Pete’s Plea
by Roderick Heim
“Stogie?” Vinnie asked, proffering a wood-carved box full of plump, sausage-sized cigars. The lid hung open, supported by two ribbon hinges. The ajar box looked like a gaping clam, the contents its precious masterwork. Pete had a feeling there was a story behind these cigars.
“No thanks,” Pete replied. Pete only smoked off-brand cigarettes like Premium Dream and couldn’t afford to acquire a taste for cigars.
A loud pop issued from the fireplace. Pete remembered his grandfather telling him that you could determine how much longer a fire log would last based on the time between each pop.
“They’re from Brazil, which is spanking Cuba in cigar sales these days,” Vinnie said. “Picked them up there myself.” Pete knew that Vinnie was trying to change the subject; no feat for a man like Vinnie, who had enough exploits to put Tom Sawyer to shame.
“When were you in Brazil?” Pete asked, deciding to take the bait. Pete had been friends with Vinnie for long enough to know that he only listened after he’d first gotten a chance to speak. And today more than ever, Vinnie needed to listen. His life depended on it. But how to convey that without sounding melodramatic?
“Last summer. Probably nicer there at this time of year, though,” he said, gazing out of the window at the snowswept night. It was coming down like Christmas day, and it was only October. Vinnie continued, “The week I spent there turned out being a hot spell. Came back looking like a sun-dried tomato.”
Pete forced a smile. Vinnie leaned over the armrest of his overstuffed armchair and selected a cigar from the box. He fished a stainless steel butane lighter out of his pocket and flipped it open. Once the cigar caught, Vinnie blew out the indigo dagger of flame and settled back into his chair and puffed away industriously as a freight train. That was old Vinnie for you. When he set out to do something he did it, on the double. No drink he poured was ever left undrunk; no cigar he lit ever got tossed even partially unsmoked. Pete could only hope that reckless old Vinnie hadn’t set out to do the one thing his daredevil reflexes couldn’t save him from.
A gale of wind moaned through the eaves, causing the flames in the hearth to dance feverishly.
“You know what Brazil has that we don’t?” Vinnie said.
“Besides sun and tourists?” Pete joked. He was hardly in the mood to crack jokes but knew that Vinnie was more likely to bend to his wishes if he was in high spirits.
“Well that goes without saying,” Vinnie chuckled. “They’ve got trees—everywhere. Storefronts, houses, bus stops; you name it and a tree’s within spitting distance.”
“No kidding?”
“Nope; they use them for shade. We’ve got patio umbrellas, awnings, baseball caps, and even those little umbrella caps…they’ve got trees. Nearly a canopy of them.”
“And you found the one break in the canopy to get burned in?” Pete ribbed.
“Well, you can’t plant trees in the ocean. What was I going to do, let those fifteen-foot waves go to waste?”
“I guess not. Not you, Vin,” Pete said, realizing that now was the perfect time to put on his concerned friend cap. “Which is why I’m here—to cover your back.”
“Yes, even when there’s nothing behind me,” Vinnie said. “Like that tree you were wigging out over last week. What got into you?” Vinnie asked, smiling good-naturedly.
Pete’s heart skipped a beat. The tree was still on Vinnie’s mind.
“Look, Vin, we’ve known each other for some 20 odd years, and I know you don’t back down from a challenge. I just want you to know that this tree isn’t something to compete with. The game’s rigged in its favor.”
Vinnie dropped his cigar in an ashtray and exhaled the smoke through his nostrils, looking pensive. “Yes. I talked to the guy whose land it’s on. He was also convinced it was haunted or possessed or whatever the terminology is in the esteemed field of paranormal research.”
“Vin, I’m not trying to spook you because I know you’re unshakable…but did old McElroy tell you the tree’s history? The stuff that didn’t make it in the paper?”
“You mean besides the one thing that made it in the paper?” Vinnie said, drawing the cigar back to his lips.
“Two made it to the paper. One is corroborated by the coroner in the Gazette, which McElroy probably showed you. The other’s in the Sentinel.”
“The tabloid, you mean,” Vinnie protested loudly. Pete could smell the sour aroma of cigar smoke mixed with spirits.
“Call it what you like, no one else has a better explanation of what happened to the homeless man who lived by the train station.”
“Oh, so now he’s a homeless man? I vaguely remember you coining him a nickname—something like Hobo Harry.”
Pete blushed. He was not proud of that. “Yes, I called him that, before he passed away—which according to the Sentinel, happened in that tree.”
“Spare me the lecture, Pete; you remind me of Sister Abernathy telling us not to walk on curbs when we were kids. What’s become of you, Petie?” he said with a broad smile.
“If you won’t do it for yourself then do it for my peace of mind,” Pete pleaded.
“Look, there’s nothing I haven’t heard about it. No startling revelation you’re going to let me in on that’ll suddenly inspire some fear and respect in me. I’ve heard it all—how it’s an apple tree but it rarely bore fruit; how one of the few seasons it did yield apples, McElroy’s German shepherd ate one and went to the big doghouse in the sky; how the Evans twins got drunk and wrapped their Mustang around it; even how that bum climbed up it for a ripe one he’d spotted and broke his neck on the way down. I’ve heard it all.”
“You’re missing one thing,” Pete said, yawning. It was half past two in the morning. “Did McElroy tell you about how the tree had grown over his father’s grave?”
Vinnie leaned forward. Pete clearly had his attention.
“McElroy’s dad was a drunk. Spent time at the county for beating his wife. When he died, McElroy didn’t even want to spend money on a gravestone for him. So he buried him out on that remote plot of land near the overpass where the Evans crashed. Right where that tree is now.”
“Go on,” Vinnie said through a drawn-out yawn. Between the booze and the sandman the two of them were struggling to fight off sleep.
“What more’s there to say, Vin? The tree’s roots are tangled up in that evil old man’s corpse…sucking its nutrients from him. When the tree came up, McElroy wouldn’t admit it, but everyone says he just ignored it—didn’t want to think about his old man. So he let it grow.”
“So?” Vinnie said, leaning his head against one of the wings of his overstuffed armchair. Pete was losing him.
“So…I don’t know anything about ghosts, but if there was a thing that’s haunted, wouldn’t that be it? Even if it’s harmless, what’s there to gain from tampering with that tree, from cutting it down like you wanted to do?”
“Warmth,” Vinnie said softly, taking a long drag from his cigar, which sent him into a racking coughs. He tossed the cigar in the hearth. Pete watched dazedly as the flames greedily consumed the stump of remaining cigar.
“Stolen firewood smells sweeter,” Vinnie said, nodding to the fire with a wry grin.
Peter stared at Vinnie, aghast.
“Show some appreciation, Pete. It kept us—” Vinnie paused to wheeze. “It kept us warm tonight.”
Pete started from his chair but felt as though his legs were made of Jell-O. He collapsed and lie supine on Vinnie’s bearskin rug, the one he’d shot and dried himself. The smoke from the fire was so thick that it made his eyes water.
“You think I’d leave all fifty feet…of wood to waste?” Vinnie mumbled, barely coherent.
Pete felt as though he were underwater, everything moving slow and ponderously around him. Addled beyond all reason, Pete said at last: “No…not you…Vin.”
Author bio: Roderick Heim confesses this story is based on a real legend involving a real tree that he really really hopes he never touches.
Editor: You thought getting sand in your shoes was bad?
"Through a Sand-Stained Lens"
by Chris Mort
‘I can still remember how that music used to make me smile…’
Jamal hummed absent-mindedly along with the old tune, which emanated from a Chevy Tahoe mired in sand.
He squinted against a sudden gale of sand and thought: So much for nuclear winter.
The skyscraper’s skeletal remains hewed the gust of wind into a cacophony of hollow, lifeless whistles.
He must be the last breathing thing on earth. If you could call it that now…
He picked himself up from the side of the Chevy he’d been leaning against, swished the spit in his mouth grimly and trudged over to the small circle of lawn chairs. In them sat the three soldiers’ corpses he’d found earlier that month, arranged in lifelike postures, a grotesque parody of a little girl’s tea party. Jamal had pulled their infrared goggles over their faces—you’d be surprised, the kind of shit that collected in a decomposed eye-socket—and festooned each man in day-to-day incidentals.
The article Jamal was interested in was Capt. Brigg’s desert eagle. He reached over Brigg’s lap and freed it from its holster. The movement disturbed Brigg’s body, which slumped to its side, as if in protest.
“Thanks, Briggs.”
He raised the gun to his temple and felt strangely relieved by the muzzle’s cool, metal rim. He wrapped his finger around the trigger.
This’ll be the day that I die.
He didn’t take a deep breath. You take deep breaths when you’re nervous, and this…this was a mercy.
He pulled the trigger slowly enough that he heard the springs and gears stirring to life inside the gun.
Click.
Nothing. 2 bullets in that 10 bullet chamber, if he remembered right. He would try again…
Click.
(One fish, two fish)
Click, click.
(red fish, blue fish)
Click.
(Daddy, how many fish are there?)
Click-click-click.
(More than you can count, Jamal—)
Before he could pull the trigger again, Jamal started at the sound of a sonic boom. He jammed the gun in his back-pocket and scanned the murky, sand-stained sky.
A heat signature!
Good God-almighty, a heat signature!
He ran to the back of the Chevy, so eager that he stumbled over himself on his way. He popped open the trunk and started rifling through the equipment—hiking lamps, blankets, empty water bottles, a cracked picture-frame featuring a family he’d never met—and there it was.
The hunting rifle.
He twisted the knobs of the scope hastily, trying to unhinge it from the gun.
Ah, hell with it.
The rifle would be a bitch to carry, but it had a shoulder-harness and he had a purpose.
Jamal hoisted himself up onto the roof of the truck. He peered down the scope of the gun, tracing the aircraft’s contrail. The sand had already begun to tear it apart, but the stripe was still discernable. It was neither leading toward him nor away, but up.
He followed its ascent with the scope, hugging the rifle to himself with such intensity that the stock of the weapon began to hurt his shoulder. An act of God wouldn’t part him from that gun.
Then, with incomprehensible abruptness, the contrail abated. Jamal’s eyes swept left to right and back again, but all he could see was the distant smog of sand, raging as meaninglessly as a static TV.
He slumped down to his haunches and—
WOOSH!
In an instant, the plane swung down from the sky, toward the city and canted hazardously toward the ground.
Jamal gaped.
The plane descended between a pair of skyscrapers and its wings were shorn off simultaneously by the buildings. The plane’s limbless body, existing only of cockpit and cabin, slammed roughly parallel against the strip of sand running between the towers, grinding perilously along what used to be Main Street. A shower of sand cascaded around it.
Jamal’s heart pulsed, but he felt with the kind of conviction exclusive to desperate men that the landing had been orchestrated.
As if in jest, the plane groaned to the left. Its tail slammed violently against a tower, bringing its entirety to a creaking halt.
Jamal leapt from the car to the ground, regained his footing and set his rear in gear for the plane.
****
The road to the crash site stretched on for about a mile. Jamal did not stop to examine it through his scope—there wasn’t time for that. Fat chance someone would look at this place for more than a couple seconds before declaring it Satan’s summer getaway.
The sun was ducking behind the horizon. Jamal’s legs screamed for a break.
When he got within a few hundred meters of the plane’s remains, he collapsed behind a giant support beam to catch his breath. Didn’t want to introduce himself looking like some frantic, loose-in-the-head wanderer.
His chest heaved, to the same frenzied rhythm his feet had plodded on the sand. That rifle was so damned heavy he may as well have been carrying Briggs with him.
Might as well make it useful. He lifted the scope to his eye and peered around the corner of the pillar.
What he saw kicked his heart back into high-gear.
A girl. The first he’d seen in a very, very long time. Hair dark red, a color he hadn’t seen (barring blood, of course) in even longer.
Jamal thought, quite earnestly, that he had fallen in love.
He twisted the magnification dial to get a closer look.
She held a great blue rifle that looked like a small shark she’d wrestled into her grasp. She spit on the sand and ran a hand through that glorious hair. She kicked sand on the spot idly and turned to face someone who had exited the aircraft.
It was a tall, wiry man. She turned back quickly. An exasperated expression flashed across her face.
And then, quick as a whip, she was looking right at him through the lens of her gun.
The bullet freed Jamal’s head from his body.
She kept her eye fixed on the blood coming up in geysers, utterly satisfied with her shot.
Son-of-a-bitch’s heart must’ve been pounding like a drum, she marveled, wondering when the blood would die down.
That other S.O.B., Johnston, came up behind her.
“Fucker had his rifle trained right at me,” she said without turning around. “Would’ve taken my head off if I’d taken a second longer. Let’s get out of here—these bastards are still at each other’s throats.”
“Perhaps the benevolent among them avoid confrontation. Would it not make sense to dig a little deeper?”
Officious little prick, she thought.
“Nope. Consider this place a lost cause. So long as I’m in charge, Union vessels are never making a rescue operation here again.”
The man nodded tentatively. He pressed a finger to his ear piece and contacted control for a rescue vessel.
She started for the aircraft but paused, casting a final glance back toward her victim. The fountain had ebbed.
She shook her head, reflecting on how goddam ruthless people were these days.
Author bio: Chris Mort's thing is King. He lives in Naperville, Illinois but wishes he was in the Maine countryside. Chris fully admits that this story was inspired by Stephen King's "Beachworld."
Editor: Hope you aren't afraid of heights...
What was at the Top of the Tower of Babel
by Ambrose Pierce
Pvt. Boyd’s ears pricked at the sound of Sgt. Skinner’s voice. Skinner hadn’t spoke since they’d made their clandestine entrance into the tower about a week ago. “Three days we been up here, professor,” Skinner said wearily. “Fat lady’s sung.” Skinner had never been one to complain. Everyone at the barracks knew the guy was tough as nails. That he of all people was ready to throw in the towel spoke volumes to how seriously fucked up things had gotten.
“I’m not familiar with that colloquialism,” Dr. Hienes muttered. Of course he wasn’t. His head was too filled with ten-dollar words like colloquialism to fit anything useful in there. The guy was real Harvard material.
“Well are you familiar with starvation?” Skinner sneered.
“When we reach the top of the tower we will have plenty of food for thought,” Hienes quipped. Boyd tried to look occupied, gazing out of one of the apertures in the tower’s unassailable stone walling. All he could see was a navy night’s sky.
Skinner trained his M16 at Hienes’ face. “Ultimatum—we head back now or you spend the rest of your short life up here.” Dr. Hienes turned and cast a harried glance at Skinner, as though he did not see a hulking, haggardly man in military fatigues but rather a bothersome housefly buzzing about.
“Come,” Hienes sighed. “Is this worth a court martial? Let’s carry on and I’ll pretend this insubordination never happened.”
Skinner squeezed off three rounds, lighting the dank, stone room in a strobe of gold light. Bullets whined off of porous, crumbling stone walls. Boyd flinched. Hienes had pressed his back against the wall, arms splayed behind him for support, his chest rising and falling rapidly. “Are you insane?”
“The court transcripts will say I was,” Skinner said. The aroma of gunpowder had risen to Boyd’s nose. The sulfurous smell was peculiarly refreshing. Something modern in this musty dungeon.
Boyd held his rifle at his hip and tried fastidiously to aim the gun exactly halfway between Hienes and Skinner. Hienes was going to get to the top of the tower or die trying, but Hienes wanted to live, and live long at that; in some ways that made him more dangerous. Boyd had heard rumors at the barracks that in the assault on Baghdad, Skinner had shot his own superior in the back because he thought his leadership was going to get them killed. As the story went, Skinner then shot a witness, claiming that both had been killed by an RPG that came out of nowhere. The details of the story were difficult to confirm, mainly because the bodies were never recovered; still, Boyd wasn’t willing to take any risks. He had a kid on the way and was determined not to end up on the wrong side of this conflict.
Hienes composed himself and said, “Forgive me. It was absurd of to ask a madman to assess his mental wellbeing. Perhaps I’ve lost my mind as well.”
Skinner walked up to Hienes and pressed the muzzle of his rifle to his forehead. “Keep wisecracking and you’ll lose your mind, all right. All over the wall behind you,” Skinner said.
Hienes closed his eyes and spoke earnestly. “Please…” he trailed. Boyd had been in the special forces long enough to know that, so far as sobering up was concerned, coffee couldn’t hold a candle to death.
“I guarantee you we’re, at most, thirty minutes from the peak. I’d bet my life on it.”
Skinner drew a sharp breath and spoke: “You’re on.”
In the milky glow of Boyd’s helmet light, he saw Hienes brush his elbow anxiously, groping in his mind for some way to plausibly hedge his bets. “Indeed I would make that bet, if it were necessary. But even if it took us another day—which it won’t—we can be airlifted from the peak when we make it there. We’d be in a safe place within three hours.”
“You take me for a simpleton cuz I didn’t spend eight years romancing textbooks?” Skinner said. “The brass wouldn’t risk that. Not for a sociologist, no matter how many acronyms you’ve got before your name.”
“And two renowned soldiers? You sell yourself short…” Hienes said, dropping his arms at his sides and settling into a more relaxed posture. [In some perverse way you had to admire the guy.] The man could kiss ass like a speedo.
“Look, we’re in a territory where car bombs go off as often as old faithful, and we’re in a site the religious nuts happen to consider hallowed. On top of that, the local militia’s armed to the teeth with shoulder-mounted anti air. Find me someone less insurable than a pilot in this warzone and I’ll carry you on my shoulders to the top.”
“Do you know nothing of the biblical narrative?” Hienes started in a tone more impatient than fearful, “Technically, the locals don’t consider it a holy sight. It’s a symbol of promethian overreaching—in a lay terms, it’s an icon of hubris. No one worships it. The local’s won’t even set foot in it; they think it’s haunted…that its penal magics have not worn off. Of course it’s a part of the biblical narrative, but then, so is Satan and no one worships him…well, not in serious numbers,” Hienes stumbled.
“Then you explain to me why they didn’t destroy it. Why there’s barbed wire all the way around it, with signs that you told us meant trespassers will be shot. And most of all, if they truly believe that Babel will consume its entrants, why they bother to do its work for it by shooting the trespassers.”
Hienes shrugged. “Why do we preserve, at exorbitant cost to the taxpayer, a sample of the smallpox virus—the disease that claimed more people than even the wildest historian would put Saddam or Stalin or even Hitler at? Why is Judas’ putative grave preserved between several inches of titanium siding? If you haven’t noticed by now, reason is not our species’ most redeeming quality…especially not in reference to the subject of religion.”
Before Hienes could finish, Skinners opened fire. Boyd raised a protective hand to his forehead and lowered it once that chattering sound of the rifle subsided. His ears were ringing, and Boyd could scarcely hear Hienes yells. Yet it wasn’t Hienes who had been hit. One of the bullets had apparently ricocheted off the wall and hit Skinners, who was clutching his arm.
“A graze,” Boyd barely made out Skinners saying. “If you want to get yourself killed, that’s your prerogative. I’m heading back down to the extraction point.”
“My prerogative may well entail death, but it also encompasses principle. Have you any notion of the impact of an archaelogical find like this one? We are in the fabled tower of Babel, the last remaining artifact of the Christian narrative. The inscriptions I’ve found on these walls are enough to dispel the great fallacy of faith…isn’t that a cause worth dying for, if it even comes to that?”
“I aint coming down on the side against stuff I can’t explain,” Hienes said. “I’m no Bible banger but this place is not normal. I’ve slept in the killing fields in Cambodia; I’ve eaten at Gettysburg; but this place…Ah, forget it. Teaching you know-it-alls that you can’t know it all is as hopeless as teaching a nun to give lapdances.”
He gave Boyd a long, unblinking stare, which Boyd couldn’t return. Boyd had been briefed on Skinner’s psychological profile. A black ops genius who was strong in every aspect except mental health. The man was notoriously OCD, a paranoia that had protected him on the battlefield but would probably not make him the man with the most clear-headed beliefs.
“Ah, Sgt. Skinner, ever the devout churchgoer. You think I haven’t heard about your debacle in Baghdad? Be honest for a moment in your swashbuckling, gunslinging life and admit that your decision has nothing to do with god-fearing humility and everything to do with that you need Boyd to confirm your story.”
“I don’t believe in second chances, but I’ll give you one, Boyd,” Skinner said sternly.
“Yes, whose side will it be, Boyd—the believer proficient on jokes about whorish nuns, or the disbeliever in belief?”
“Disbelief’s a belief,” Skinner said. “Just as much as belief is, even if you don’t believe in a god that sits on the clouds, watching us crash our planes and contract our diseases and shoot people in the back without doing anything to stop it…”
After a moment of heavy silence, Hienes spoke: “I suspect all that needs to be said has been said.” Hienes turned on his heel and clambered up the next set of delapidated, mossy stairs.
“You asked for honesty,” Skinner said plainly. Boyd just shook his head and followed Hienes, the lesser evil.
***
Eight hours passed before Boyd and Hienes came to a room with a wooden hatch in the ceiling. The wood had warped into an impossibly convex shape. It looked like a giant droplet of oaken dew, ready to drop at any moment. Hienes was patently giddy, and fixated on a plaque that had some writing inscribed on it, the characters of which didn’t resemble any of the inscriptions they had seen before.
“Strange, I actually don’t recognize the language,” Hienes said, snapping a picture of it with the mini-cam that hung from his neck. With that, he clapped his hands together gleefully and remarked, “If you wish to coin an expression, do so now.”
“I’m a man of actions, not words,” Boyd said wrly.
“Very well. Your gun? I’ll phone in HQ.” Boyd lifted the stock of his rifle to his shoulder and asked if Hienes was ready.
“One small step for skeptics,” Hienes said. Boyd didn’t want him to finish and tapped off a couple of rounds. The hatch burst apart, the brittle wood tumbling to the ground in a deluge of splintered bits.
“Oh, pooh,” Hienes said. “Having robbed me of my moment, at least let me be the first to mount the apex.” Boyd shrugged, and Hienes made for the hatch, stepping over wood detritus which crackled under his feet. Hienes began clambering up through the hatch, struggling, looking like a first-timer at the gym, taking a stab at the pullup bar. His legs dangled about, groping for purchase. He let himself down and tossed Boyd his knapsack, which contained the week’s worth of photographs, notes and observations.
“Take care. That’s truth you’re holding,” Hienes said with a crooked grin. “Give me the phone; I’ll make the call from the top. Signal should be clear from up there.” Boyd handed him the bulky phone, and Hienes pocketed it hastily. Hienes leaped up and, muttering curses, finally succeeded in making his way up the hatch. As he pulled his legs through the battered hatch, his boot got caught in the shards of wood. Hienes yanked mightily and the boot slipped from his foot onto the ground with a soft thud.
Boyd called after him. “Trying to make the boot go for a few extra dollars?”
No reply. Boyd could imagine Hienes staring up at the stars in speechless rapture. Boyd slipped the boot under his armpit and ambled over to the hatch. With a grunt he lifted himself through, one arm pressed against his side to support the boot. It was considerably easier for his soldier’s physique. Boyd mounted the landing with ease, but the boot slipped from his grasped and fell back to the previous room.
Brushing his sleeves, he glanced about for Hienes, who was nowhere to be seen. Neither did he see a star-mottled sky. In fact, the area above him bore the same plaque, which seemed to bear the same inscrpitions that the wall of the previous floor had.
Boyd frowned and looked for the wooden hatch. There it was, in the same part of the room as before, except this hatch was already blasted open. Had Hienes broken through already?
Advancing warily, Boyd craned his head up the blasted hatch. He heard splinters crunch under his feet like twigs.
The light from his head-mount revealed another stony ceiling. Boyd lifted himself up this hatch and wriggled through with more difficulty than before. When he swung his leg over the landing, he felt himself break into a sweat. He got up, dusted his knees, and gazed up through the next hatch which was, of course, blasted open.
He grasped for the phone at his hip and realized he’d given it to Hienes. Boyd’s heart drumrolled, and he retraced his steps back to the hatch he’d entered through. I’ll get out the same way I came in.
But the hatch wasn’t there. All that was there was unyielding, mossy stones. He ran his fingers along the grooves, trying to find if perhaps there was some way the hatch could have closed behind him...but nothing. Nothing but that godawful hatch, which led of course to another room just the same as the last. Boyd dropped the professor’s knapsack—the truth, as he’d called it—and stared at the broken hatch, which would be his only company in the hungry days to follow. Along with that boot.
Author bio: Ambrose Pierce resides in the icy climes of the Appalachians with his wife and zero children. Can never have too few children!
