food I need” she said, almost as in reply to my thoughts.

“You read minds?”

She shook her head. “It’s a common question. I guessed you were thinking on it.”

I had been hiking through the Biltmore ruins. Biltmore had been famous once, known as a presidio for a Gath warlord before magicians curtailed its habitability.

I had just lost my friend Franklin, who had stumbled into what he thought was what we call a silent drone — which is just a drone that has somehow lost its power or has in some other way become incapacitated.

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Franklin saw a box-shaped device like the kind The Gath employed for surveying a region’s human life, but it was dead quiet. Just a gray box displaying no activity. It didn’t hover a few inches off the ground like they usually did when operational.

People liked to scavenge them because they contained loads of information. Not just on what was left of humanity (there wasn’t much) but a treasure trove of information and books and scientific journals. Sometimes they even stored literature and works from long ago.

Nobody knew why The Gath stored so much information on the devices. Perhaps our common ancestry fascinated them. Perhaps the machines were themselves scavengers of information.

Or, perhaps, I was thinking as I watched Franklin, they did it to lure us closer.

Because that’s what happened. Franklin, excited, rushed towards the thing with gleeful anticipation. I wanted to yell out to him to tell him that there was nothing we could do with its stored information. We weren’t Librarians.

Librarians could lay their hands on the devices and soak in all their information long enough to deliver it to the Oracle. They usually died in the process but they didn’t mind. Especially if there was a Spiritmancer nearby.

But we weren’t Librarians, and we were far away from the Oracle, which was on the Unreachable Coast.

Before I could say anything to him, he was upon the device.

And then it happened. The device flattened itself in an instant and made a buzzing sound as it began to rotate so fast that its motion was a blur. Before another thought entered my head, Franklin was shredded into a red misty storm of a thousand pieces.

I didn’t have time to grieve or even express shock. I had to get out of there.

So I ran through the blighted forests of the Blue Ridge mountains unpursued and found myself at the ruins.

There wasn’t much left in the way of whatever the place had once been. I could make out the general outlines of a broken spire, which peeked out of the ground like a skeletal periscope, but mostly it was nothing more than rubble overgrown with plant life.

Then I saw a large pond. I didn’t expect potable water but I wanted to check it out anyway.

Before I reached the shore her head was bobbing in and out of the water watching me.

I was sure I was hallucinating.

I wasn’t a Librarian, but I was a Scientist. Magicians, of course, are quite leery of Scientists, and so there are few of us. But my magic was chemistry; I was able to read the chemical structures of almost anything just by looking. My skills were always in demand.

We all have our magic. Mine is a little weird.

As soon as I realized that I wasn’t hallucinating, I was able to evaluate the molecular structure of the water the woman was in. It was full of toxins and solvents and chemicals that should have made life impossible.

Magicians wouldn’t have done this, I knew. The Gath must have laid waste to the ruins after the magicians’ attack on Biltmore to make sure nobody came near or tried to repurpose it.

So this is grieving, I thought, again quite sure that I was hallucinating. I didn’t consider that she might be genetically enhanced, but even if I had I would have known that her existence in this toxic soup was a betrayal of known biology.

As she lifted herself out of the water and sat on the shore, I scanned her molecular structure. She was not a drone. She was pure biology. Not a nanowire or bot anywhere inside her.

And she had a tail. Like a mermaid. I knew about mermaids. More specifically, I knew of their myths.

She was completely naked aside from some jewelry, but her tail was such that I wondered about reproduction. She didn’t seem suited for that. Long blue hair mostly covered her breasts but left aspects of them tantalizingly visible. Her skin was an alternating mixture of blue, light brown, and a bruised dark network of scales, some of which seemed to be peeling away.

Her face was ludicrously gorgeous, as if she had been designed to lure victims into the swallowing poison of her home.

I considered this possibility as I approached her, finally concluding that, since I was able to read her cell structure, she couldn’t be a hallucination. My new theory was that she was the work of a Conjurer, and not the sort I would want to get to know.

The problem with that theory was that Conjurors couldn’t do this sort of thing. Could they? Conjurors were more like time manipulators. They couldn’t create living beings.

I wished at that moment for a Psychologist, who could read my mind and tell me why I was losing it.

Before I could get closer she dove into the water. Instead of splashes of water spraying around her dive, there was light mimicking the movement I would have expected from the water. Even the ripples within the water itself spread out as if made out of light, not water.

A trap, surely, I thought. But one doesn’t survive in a world such as ours as long as I have by falling for a trap, no matter how clever.

So I waited, thinking to myself, Waiting for what? The next trap?

“You didn’t follow me,” she said when she popped back up.

“I don’t know who you are. Or what you are, for that matter.”

That’s when she said she wasn’t from here.

“So you’re saying you are a creature of the cylindrical moon?”

She nodded. “I think so. We all are.”

“I’m not,” I said defiantly.

She giggled at that. “No, I mean my people.” She looked over her shoulder and into the water.

“There are more of you?”

“Uh-huh. Lots. Do you want to see the city?”

A trap.

Besides, it would be impossible for me to be in that water and survive more than a few minutes. It was a ludicrous question. I wondered if she knew. But then, I was still wondering if she was real.

“No,” I said.

“I can make you like me.”

“You’re a succubus?”

She laughed again. “No no, what I mean is I can make your appearance like mine” and she dove into the water like a dolphin with her tail splashing a rain of light through the water and air around it.

She came back to the surface.

“You have magic?” I asked.

“Not really. Not like you may think of as magic. I can make you become like me, but it only lasts for a brief length of time. The regeneration of cells reverses itself completely. I don’t know how long it lasts. I don’t measure time. Maybe before your next meal, you’ll transform back. Something like that.”

“I’ll have a tail?”

“Only for a time.”

“That’s truly bizarre.”

“So is everything.”

“Why would you want me to do this?”

“So you can see where I live. And then, after, we will journey to your new home, if you will wish it.”

I looked around. The ruins were surrounded by a forest petrified by some kind of plant toxin that the Gath had been experimenting with. The trees were fully brown but looked full of leaves. They were statutory and unaffected by the wind. The sky was a brown haze, a fall day, clear, but with the usual persistent translucent fog that sometimes bore the chemicals of war.

Anything was better than here. Death roamed every bend, arch, trail, and rock. But still…

“I don’t think I want to, sorry. It just seems like a bad idea. You don't know me, I don’t know you, your people don’t know me, so I may end up some kind of fish food.”

“We don’t eat,” she said, somehow getting the reference. Right, she’s already said that. Where are my manners?

My new theory was that she was some kind of Gath weapon. Had they mastered genetic engineering? I had thought that it had been banned by their society because of the Piltdown Man Accident,1 but maybe things changed.

Despite her claim of some big city in the filthy pond, which was a ludicrous statement, or maybe because of it, she looked terribly lonely. Her eyes looked haunted by a form of loneliness that, despite my significant losses over the last few years, was probably unimaginable to me.

Because the reality was this: She was probably a genetically manufactured creature created for the amusement of an individual with a very poor sense of humor and, so, she was left here, forgotten, to live in her tiny, empty kingdom. Alone.

How do you even talk to someone like that? I felt an unmistakable longing to try to comfort her, but I had no idea how.

I began to consider that because this world we live in was so full of hopelessness, nothing but a daily fight for survival, a fight I knew I’d eventually lose, perhaps a different outlook was required. Maybe, I thought, I should redefine the word “opportunity,” if I had ever in fact defined it.

So I started to talk to her, to try to find out what she did during her days and nights.

She told me grand tales of celebrations and water dancing and wild, playful games that her people played. Stories that were not possible but somehow, from the way she told them, were believable.

She pointed to a bracelet wrapped loosely above the end of her tail. “My friend Maura made this for me,” she said softly. “It’s my favorite thing in the whole world.”

It looked to be made of pearls but there could be no pearls in that water. I scanned it. It was pearl.

Opportunity. In this case, the opportunity to simply do something out of the ordinary. So what if I died doing it? I was going to die anyway, probably much sooner than I’d like. Probably unpleasantly.

“Take me there,” I finally said.

She beamed an illustrious smile whiter than any set of pearls could ever be.

Before I could wonder if the transformation she had spoken of would hurt, I had a tail. That was weird. I was standing in front of her as she looked at me from the water, and I crumpled to the ground, which made her laugh more than I would have liked.

“You can get in the water now,” she said assuringly.

I wasn’t convinced.

“It’s the only way to see my city.”

I doubted the water was as deep as my own height. I shrugged and used my elbows to crawl towards her, my new tail lagging behind in the mud.

I looked into her eyes and noticed for the first time that they were like glimmering topaz. I was astounded at her beauty, wondering about how much of a fool I was showing myself to be.

She took my hand.

I gulped, most likely rather pronouncedly, as she led me into the water.

We dove into the brown toxins, which began as a watery bramble but quickly became a clear blue exposition of lush plant and water life I could never have imagined.

Fish of all shapes and colors darted about, floated and hovered, kissed green rock, frolicked and played. Long wavering extrusions of plant life danced as we plunged into darker water.

The floor of the sea, which this suddenly and miraculously surely was, began to disappear.

I marveled at the sunlight failing its wide patterns as we descended.

I could not understand what was happening.

“Be patient,” she whispered audibly, impossibly.

Refer a friend

Then I saw it. A massive city lit by some kind of natural illumination. Its buildings looked alive, as if they were constructed out of undersea plant life specifically designed for its residents.

Long tendrils acted as bridges. Massive stumps of tree-like plants rose majestically within the water, carved with windows and emitting the same kind of natural light that I had seen when the mermaid had splashed on the water’s surface. The windows didn’t look carved by human hands but appeared instead as if nature had provided them.

The trees were linked together by soft, thick branches. There were hundreds of these trees, I reckoned. Two massive whales seemed to be guarding an entry, which consisted of a wide gap in the undersea forest.

I wondered if we were going in but she interrupted my thoughts with another audible whisper. “No, no,” she said. “I just wanted you to see what possibility looks like.”

We continued on, past the city.

We swam past thick clouds of fish, past dolphins, past sharks and tuna and swordfish and barracuda.

A large white light began to make itself known through the dark waters. We were upon it quickly, my hand still in hers. It was as if she had been charged with an accelerant of some kind that sped us to the light, which looked like a bright hole in the sea.

“We have to hurry,” she said. “Before the regeneration reverses itself.” The light was so bright I could no longer look at it, and before I could react to her comment we were through.

My body began to feel constricted as if I was being crushed by a large vice. My heart raced. I could feel myself begin to want to gasp for air and I nearly swallowed water.

“It’s happening sooner than I thought,” she whispered. To this day I don’t know if those whispers were simply introduced to my own thoughts, or if they somehow carried through the water to my ears. “Don’t breathe,” she said. “Hold your breath. We’re almost there.”

And sure enough, we were. The light had been a tunnel of some kind, but structured in such a way that it was as if it had ended as soon as it began. Before I could process any of this, she led me to a rocky shore.

I looked up and saw a large vermillion bridge.

“You’ve arrived,” she said.

My tail began to morph into legs. “Where?” I asked.

“Moria.”

I shook my head. “I don’t see a city.”

“It’s just past that small cliff above.”

Two robed women appeared out of a small clump of trees.

“Welcome to Moria,” said one of them.

“Wait, the land of magic on the Unreachable Coast?”

The two women looked at each other, and smiled.

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Author’s note: This is part of the MagicLand Chronicles. It’s another relevant story in an age of oligarchs and tech bros, who in this scenario long ago grew tired of our protestations and simply eliminated us. This story is about survivors of those eradications.

Mary Catches Fire for Free

Chance is so old she wears her skin as if it could all peel off tonight in her sleep. But her stories make us happy enough we’d die to protect her. And her peeling skin.

“For centuries, our people were at the mercy of The Gath,” she is telling us tonight around a large fire. “But this is changing. The firecatchers have found a way forward. They have met an impossible challenge. It is as if they have reversed the horizon of the setting sun or added another moon to our skies. It is as if they have changed the nature of the atom itself.”

She’s talking, of course, about the nukes. The Gath built huge cities away from ours. What few we have. And then… Well, I’ll let Chance tell it.

“The story really begins with a young girl,” says Chance, chewing on a long reed coated in sugar. That’s her thing. Reeds of sugar.

“She didn’t know much, this girl, truth be told. Some thought she was as dumb as a mule’s tailbone. Not a whit of wit. Stone cold stares like she couldn’t think a word up for nothing. Just a young thing, too. Couldn’t a been more than ten, eleven.

“Well one day, she’s watching the other kids play. As usual, she wasn’t, how should I say, invited? You know how children can be. She wasn’t one of those children that other children invited to the party, so to speak. Well then. There she was just watching, when out of the sky comes a fireball the size of an apple tree.

“Just came out of nowhere, it did. No drones in the sky, nothing like that. It appeared out of nowhere. Like it was done by magic. But it wasn’t. Not magic. It was just another evolution in Gath weaponry. Each generation of weapons, you know, it just got worse and worse.

“But we didn’t know it at the time, no, we didn’t know what that thing was. Like I said, it came out of nowhere, starting out real small like, then grew and grew to the size of a tree as it came near, and then the strangest thing, the strangest thing in a long time happened next.

“This little girl Mary, she just raised her hands all up in the air like this,” and Chance stretches both palms up to the sky, “you know, maybe to protect herself even though of course there was no protection. But just instinct or something. It’s just sort of natural to want to do that I think. Put your hands up in front of you to stop that thing that is about to hurt you.

“And then, well, that fireball, it just stopped in midair, it did. I saw it, I did, just like I see you all sittin’ here. And Mary, she stood up and walked up to it. It was right about at her height, a little above her. And she walked up to it and stared at the thing like she was studying it.

“She circled around it, stared at it some more, circled around more, stared at it more. And then she takes her hands, and lifts them up from her waist side like so, and swoosh! Up go her hands, palms facing the sky, and that fireball shoots off so fast you couldn’t barely see it as it trailed off up into the sky in a long, curving arch that curled high up into the air and then into the horizon, leaving a beautiful contrail behind it.

“You can bet that got their attention. It did. Suddenly everyone wanted to be her friend. The quiet little thing seemed indifferent to all that, however. Didn’t seem to care about friend or foe. Didn’t seem to grasp the importance of what she had just done.

“Funny how such a thing changed our world. Changed everything. Gave us more than a chance at survival. Gave us our planet back, pretty close anyway.”

Chance looks up at the clear night sky. Soaks in the quiet night air that itself seems to be listening to the crackling embers of the bonfire.

“But at a terrible cost. Poor child. If she had known the cost…

“At first, you know, she hired out her services. This little eleven, then twelve, then thirteen-year-old girl became known everywhere for this unique talent, and she’d help out anyone, but she bargained and bartered and made her village a bit wealthy by most standards. If such a thing can be in this land.

“The fireballs seemed to get bigger and bigger, but she still was able to stop them. And a few others learned how, too.

“Then it so happened that a large city just north of her village was wiped out. People from the north — they said it was a big fireball that did it. Big enough you could see it from miles away.

“And when Mary heard that, well, she just had to see for herself, but they wouldn’t let her go, said the fire ash would kill her even if it wasn’t hot. She couldn’t understand how that could be and she resisted but the stories coming back from up north painted a good enough picture for her eventually.

“And she didn’t need to see it for herself. A whole city. Incinerated in a flash of light. And Mary, she couldn’t sleep after that and she tossed and turned and got herself skinnier than she already was because she couldn’t eat, neither, and I tell y’all she was already thinner than this here reed.”

Chance snaps a bit of the reed off with her teeth and chews.

“Some of us thought she was gonna just die in her bed, we did. She couldn’t get out of bed after hearing those stories from the north. Couldn’t a moved if you prodded her with a spear I don’t think.

“Well then. One day, Mary, she was sitting in front of a fire, just like we all here, but by herself. Just on her lonesome, you know. And this bonfire she sat in front of was a big old thing, and she was looking into it like we are looking into this one here.

“Just then, the flame died in an instant, and Mary was sitting cross-legged with her arms out juggling all these small fireballs in her hands, but it was the craziest thing because there must a been twenty of them and she was juggling them all somehow and then, she threw them toward where that fire was, threw them all.

“Now, the fireballs, they got thrown, but they didn’t. That is a hard one to explain. They suspended themselves in the air, and when they did, a city appeared in the middle of the embers of her fire. It wasn’t a real city, mind you. It was more like, I don’t know how to say this. It was like a representation of a city, three-dimensional, but small, as if a child’s toy model of one, if there ever was such a thing.

“But it wavered as if it was made of light, and I could see through it just a bit, not transparent, mind you, but not opaque, either. One of the suspended fireballs hurled itself at the city and a huge cloud rose up from that city. That cloud? It looked like a toadstool, or a mushroom full of light and thunder.

“That cloud enveloped the little city completely. When the cloud dissipated, the city was a ruin. What buildings remained were skeletons. Such a sight. Such a sight.”

“That’s how it started?” I ask.

“Pretty much, that’s it,” says Chance. “How that child knew about those fireballs about to rain down on our cities is still beyond anybody’s imagination or understanding. How she knew to throw them back at the cities of the enemies is, too. Just a mystery. A wonderful, deep mystery.”

“It’s all about time,” says Mary.

She’s a grown woman now, and I’m a grown man, and we are sometimes lovers, and I’ve never questioned my luck at how I ricocheted through life into a relationship with a legend.

“What do you mean?” I ask. Sometimes I ask her how she did it. How she controlled the atom more thoroughly than the nuclear scientists from centuries ago who turned it into such a fierce weapon.

“When people ask me how I do it? I can’t really say. I don’t really know. But it’s about time somehow. Like a lot of magic these days, you know? We manipulate time like a baker kneads bread. We all do it. It’s what the firestarters do. Conjurers and acquirers. Everybody.”

I nod at this. When a Gath drone approaches me I can freeze it. Prevent it from moving. It’s time manipulation. I send it on an endless loop that takes it back in time for a millisecond, then forward, then back again. The drone moves a tiny amount, but then back, in a way unnoticed by the human eye.

“I don’t understand how you can do something you don’t understand how to do,” I say. I usually don’t do this with Mary, but I take her hand and kiss it. I look at her not knowing what possessed me to do it.

She smiles as she looks at her hand in mine, then withdraws it. She’s not big on intimacy. “I don’t, either,” she says. “It’s magic, I guess.”

“But all magic has an underlying science to it.”

“There’s much more to it than science,” she says as she looks up. I understand the symbolism of her looking up.

“Yeah, I guess. But I don’t believe in God. A God that has allowed all this to happen? To us? And now,” I added, not wanting to make her feel bad but unable to halt the conversation, “to them?”

“It was us or them, and now it’s them.”

Chance had been right all those years ago when she told the others and me about how the Gath had nearly destroyed us. They had stalked us for centuries, wiping out most of us through designer pathogens and then hunting down the rest of us with drones.

We persevered. Built cities. Found ways to defend them through magic. Then, a few of those cities burned. The Gath decided to unleash nuclear weapons on our cities to finish us off for good. They knew many of us preferred the forests and the hills and places where remnants lived something close to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but they didn’t mind that so much. They enjoyed hunting such stragglers for sport.

And then along came Mary.1

The fireballs turned back onto the Gath’s own cities. They had no idea what was happening as they unleashed one after another, destroying dozens of their cities and laying waste to the earth’s landscape.

“I feel no guilt,” she says confidently but unconvincingly. I know if I took her hand right now to offer her comfort she’d pull it back as if I was a viper.

Of course, neither of us would be here in this moment if she hadn’t done what she had done. But how does one bear the burden of millions of deaths? Especially when you delivered that fate as a child?

That is why we are sometime lovers. She cannot give me more than that. When I gaze into her eyes she always looks away after a brief moment, unable to sustain the touch such a soulful tenderness expresses.

If I was a praying man, I would pray for her every night. As it is, I give thanks to her quietly in a whisper under my breath that only my soul can hear.

This is part of the MagicLand Chronicles. You can buy MagicLand, a 2023 Featured Quill Award finalist, wherever books are sold and, of course, at Amazon.

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1

A wonderful cover of “Along Came Mary” from Supertramp’s lead vocalist.

Until now.

The story of how I created an app that captures the images of these beings is one born out of an accident.

It happened during what some people call The Eradication.

Magic, the ultimate weapon of the resistance fighter, didn’t just start happening. At least, that’s not how I look at it.

When people began to download MagicAct and see real, live, images of angels and demons, a big segment of humanity began to tap into that part of our universe. It’s a part of our universe that has always been there. The only reason it has been out of reach is that people didn’t believe.

People began taking pictures of the beings who are responsible for so-called coincidences. Next, they began to tap into their power.

It is giving us a fighting chance in this Eradication. It is giving us hope.

“It works like this.” I was showing it to Zor, who likes to say his real name is his online name, “ballsyUnicorn”, which probably tells you all you need to know about Zor.

I mean, Zor is the type of dude who spent hours online watching twenty-year-old girls dance on Twitch, joining various streams of comments with remarks that didn’t quite get him blocked. That was before the Eradication started. You’d expect that a dude like that isn’t going to last long, but here he is. Sometimes you just never know what’s inside a person until a crisis hits.

I attached a lens piece to my iPhone. We — my company, were able to get it approved for sale by marketing it as a zone analysis tool. The little lens attachment was supposed to analyze a zone to determine the number of Eradication survivors, and send reports to The Bureau.

Some zones are supposed to be completely free of people, and the idea was that the tool would be used as a citizen’s spyglass of sorts. When it didn’t work as advertised, the government simply ignored it.

“We worked with these dudes out of Switzerland,” I was saying to Zor. “This thing captures at a frame rate equivalent to five trillion images per second. It can capture things moving faster than light into images.” My company wrote the software, the Swiss produced the camera and my friends in Bangalore developed the chip.

“So? I mean, what’s the point?” Zor. Always the deep thinker.

“Well, most phone cameras do about 120 frames per second. On a good day. See, the device here encrypts flashes of light. Every time one of these coded flashes hits an object, the object bounces an image signal containing the same precise encoding. Then, all the image signals are gathered into one single photograph. You know, one frame. Then the chip inside the device separates all these signals into individual image frames.” Really fast, I didn’t bother saying.

“Outstanding,” said Zor sarcastically. He was probably trying and failing to imagine a girl dancing at the speed of light, and completely unable to see the utility in this.

Honestly? I didn’t see much utility in it, either. The project was a bit of a lark. Something to do.

Most of the things still happening on the internet were similarly random, happening through cell towers and neighborhood antennas strung up and torn down by the authorities and strung up again. It was all very clandestine. These days it is almost all gone but not before the app had managed to accomplish its unplanned mission. The internet still worked. Things could go viral.

And they did.

And the angels have spoken.

Enough people bought the device and app that they began to take very interesting pictures and movies. Demons entering the mouths of their hosts. Or swirling wildly around people in motion as if trying to guide them. Crowds of them would gather around politicians and military personnel and the people who supervised the Eradication bots.

Some of the apparitions that were captured in these images moved without moving. If they appeared still, they were not, in truth, still at all.

They existed in one part of a movie in one space for an infinitesimal moment, then in another moment in just the slightest different position. It was as if they were part of an edited video. It was as if they were lifted out of their space and dropped into the exact same position one millimeter apart from the original place.

But what they were really doing was moving place to place at speeds we can’t see with the human eye.

These differences were only discovered through analysis by dedicated servants of a still uncertain cause. You couldn’t see the changes with the naked eye, not really. You needed video capturing software to find the tiny displacements.

I can’t tell you what inspired people to analyze these things. Maybe it was just the bizarre nature of the images. A good many people assumed they were staged. But the recorded sightings became so common that people realized that they were real.

The demons, especially the demons, were everywhere. Swarms of them, like a pestilence, haunting everyone and everything, twenty-four hours a day.

People stopped analyzing and just focused on shooting and distributing their shots over what was left of the internet.

Angels were seen, too, but they seemed rare. And, frustratingly, they didn’t seem to be interfering much with demonic activity. It was like they just allowed this invasion to happen. Most people eventually concluded that the invasion was simply a permanent presence.

One person posted an image of a huge angel, a grey man with a beard and a wildly colored costume, whose presence consumed an entire hospital room as he rested his hand on the forehead of a small child. It is said that the image made a million people cry.

It is also said that it was the beginning of the human migration to a place dubbed MagicLand. Not a place, a thing. A way to tap into the magic of the good souls of the universe. A way to fight back.

Buy MagicLand

Eureka Mounds felt his heart race as he ran under the ancient bridge. The bridge was covered in vegetation and vines, but he could see concrete railings that must have been designed to keep Old Earth vehicles from crashing to his current vantage point.

The Gath leapt over mounds and fallen trees with ease as Eureka sought shelter. He didn’t see any. The viaduct was nothing more than a break from the relentless sunlight. It offered no sanctuary from the quickly approaching Gath, who ran with the speed of a gazelle.

Eureka was armed with nothing but a long sword. He didn’t know its history as a Sumarai weapon kept by a rich hobbyist from before the Eradications. All he knew was the lethal sharpness of its blade.

But his opponent was a bipedal weapons system, a humanoid equipped with enough weaponry to knock dead a platoon of Eureka’s kind. The sides of the viaduct offered no respite. Its sturdy walls were plain and filthy from storms and weather that demonstrated a long test of time, but they weren’t a hiding space. He saw no tree lines in the immediate distance, but he would not have been able to outrun a Gath running at even a tenth of its capabilities even if he did.

Worst of all, Eureka was a lousy magician. He couldn’t conjure a spell for better hair, much less to kill a Gath. Survival of the fittest, he grunted to himself. Well, I guess this is it.

In a macabre way, it made sense to Eureka that natural selection should run its course this way. Anyone with such weak magical powers was not likely to survive this world, and that was that.

So he decided he would simply make his stand, and offer up his death in full resistance to his kind’s hated enemy.

Eureka doubted that the Gath would notice his last moment of defiance when falling to whatever terrible weapon the Gath chose. For the Gath, killing was as routine as a drink of water or the scratch of an itch. If an ant were to lay on its back and try to fend off a human foot with all six legs, would the owner of the foot notice?

The Gath nearly upon him, Eureka crouched with his sword up and out in front of him in a pitiful display of courage. Would he even feel being vaporized by this Gath’s weaponry?

The Gath offered no satisfaction in their administration of death. Eureka wanted to feel something before he died. A gut wound, or a blow to the head, but he knew he’d instead momentarily morph into a cloud of bloody dust particles.

Sword up, Eureka waited for his final moment.

It never came. The Gath stopped in its tracks, its distinctly humanoid body, a look that always surprised Eureka, frozen as if chilled into an ice figure. Nothing moved, not even the frayed filigree of its sleeves in what had become a windy day.

“Don’t move!” yelled a woman’s voice from the other side of the viaduct. “Don’t move your sword! It is a Blade of Time! Do NOT move!”

Eureka forced himself into a state almost as frozen as his Gath enemy. He didn’t turn to look as he heard footsteps running against gravel and branches, approaching quickly.

“Walk very slowly towards the heinous creature,” commanded the voice as it neared. “With your arms displaying the sword precisely as you are doing now.”

Eureka did so.

“Good,” she said as Eureka neared the ghastly thing. “Now, off with his head!”

“You know it’ll just grow back,” objected Eureka, but hopeful a few moments of extra time might save his life.

“Do it!” she insisted loudly.

Eureka pulled his sword to his chest, then reared it back and to his right, then with a long swoop, sliced at the creature, but the head only partially severed. Eureka cursed and repeated the motion from the other side, and the head bounced onto the ancient weed-covered pavement.

The woman was a beauty, Eureka now noticed, with dark brown skin and metal jewelry embedded into her forehead. Braided hair fell to her waist.

She was gleeful as she kicked the Gath head with a foot covered in an ice blue moccasin studded with emeralds. He couldn’t imagine who she was, but she was amazing.

“Why isn’t he growing another head?” he asked with the innocence of a child.

“I won’t let him,” she said proudly with her hands on her hips as she stared at the corpse with the missing head.

Eureka had to laugh at that. “What do you mean you won’t let him?” He laughed again. “What gives you say over his biology?”

“I don’t know,” she said, smiling at Eureka. “A power that doesn’t belong to me, or to you. But that sword of yours, maybe it knows. There’s some power in that sword of yours, I can say that.”

“I come from a family of sword wielders,” he said. There was more truth to that than even he knew. Eureka had come from a long line of sword collectors and aficionados, but he had never known any of them. He never had any awareness whatsoever of any of their talents.

“All I know,” said the woman, “is that I can mess with their bioelectricity to circumvent their regenerative capabilities. I discovered it one day in the forests north of here.”

“There are forests nearby?”

She nodded quickly. “Uh-huh.” She looked sad for a moment before asking softly, “How long have you been alone?”

Eureka shook his head, not wanting to answer.

She nodded her head. “Well. Anyway, I got lucky one day. A Gath had me pinned to a wall. I guess its weapons systems were failing or something because it could have killed me long before that. And my companion at the time snuck behind it with a machete and lopped that head right off, he did.”

She made a swishing noise with her tongue against her teeth. “Well of course I knew that would buy me about five minutes of time, so I began to run, but before I did, I yelled out, ‘and stay off!’ I just imagined that head off permanently.

“Two weeks later I returned to the spot because it was a food storage depot serving the Northland, and its body was still there. It was the craziest thing. And I’ve found out since then that I have this power. All I gotta do is think it, and it happens.”

“Think what?”

“I just visualize it, you know? If the creature dies, no matter how it dies, it can’t regenerate in any way if I just imagine it, you know, dead.”

“You can imagine them dead, and they die?”

She shook her head. “No. I wish. That would make me one powerful woman, huh?” She laughed. She had an upper row of white teeth that looked like they had been carved by an artist with a perfect eye towards geometry. “No, alls I do is stop them from regenerating.”

“That’s still a pretty big deal,” said Eureka.

“It helps. Yeah. I’m likin’ it.” She gave the head another kick. “God I hate these things. But get this. And you won’t believe me unless I show you.”

“Okay. Show me.” He was liking her more with every word out of her mouth.

“See that tree just yonder?” she pointed to a lone adult elm in a small grove of small trees set apart within the flat grassland.

Eureka nodded.

“Go and cut me off a branch. A big one, as thick as you can reach.”

That was a strange request, but he was at the point where he thought he’d stand on his head for her, so he obliged. He returned with a thick branch full of leaves but few smaller branches.

“Perfect,” she said, as he handed it to her. She bent down and slid the thickest end of the branch firmly against the neck of the fallen Gath. “This part is fun,” she cackled.

Within a few moments, the Gath’s palms slammed into the ground, its elbows bent as if to push himself up, and Eureka swore loudly. “It’s alive!” He wanted to hack at it with his sword, but the woman said, “No! Watch!”

The Gath pushed itself off the ground and began to stumble around, with the tree limb now growing firmly from its neck. The woman cackled some more. “I can use its own bioelectricity to convince its cells that it is supposed to grow a tree branch from its neck instead of a head, using the beast’s molecular biology to change its cell structure.” She whispered loudly, “Don’t ask me how I know this. I just do.”

The Gath flailed around wildly as it stumbled around under the viaduct, looking ridiculous with the tree limb protruding from its neck.

“He’s nothing but a treehead now,” she giggled.

Eureka was speechless. “And my sword,” he finally said after the woman stopped laughing at the ludicrous sight of the Gath’s helpless wanderings. “You said my sword is a Blade of Time. What does that mean?”

“Your sword kept the Gath moving one second back in time, then one second forward, then one second back, repeating over and over again, so that it remained in that one position. If you look really carefully when it is happening, you can just barely see the victim flicker. It’s almost as cool as grafting a tree limb onto a Gath neck.”

He stared at her, awed by her beauty and her words and her magic.

“It has the effect,” she said, “of freezing the victim in place.” She stopped for a moment, then said, “We would make a good team, you and I, at least until we get to MagicLand.”

His heart pounded.

“MagicLand? What is that? Where is MagicLand?”

Thanks for reading!

This is part of the MagicLand Chronicles. You can buy MagicLand, a 2023 Featured Quill Award finalist, wherever books are sold and, of course, at Amazon.

Buy MagicLand