Quicksand, Part 25

Open your eyes. Sally did. She was uncomfortably damp, her face pushed into the warm, wet asphalt. She blinked at the wheelchair access, where the curb melted into the road and for a moment wondered if she'd been hit by a car.

He legs wobbled slightly as she got to her feet, but they held her weight. A small voice, deep in the back of her mind, urged her to get off the road before she got hit by another car, but she was too busy trying to figure out where she was to pay it much attention.

She was a still in the city, though in what part, she couldn't tell. Wherever she was, it had to be either late night or very early morning, because there weren't any cars on the street. The wheelchair access, if that's what it was, seemed to go the length of the block and the block seemed to go on forever.

Sally stepped onto the sidewalk and looked at the buildings that ran along side it. They were massive, towering things, cartoonish in the way they seemed to lean intimidatingly over the street – and, Sally realized as she looked up at them, wider at the top than at the bottom.

Daisy Chain had definitely put something in her drink. Except, the mere fact that Daisy Chain had shown up suggested that someone else had put something in her drink – but both who could have done so and why were beyond Sally's ability to work out.

The sidewalk was too narrow to walk on comfortably, and Sally moved back to the road after a few steps. The asphalt was almost spongy under her feet. She realized uneasily that the unnatural orange glow which appeared in regular intervals along the length of the street was not the result of street lights; it didn't seem to be the result of anything – it was just there.

Another thing about the buildings: they didn't have doors. They had windows, all of which seemed to have translucent yellow glass, either lit up or blacked out like a checkers board.

And it wasn't just that there weren't any cars driving on the street, there weren't any parked there, either. There weren't any people. There was nothing, except dark skies, impossible buildings and sourceless orange light.

“Morning,” said a voice behind her and Sally froze. “Don't worry,” the voice told her. “It's me.”

Sally didn't feel capable of running. She turned around slowly, praying that it would be someone she actually knew. Daisy Chain. She looked at the giant rabbit, who was watching her with a look of mild concern.

“What happened?” she asked, rubbing her eyes. She still felt groggy, as if she'd been asleep for a week.

“I drugged you.”

She could remember that much, but hearing him admit it made her livid. “You did what?”

“I drugged you,” he repeated. “I had to. You wouldn't listen to me.”

“And you thought that drugging me was a good way to get me to listen? That makes absolutely no sense.”

“I thought that drugging you was a good way to get you here,” Daisy Chain said. “Clearly I was right.”

“And what? You decided to drag me here and then just dump me in the middle of the road and disappear?”

“I didn't dump you anywhere.”

Sally was too angry to form a coherent sentence, and for a minute, she just stammered. When she could speak properly again, she asked, “How did I get here, then?”

Daisy Chain paused.

“What, did you hire someone else to dump my body? It's a simple enough question. You drugged me, brought me here, then what?”

Daisy Chain hesitated again, not sure how to answer. His eyes darted around uneasily.

“Look,” Sally said, through clenched teeth. “I woke up on the ground and—”

“You woke up? Don't often see that.”

So he gave you poison to knock you out. Great. “Was I not supposed to? What did you expect to happen?”

Daisy Chain shrugged. “Normally people sort of fade into existence.”

“What?”

“Look, Sally, I didn't dump your body anywhere, if that's what you're worried about. I'm sorry I wasn't here when you got here, but I had to take care of some things before I left your apartment.”

“What do you mean before you left? What things? Where the hell are we?”

“You won't believe me,” Daisy Chain said with certainty. “But, look, can we walk and talk? I don't want to stay in one place for too long.” He didn't wait for an answer; he started to walk and Sally was left running to catch up.

“So, where are we?” Sally asked again, when she had matched his stride.

“You've been here before, actually,” Daisy Chain said. He anticipated her objection and added, “You don't remember. I wouldn't expect you to. But this is—well, you know when you dream?”

Sally did her best to look incredulous, while she struggled to keep up. “Dream?”

“Look, you've heard of the dreamworld, alright? This is it.”

“I'm in the dreamworld?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean I'm dreaming?”

“Yeah. Sure. If you want. Whatever makes it easier for you to wrap your tiny human brain around.”

“So that whole thing with you chasing me,” Sally said, ignoring the insult, “that was a dream too.”

“You were awake,” Daisy Chain told her. He gave her a look which suggested she was being stupid. “You didn't start dreaming until after I drugged you.” There was an implied question mark at the end of the sentence, which accompanied the unspoken question of why she was being such an idiot.

“You're so full of shit,” Sally told him.

“No I'm not.”

“None of what you're saying makes any sense. I mean, I don't really get the whole time-zone thing, but shouldn't roughly half the world's population be asleep at any given time?”

Daisy Chain considered explaining about the population of Asia, but decided against it.  “So?”

“So? So where are they all? Look around. There's no one here but us.”

Daisy Chain looked annoyed. He sped up. “You need to stop thinking of this place as an extension of Earth. The rules that apply there don't apply here.”

Sally was nearly jogging to keep up with him now. “I'm not thinking of this place as an extension of anything.”

“Good, because it isn't. Things are different here.”

“Such as?”

“Such as I'm giant talking rabbit. Time is layered here. Space is more finite, more like Earth, but you could have a million people standing in the same place at the same time and they'd never know it. It's pretty rare that two people end up in the same place in the same layer and even then, they're usually total strangers—or people close enough that they don't find it odd that they're dreaming about each other.”

“So, how do you know which layer you should be in?”

“For what?”

“For whatever you want to do. Or whoever you want to meet.”

“What? I don't know. You just do.”

Sally sneered. Her voice oozed incredulity. “So you're saying every time I have a dream about someone, they've had a dream about me?”

Daisy Chain sighed. “No.”

Sally couldn't help but feel proud. She had debunked Daisy Chain's arguments enough that they had turned into flat denial. But she couldn't shake the feeling that she'd won the battle but the war was yet to start. “So I'm asleep right now,” Sally said slowly, trying to get a handle on the idea, trying to understand how she could possibly be so tired if it was true.

Daisy Chain sighed. “Yes.”

“So I'm actually... lying on my kitchen floor?” She didn't wait for him to answer. “In a puddle of tea and my own drool. Wonderful.”

“I moved you to your bed,” Daisy Chain said. “I looked after everything. And I fixed your door. That's why I couldn't make it here before you did. I didn't want to leave your body unprotected.” He lowered his voice. “I'm sorry I wasn't here when you woke up.”

Sally looked at her surroundings. They had been walking for a while, but the view hadn't changed. They seemed to be in the exact same spot. “And why are we here, again?”

“There are some guys after you. Bad guys. You remember when I said I had to go away?”

She could remember, almost. Not so much Daisy Chain leaving as crying to her mother about it afterwards. “You said you had to fight the bad guys,” she said finally. “God, I hadn't thought about that for years.”

“It's easier to remember things here than on Earth. You'll be surprised at what bubbles out of the back of your mind. But yeah, that's what I told you.”

“So it's the same bad guys?”

“Near enough. They're all the same. Scum.”

Sally sighed. She didn't want to keep walking. She didn't want to keep asking questions she was afraid to hear the answers to. “And why are they after me?”

“They're trying to get to me through you. I should have expected it.”

“And they're human?”

“No, they're figments, like me.”

“Figments. Like, man-rabbits?”

Daisy Chain sighed. “Damn, this stuff was easier when you were a kid. No, not man-rabbits. Dream creatures, I guess. They've been after you for a long time.”

“On Earth? Really? Because if they look anything like you, I think I would have noticed.” Sally tried to laugh, but it sounded a little hollow.

“They can't go to Earth,” Daisy Chain told her simply.

“Well that's good, I—” Sally stopped walking and stared at Daisy Chain as he was forced to do the same. “They can't go to Earth,” she repeated.

“No.”

“So, you brought me here.”

“Yes.”

“Where they're from.”

“Yes.”

“What the Hell?”

“They weren't after you on Earth, they were after you here. They've been chasing you through your dreams.”

“No. I think I would remember dreaming about giant figments chasing me around, trying to kill me.”

“I would have thought so, too,” Daisy Chain said, sounding annoyed and a little disappointed. “Most humans don't, but I had hoped – never mind. It doesn't matter. The majority of humans don't remember most of their dreams, and the ones that do rarely remember them right. I've chased the rat bastards away from you twice now, but you're hard to keep track of, and I don't always know where you're going to end up when you fall asleep. I needed to be able to control the situation. Now keep walking.”

Sally did, if only because, now, she wanted all the answers she could get. “But even if they catch me, what's the worst that can happen? I'll have a nightmare? And don't give me that bullshit about dying in your dreams making you die in real life; I know it isn't true.”

“It depends how you die in the dream. And why.”

“No it doesn't.”

“Yes it does.”

“How's that?”

Daisy Chain sighed again. It seemed like he was incapable of starting a sentence with anything other than a sigh. “There are ways they can do it—ways they will do it, so that you don't wake up. Your body wakes up, healthy, fine, but your mind is soup. You'll be a vegetable, forever. Sometimes, the brain stops telling the heart to beat and the lungs to breathe, and the person dies without ever regaining consciousness. Those are the lucky ones.”

“Sometimes? How long has this been going on for?”

“I don't know. A long time.”

Sally thought about it. She was trying hard to be rational. “So why isn't the world full of vegetables? That doesn't make any sense.”

Daisy Chain sighed again, as if it was the eight millionth time he had explained this. 

“Humans are more physical than us. Your identities are more strongly connected to your bodies. It's difficult to cause any real harm to a human here because there's nothing to stop you from waking up.”

“Unless we're drugged,” Sally said bitterly.

“Unless you're drugged,” Daisy Chain agreed. “Or the raiders have a Keeper.”

“Raiders? Keeper? Now what are you talking about?”

“Keep walking.”

Sally looked at the buildings, still unchanging on the long street. “So you drugged me, put me in my bed and now what? How long until I wake up?”

“The drugs I gave you will last a long time. You're staying with me until they're dead.”

“What?”

“You can stay with me until I've killed everyone who is after you. When they're all dead, 

I'll go back to Earth and wake you up.”

“And how long is that going to take?”

“Earth time? I don't know. I still don't have a handle on it. You remember when you were little, how pissed off you'd get when I didn't show up for a few days? For me that time was a second, or a year, there's no way to really judge it. Overall, time goes faster here, but I can't put an end date on it.”

“You realize that I'm going to dehydrate and die?” Sally asked.

“You'll be fine for a few days,” Daisy Chain told her. “I put you on a saline drip.”

“You—”

“Had to.”

“And what's to stop the bad guys from going to Earth and killing me in my sleep?”

“I told you: they can't go to Earth. Anyway, you're a lot more useful to them if you die here. If they killed you on Earth, you—this version of you, would turn to Dust and disappear before they got back.”

“Great.”

Sally noticed that the buildings were finally starting to change. They were getting smaller, the spaces between them wider. She noticed a few pale neon signs blinking in the dirty, run-down alleys. In front of them, the strange orange lights faded into nothing and she thought she could make out some weirdly shaped trees, silhouetted against the dark, purplish sky.  She was going to ask where they were going, demand that they take a break – but something stopped her.

Lurching toward them, from one of the alleys, was a woman, who, if Sally had had to guess, she would have said belonged to the same half-rabbit species as Daisy Chain. Except. The woman's face, such as it was, was lit from one side by a green light which was embedded in it where her eye should have been. Her other eye, Sally could see, as she pitched forward into the glow of a non-existent street light, had been sewn shut with coarse black thread. Her face was mostly smooth, like china, but had eerie cracks in it, like a plate that had been dropped. She was wearing the tattered remains of an aquamarine cocktail dress, the hem of which had been reduced to knee-length and was trailing tulle down her legs.

Sally moved quickly to the other side of Daisy Chain and grabbed a well-muscled arm.

Daisy Chain stiffened at first but when he followed Sally's silent stare, and saw what was moving toward them, he relaxed. He raised his free arm in the casual wave that men use when greeting acquaintances from across a crowded room.

The other figment – though Sally couldn't be completely sure that's what she was – didn't wave back. She cocked her head slightly to one side, then looked at the trees at the end of the street, ran (though not with any real sense of urgency) toward them and disappeared into the darkness.

Sally waited until the woman was out of earshot before speaking, but she couldn't help the feeling that she was being overheard. “Jesus, that was scary.”

Daisy Chain didn't answer her.

“What was that?”

Daisy Chain frowned slightly. “You mean who.”

“Fine. Who was that? And what was up with its eyes?”

“Her name is Minty. No one knows how she ended up the way she is, not even her.”

“What do you mean, not even her?”

Daisy Chain sighed. “I mean, even she doesn't know how she ended up that way. She can't remember anything.”

“And the mask?”

“What mask?”

“She was wearing a china mask. I have no idea how she sees through it, but—”

“She wasn't wearing a mask,” Daisy Chain said simply.

Sally sighed. “Yes she was. I saw it. It was all cracked and—”

“That's her face. She's porcelain.”

“She's—”

“Porcelain,” Daisy Chain repeated tiredly. “The cracks? Like I said, no one knows what 

happened to her, how she lost the the eye—”

“Or how she became a cyborg?” Sally laughed.

“Are you talking about her good eye?”

“If you want to call it that.”

“I fitted her with it.”

Sally stared at him, unsure how to answer.

Daisy Chain started to walk again. “I found her, not far from here, curled up in a ball, no one around for miles. She'd been roughed up pretty bad. I couldn't do anything with her left eye, it was completely burned out of the socket. I had to sew it shut.” Sally wanted to ask how he'd managed to sew porcelain, but Daisy Chain didn't give her the opportunity. “The right one,” he went on, “I had a little more luck with. I'd actually just killed a Clonget and—”

“A what?”

“Don't interrupt. A robot. It was—look, it doesn't matter. I'd killed one, I had a spare part. She needed the eye, I put it in her head. End of story.” He sighed and muttered, almost to himself, “Never did catch the bastard who worked her over, though.”

For a long time, the road grew narrower and less well-maintained and the buildings grew shorter and shabbier. Sally didn't talk. She couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't either make her sound like an insensitive idiot or piss Daisy Chain off even more. She found the idea that Minty had ever been anything else, anything other than a monster, hard to believe. Although, she admitted to herself on further consideration that if you took away the cracks, the creepy eyes and her unnerving vacant stare, if you put her in a new dress and taught her not to walk like a reanimated corpse, Minty might well have been beautiful – in a rabbity sort of way.

The trees, Sally realized, in the midst of her silent contemplation, were a lot further away than they had originally appeared, and she began to wonder how Minty had run to them so quickly.

“So,” Sally ventured, after a suitable amount of time had passed.

Daisy Chain looked at her, but didn't answer.

“So... where are we going?”

“I haven't decided yet. For now, we need to keep moving.”

“I thought we had to kill those guys.”

If she thought about it logically, the idea of killing figments herself, or having them killed on her behalf, didn't bother Sally at all. In her mind, she was dreaming and nothing she saw or did here was real, not really. Killing something that she'd dredged up from her own subconscious seemed a small price to pay for waking up.

“We do have to kill them,” Daisy Chain agreed. “But we have to find them first, and in the meantime, it isn't safe to stay in any one place for too long.”

“How long is too long?” Sally asked. “I'm seriously tired.”

“You're sleeping. Stop complaining.”

“Yeah, about that.” Another question Sally didn't want to ask.

“What?”

“Well, speaking of staying too long in one place.”

“What?”

“What's going to stop me from—” the fact that she was having this conversation at all was almost worse than the fact that she was having it with a giant talking rabbit. “What's going to stop me from wetting myself?”

Daisy Chain looked confused. “Oh,” he said, after a second.

“Oh?”

“I took care of that.”

“You... how?”

He shrugged. “I fitted you with a catheter.”

Sally stopped walking. As soon as her voice came back, she fully planned on going completely postal on Daisy Chain. As she opened her mouth to do so, something scuttled past her, crawled around Daisy Chan's feet and stopped, facing her. It was, by its shape, mostly a man. A very small, sheet-white bald man with an extremely prominent brow and a bulldog-like expression. An underfed man with his ribs showing who crawled around on all fours. It opened its mouth and hissed, showing off tiny, needle-sharp teeth.

Daisy Chain kicked at the creature, just missing it with a dangerous-looking claw. It hissed again, this time at him, and crawled sullenly into the shadows.

Sally shuddered. “Are there a lot of things like...” she stopped herself from saying that, but just barely. “him here?”

Daisy Chain looked surprised. “Him? No. That thing climbed off a building in Salisbury and followed me here. It's from Earth."

_______________

 If you enjoyed reading this, stop by next week for another instalment. You may also like my published novel, Aigaion Girl ... a story of the end of days, available here.

Flash Fiction Challenge - Human Found Dead

Well...

Here we are then.  I haven't actually written anything since...um...NaNoWriMo 2011. It's been a while.  I claim a combination of writer's block and getting on with life...  So, I'm out of practice.  You have my apologies for the roughness of what follows...though, since it's supposed to be hard-boiled, that might actually work in my favour...

Anyway.  Challenge was 1000 words, and after bouncing up and down, I managed 998. I'm actually intrigued enough with this to write a whole short story...first time I'd ever done a hard-boiled anything, and I think I kinda like it...

Anyway, it's a hard-boiled urban fantasy, with (hopefully) a theme of Love Demands Sacrifice, so...lemmie know how I did.

.~.~.~.

Human Found Dead

I was at Grimm's when he started running his mouth.  Normally I let drunks ramble and ignore them, but tonight I'd come to wash the blood out of my thoughts with whiskey, not listen to his whining.  So, I give him a not-too friendly warning.

“Look, friend,” I said, interrupting him.  “A little free advice:  You've got about five minutes before someone in here decides to take your hide.  I suggest you use it well.”

“They won't kill me.”

I shook my head.  Humans.  They're never willing to believe any of us wear their skin – or used to, rather.  It's been banned, though that don't stop the traditionalists, and the traditionalists drink at Grimm's.

“For your own good, tell your story and scram – before someone kills you to dye their hat.”

“I thought you guys were cracking down on the Red Cap gangs.”

He was actually giving me attitude, after the sob story he'd just been telling anyone who'd listen?  I gave him a look.  This idiot just didn't realize on whose turf he was being an ass.  I could feel the assorted eyes of the other patrons on us, staring from the shadows.  Out in mainstream society or not, the fae don't like humans drinking in their bars.  Especially the annoying humans.

“Fine, fine.”  He turned sullen and swallowed what was left of his drink.  He had a face like the backside of a barn door, grey and unloved.

In spite of myself, I was curious.  This guy was a real, true-blooded human, and you don't get a lot of those in Grimm's.  I figured he probably had an hour tops before he was somebody's dinner, and I wanted to know why he wanted to die so bad he'd risk being human in a fairy bar.  Guess I felt bad for the poor sucker, so I signaled the barman for another round.  Least I could do, if he was going die of Terminal Stupidity.

Besides, maybe it'd take my mind of my own troubles for a time.

“What happened to him?”

“Hmm?”

“This friend you've been going on about.  What happened to him?”

“I...I dunno.  We grew apart.  I grew up, and...”  He squirmed.  “There was this girl.”

I nodded.  Nothing new there.

“She...well, eventually she left me for a six foot QB who beat her and knocked her up on Prom night.”

“And your friend?”

“I tried to find the way back, but...”  He downed his drink.  “This was before the Boundaries fell, you understand.  I couldn't find it.  We used to do everything together.  Sailed up and down the coast...he was so fierce that even the pirates backed off.  Doesn't matter,” he added bitterly.  “He's coming for me now, and there's nowhere left to run.”

I didn't say anything else.  Didn't ask him how he knew. I just bought us another round of drinks.

.~.~.~.

She has hair like untouched snow and eyes so dark they go on forever, and at 3 A.M she handed me a cup of coffee to mask the scent of whiskey on my breath.  I'd only slept for an hour tops, and was still in yesterday's clothes.  I was rumpled and smelly, but she was pristine; cool and crisp like fresh linen.  Even here, surrounded by blood and filth, Aderyn smelled like flowers.

“Barman found him.”  She has a voice like a warm fire on a cold night, and is so gentle with me it hurts.  “He said you might know something about it.”

I looked around.  I hate that she sees this shit, but she chose it – gotta help those who can't help themselves – and as she told me in the beginning, I can't take that from her.

The morning paper will have few of the details, none of the gore in a story as flat and flaccid as a rentboy at noon.  They'll leave out the splashes of dark red against brown bricks and the black puddles of lifeblood on asphalt; the smell like raw steak, and the multiple chalk outlines around what was left of that poor bastard.  They'll leave out the rank stench of bile from where the rookie yacked, and the piss-and-filth-and-garbage reek of the dumpster they found him behind.  The damp air and the eye-pounding strobe lights on the marked cars.  They'll tidy it up for their readers with three words:  Human Found Dead...

“He was a human drinking in a fairy bar,” I said.  It should be all the explanation anyone needs.  Not that that would make it better for the human cops, when we called them in.

“What do you make of this, then?”  I looked where she pointed, up at the words scratched with bloody efficiency into the brick.  “'Honah Lee'.  Could be a person.”

“Maybe.”  I filled her in on what I knew; it wasn't a lot.

“He have a name?”

I shook my head.  No names, not in Grimm's.

“Looks like his friend caught up to him, though.”

When they found the head, the mouth was stuffed with strings and wax, and there were two scales, emerald green and glowing, on his eyes.   Pennies for Charon.

I looked up at Aderyn as a nameless tech handed me a wallet.

“Jean Papier,” I told her, reading the name off the license, and had to hide the hitch in my breath.

Aderyn had taken the Change so she could walk upright like the rest of us, given up her life in the forests to wade hip deep into the scum of the Earth and make things a little brighter.  I'd marry her if she'd have me, but unicorns don't really go for elfin types.  Especially elfin cops with drinking problems.

She reached out, but not to pull me out of my personal darkness.

I handed her the wallet.


NB: I've fixed a few awkward phrases/grammar errors since putting this up and linking it to terribleminds.  Infinite do-overs and take-backs, yeah?  Well, I'm usin' 'em. :)

Invaders from Beyond the Sky - Flash Fiction Challenge

I wrote this for a flash fiction challenge on Terrible Minds.  The idea is to combine two sub-genres in 1000 words.  I decided to combine three, Dieselpunk, Alien Invasion and BDSM erotica.... which means, NSFW.  Reviews welcome.

The dashboard had five dials in it. Five dials and 16 toggle switches. It seemed like more than enough, but what did I know about motorcycles? How to fix them, but not how they should look. 

Anyway, Ace Savage was impressed with himself and I wanted to be polite.

“She's a beaut,” I told him. “Looks just like a jewel or something.”

“Like a bullet,” he corrected me. I didn't argue, even though a bullet like that would never get out of the chamber.

Ace was a nice enough kid. He was a couple years older than me, blonde, handsome. Not my type. We'd known each other growing up and he always wanted to wear the pants. He'd boss me and I'd let him, but if I'd ever wanted to, I'd have had him grovelling in a heartbeat. I didn't like that. Inconsistent.

I batted my eyelashes at him. “Can I go in front?”

He shook his head. He wasn't about to let a girl drive his new toy.

My baby blues were losing their charm. I sighed. “OK. I guess I'll just get behind you and hold on real tight.”

Ace smiled and handed me a pair of goggles.

The road was empty, but the sky was full of zeppelins. I closed my eyes, smelled the cedar and squeezed Ace tighter. It was too quiet. The calm before the shit storm.

When we got to the base, my hair was mussed, so I pretended to worry over it while Ace went to talk to the guard. I didn't catch much, but I heard Ace refer to me as his girl twice. Their talk ended with him turning to me and saying, “You don't mind waiting with the bike, Millie? There's a good girl.”

I nodded and sat side-saddle on his bike. “Aye-aye, Captain.”

Ace went through the gate. I looked at the trees.

After about a half-hour, the guard got a call on the radio, put his gun over his shoulder and high-tailed it down the road.

I waited until he was out of sight, walked along the fence a little ways and slipped under it into the forest. I didn't always snoop around the base; I'd planned on waiting right where Ace told me to – but it was strange for the guard to abandon his post like that, and I was curious.

I walked parallel to the road, right up to the marble building and in through a side door. Usually this is where my heart would start pumping so hard I could hear it, where I'd have to duck into a doorway to avoid being caught – but the halls were empty, just like the road.

There was a faint buzzing sound, and I followed that. Everybody was gathered in one room, silent.

I crept in through the open door. The sound was coming from the projector. The screen was full of tiny discs, nothing too impressive, just blobs of dark grey on white. There was a big blob that was lighter than the rest. It took a second for me to see it was a zeppelin – which meant that all those black blobs were filling up the sky.

I covered my mouth to keep from gasping and backed through the door. I hit something, and before I could turn around, I felt a giant hand pinning my arms together at the wrist. I tried to turn my head, but another hand pushed my face forward. I felt lips against my ear and heard, “Don't bother, just walk,” and was pushed down the hallway.

I'd been around the base enough to know I was lost. I hadn't even known there were elevators until he shoved me into one.

I hit the wall hard, too fast to get my hands up. I turned around in time to see the doors close.

“Want to tell me what you're doing here? Who are you spying for?”

Tears stung my eyes. This was the problem; I'd get roughed up and I'd be such a mix of turned on and spitting mad that I wouldn't know what to say. “No one. I was just—” I thought about mentioning Ace's name. It would have been the fastest way out of the mess I was in. “I was just snooping. You know, in general.”

“Which General?” the man demanded.

I blinked at him, disappointed that a man like this should be so stupid. “Sorry, bad joke.” He cracked a smile. Gorgeous white teeth. I thought I might provoke him, see if I could get him to bite.

His uniform wasn't one I recognized. Some special division, maybe. Definitely not in Ace's unit.

“I'm Millie.”

“Vale.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Basement.”

“Why?”

He crossed the elevator in half a second, backing me into the corner he'd thrown me into. “Questioning.”

My heart thudded in my ears. I pressed myself into the railing to keep from pressing into Vale. The elevator bell dinged and the doors slid open.

At first Vale didn't say much, just asked me questions and tightened my restraints when he didn't like the answers. He finally worked out that I got off on it and gave up on interrogation. Every time he came down, he looked a little grayer, a little weaker, sometimes beat up pretty bad.

One day he came in, looking rough and told me, “This is the safest place for you,” chained my arms above my head and fucked me against the bars of my cell. That was the closest to a heart-to-heart we ever had.

The aliens have taken all the big cities. Not just here, worldwide. This base is one of the only ones left and I have to wonder who's holding it together.

I don't know what's happened to Ace. Vale still comes to see me sometimes, but we don't do much talking.

Quicksand, Part 24

Sally leaned all of her weight into the door and pushed with both hands, but it wasn't enough; he was just too strong for her.

She had dropped her cell phone somewhere outside, she thought – and even if she hadn't, it wasn't as if she could dig through her purse and pockets right then. The cordless was on the counter behind her, within sight, within reach, if she was willing to take one of her hands away from the door.

And you're going to do what? she asked herself. Call the police and tell them you're being chased by a giant rabbit man who may or may not be known to you? “Screw it,” Sally said. She took a step back from the door.

The creature burst in, somehow managing to send the trim from around the door splintering toward Sally.

She winced and covered her face instinctively, but managed to hold her ground. “You're not real,” she said decisively, trying hard to keep the shake out of her voice.

The creature, who was, true to her first assessment, an over-sized human/rabbit hybrid, jerked back a bit, as if he'd been stung.

“You're not real,” Sally repeated, and again, it seemed to cause him pain. “You're. Not. Real. You're—”

“Sally. What the Hell are you doing? I'm not going to drop dead. I'm not Goddamn Tinkerbell.”

“But,” she said confusedly, stumbling over her words. “But you're not, I mean you're not—”

“—real? Yeah.” He watched her for a minute, as if he was waiting for something. His eyes narrowed. “Jesus, Sally.”

She told herself what she'd been telling him. He wasn't real. She squared her shoulders and raised an eyebrow at him. “Jesus Sally what?”

He got that stung look again, and took a step toward the door. “You don't remember me, do you?”

Sally stared. She started to shake her head no, but stopped and tried to think. It was like meeting someone you haven't seen since high school; you want to remember them, if only to save you both the embarrassment of a continued blank stare.

But it wasn't as though he had a face you could forget. Wholly apart from the fact that it was neither man nor rabbit, yet somehow both, ignoring his high cheekbones and tiny black nose, putting aside his fangs, his long, slender ears and silver white fur, he had a rather noticeable patch of leathery, blue-black, slightly sparkly skin which formed a diamond over the top left quarter of his face – and which seemed to be held in place with black thread.

She hesitated. “Daisy Chain?” She had had a stuffed rabbit when she was a kid, with a patch on its eye and the body of a doll. She probably still had it, somewhere. And she'd had, she could almost recall, an imaginary friend to match.

The man-rabbit sighed. “Thank God. Thought we'd lost you, kid. We have to get going now. I wish we had time to catch up, but I can't always be here to watch you and—”

Sally blinked twice, slowly. “You can't be here,” she said.

“Still not allowed to have boys over?” Daisy Chain laughed. He watched her face for a moment then added, “Sally, I wish I had time to explain all this, but I don't. We need to get going, OK?”

“You're not real,” Sally said.

“Not this again.”

“You're not. You can't be. It isn't physically possible.”

Daisy Chain growled. “Quit dicking around. We need to go.”

“No.”

“Sally, how long have we known each other?”

“We don't know each other. You're imaginary. I invented you.”

Daisy Chain stuck his head into the hallway, looked around furtively, then came back in and closed the door. “No,” he said in a low voice, “you didn't. But look, I get why you're weirded out about this, I do. A lot of humans stop believing in us if they don't see us for a while—I mean, I didn't expect you to, but it's not your fault.”

“Not my—Look, obviously I'm experiencing some kind of mental breakdown, which is fine, I clearly need help, but I'd appreciate it if you'd go away and let me call an ambulance for myself instead of leering at me and regaling me with your bullshit. OK?”

Daisy Chain sighed. He looked defeated. “OK. I can see you're a lot more rational now than you were as a kid, so look: I'll make us some tea, we'll talk, like two rational people, and if, at the end of our cup of tea, I can't convince you that what you're seeing is real, I'll politely fade into nothing, and you can either call your ambulance or pretend this whole thing never happened, whichever suits you better.” He sighed again. “Deal?”

Sally walked to a chair and sat down at the small table in her kitchenette. “OK,” she said. “Wow me.”

Daisy Chain filled the kettle with water, put it on its stand and flipped it on. “I hate these ones,” he said over his shoulder, as both blue and red LED lights lit up the water. “I don't get why they can't just whistle when they're finished.”

Neither of them said anything until after the kettle had boiled, the red LED had blinked off and Daisy Chain, with paw-like hands, had filled two cups and put teabags in them. He put one down in front of Sally and sat down opposite to her with his own in his hands.

“This is going to be hard to believe—”

“Try impossible.” Sally took a long sip of her tea. “But go on.”

Daisy Chain looked down at his tea, then back at Sally and narrowed his eyes. “I always thought you'd grow up smarter.”

“Just because you're bitter that I invented you—”

“Christ. You didn't invent me.”

“I obviously did. It's not rocket science. I had a little stuffed rabbit called Daisy Chain, my imaginary friend is a rabbit called Daisy Chain.” She took another sip of tea. “Am I missing something?”

The rabbit shook his head and stared despondently into his cup for a moment before looking up. “You humans are so goddamn arrogant, you know that?”

“What?”

“Did it ever occur to you that maybe, just maybe the man who designed that doll, might have known me? That maybe that was the closest thing he had to a memory of me? That maybe I was the inspiration for the doll and not the other way around? Did you ever stop to think that the only evidence that I ever came to Earth, that I ever even knew him, is a bunch of stupid dolls?”

Sally could feel her shoulders and neck start to tingle. Being yelled at almost always caused some kind of physical response. “You—you're—you're just—you're a liar,” she slurred, pointing accusingly. She pushed the side of her cheek with her outstretched finger, suddenly aware that her face was going numb. The tingling spread down her arms. “You—Hey! You put something—you—put—you... You drugged me!” She stood up, but her legs couldn't support her and she fell onto her knees, spilling the remainder of her tea on the floor. She crawled toward the edge of the linoleum, ignoring the thick, phlegmmy drool which was, by then, all over her hands and forearms and the puddles of tea which were slowly seeping into her jeans. She made it onto the carpet – she almost made it to her front door – before she blacked out.

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 If you enjoyed reading this, stop by next week for another instalment. You may also like my published novel, Aigaion Girl ... a story of the end of days, available here.

5 Reasons Pop Culture is Run By Fanfiction

Well, I was going to write this article myself, but Cracked.com beat me to it, and did all of the more research, so instead I'm just going to link to it and point out that now you don't even have to wait until the authors are dead anymore to make money off pre-existing stories - you just have to change the names and a few details and add in badly portrayed BDSM relationships and call it erotica *coughcough50ShadesofGraycough*.

I should also point out that changing the names and a few details of a story to make money off of it isn't a new thing either; just look at almost every fantasy story written since Tolkien published LOTR.


Anyway, here's the article :D

5 Reasons Pop Culture Is Run By Fanfiction

Quicksand - Part 23 (Language not safe for work or children)

Fucking run. It wasn't the the most eloquently-expressed thought, but it gave her the push she needed to keep going – through the pins and needles pain in her feet, through the persistent burning in the centre of her chest. And it did have the benefit of being the loudest thought in the cacophony of her inner dialogue. Louder, even, than the one that had chimed in fairly recently, saying, But you know him from somewhere. “I do, don't I?” she breathed, as she leaned against a brick wall to rest. A small part of her thought that she must have completely lost it, if she was talking to herself now, on top of everything else. But it was true, there was something familiar, something almost friendly about the... thing. Maybe—the thought was abruptly cut off by a louder one: Maybe? Maybe you should run. But run from what? Because there was no way that that thing could exist. And if it could exist, if he could exist, he was awfully familiar, she definitely knew—It doesn't matter if you know him, said the panicked voice of reason. It's a fucking giant half-fucking-rabbit. Run away.

And so, Sally ran.

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 If you enjoyed reading this, stop by next week for another instalment. You may also like my published novel, Aigaion Girl ... a story of the end of days, available here.