PULP METAL MAGAZINE - New Fiction &New Post From Me

Over at Pulp Metal Magazine there is new fiction from Frank Duffy, Jodi MacArthur and more PLUS a new post in my I DIDN'T SAY THAT, DID I? column. Click here: http://pulpmetalmagazine.webs.com/apps/blog/

Late Night Film at disenthralled

Walter Conley's amazing disenthralled is out again with some great prose and photos from Alisa Rynay Haller
R o b e r t C r i s m a n
Lynn Kinsey
M i s s A l i s t e r
Howie Good
Tom Leins
C K B l a c k
Richard Godwin
L e n a V a n e l s l a n d e r. I've a story there too:Late Night Film. It's here: http://disenthrallme.wordpress.com/issues/issue-3/

When The Snowman Brings The Snow at Thrillers Killers n Chillers

I've another Xmas story -WHEN THE SNOWMAN BRINGS THE SNOW - over at THRILLERS KILLERS n CHILLERS. Have a gander: http://thrillskillsnchills.blogspot.com/2009/12/when-snowman-brings-snow-by-paul-d.html

The Steve Weddle Memorial Airport Flash Fiction Challenge

The Steve Weddle Memorial Airport Flash Fiction Challenge

Details of the challenge are here:
http://danielboshea.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/the-steve-weddle-memorial-airport-flash-fiction-challenge/
The challenge was to write a Flash Fiction story featuring an airport. I struggled but this is what I came up with.


Warsaw Dawn by Paul D. Brazill

The men in the long black overcoats looked like shadows as they cut through the snow smothered square. A ghostly spiral of smoke drifted up from the husk of the burnt out car as Darko fell to his knees, the low hum that hovered in the distance growing louder.He looked up, gasping, as the plane roared overhead. His fingers buzzed and tingled and the sensation spread through his hands and up his arms. The weight of an elephant was on his chest and he felt the cold hard metal against his forehead. Then the day dissolved into black.

The tall man hummed a misty melody as he poured the petrol over Darko’s blood splattered body and set it alight.

‘Get a move on, Marek ’ said the corpulent slug with the bullet hole eyes, who stood beside him. ‘He’ll have landed by now.’ The tall man picked up the briefcase and lit a cigarette on the flickering flames of Darko’s burning cadaver.

‘Take a chill pill, Arek,’ he said without cracking a smile, his accent as dark and thick as Irish coffee.

The airport was as bright as a migraine and Colin Graham shuffled to the front of the queue and picked up his suitcase. He was gasping for a drink and one of the reasons he was glad to be back in Poland was that he knew the airport bar would be open, even at this hour. He rushed through customs focused on the thought of a pint of Krolewskie and a shot of Bols when he saw them. Laurel and Hardy,Flip and Flap, Bolek and Lolek. They had a few nicknames, although no one ever said them to their faces. He knew them as Marek and Arek. Dragan’s boys. And he knew that they were a harbinger of a shit load of trouble.

Whenever Colin saw Dragan he was reminded of the picture of Dorian Grey. He’d been a journalist in Warsaw long enough to know that Dragan wasn’t known as The Psychotic Serb for nothing. But like Wilde’s hero there was no sign of corruption or suffering or sickness or guilt on Dragan’s angelic face. Colin knew that the Serbian was in his forties but his face was that of someone half that age. Unblemished apart from the small crescent shaped birth mark on his right cheek. Colin sipped his vodka and waited while Dragan and his goons examined the contents of a briefcase that was splashed with what he hoped was red paint.

Dragan nodded and said something in Russian to his henchmen who rushed out of the room. Colin spoke Russian but sometimes it was better not to know what was being said. Dragan looked up from the briefcase and turned on his 5000 watt smile.

‘My old friend, Colin,’ he said, with a twinkle in his eye.
‘My English/Irish friend. How the fuck are you?’

He filled up Colin’s vodka glass and sat on the edge of the desk, swigging from the bottle.

‘Could be worse. Bit knackered.’

‘Long flight, eh?’

‘Six hours. Long enough.’

‘And how was the Big Apple?’

‘So good they named it twice. Beers like rat’s piss though.’

‘And did you see her? Colin shuffled in his chair. He shook his head.

‘Long gone, Dragan. Months ago.’ ‘And...’

‘Well, NYPD are looking for her. In connection with the murder of a mugger in Central Park but ...’

Dragan laughed.

‘Ah. That’s my girl. That’s my Krystyna’

His face went dark.

‘So?’

‘Back in Blighty as far as I know.’

Dragan nodded.

‘Scotland? With Banks?’

Colin shrugged his shoulders. There was a knock on the door. Dragan looked up at Marek and Arek. They had the look of scolded schoolboys. They mumbled in Russian but all Colin understood was that ‘the real one’ had been ‘burnt to a cinder’ in the back of the car. Dragan looked like Vesuvius ready to erupt. He took a large envelope from the top of the desk and handed it to Colin.

‘Later,’ he said. Colin didn’t argue. He picked up his coat and suitcase and left Dragn’s office as fast as he could.

The trendy bar in the New Town –which was actually older then the Old Town -was pricey but with the money Dragan had paid him - plus his money from Krystyna -Colin felt he could afford it. He sent one short message to the Facebook page know as Femme Fatale: He bought it and then closed his lap top. He lay back in the Zebra striped sofa and looked out outside as a horse and cart clip clopped past and wondered how long he should wait before he headed off to Scotland.

Guest Blogger: Carrie Clevenger - Reboot.

Reboot

by

CARRIE CLEVENGER

The red subsided into darkness; a black muffled in between unseen cushions of dust and discontent. There was no pain, no want, or loss. There was only the staleness of contained air.

Silence. Sweet, blessed silence.

I resisted my coming-to, my conscious mind moaning and rolling over in sleep. I wanted nothing more than to chase away the morning sunlight. But there was no sun, no bed, no voice welcoming me back to awareness. There was only stillness and perfect, immaculate nothing.

Even nothing couldn’t describe what I saw when I opened my eyes. It was as if everything around me had simply dissipated, and all that was left was one tiny neuron, capable of bearing intelligent thought. Electricity. Cold.

My mind felt the freezing temperature but my skin registered no response. My eyes rolled dryly in their sockets, confused about being open or not. I had something behind my back. Hard. Yet soft.

My hand jerked. Slowly, it obeyed, coming to an abrupt halt as I considered my confinement for the first time. Satin, covering hard surface there. Slowly, my fingers tiptoed over the quilted fabric like blind salamanders in a cavern pool. I tested it with a push, and it did not move.

My feet revived suddenly and I kicked. More resistance. I was cold and contained. Here in this perfect, impenetrable dark, so complete that white snow danced in my vision as my eyes fought the first exposure to the only true darkness they’ve ever known.

A box. I was in a box. The thought filled my head. My ears were catching up to the rest of me and initiated their first complaint of silence. The low hum became a high rev of interior noise. The sound of my brain. The sound my fingers made as they nosed into the satin. I knew satin.

Satin, like my girl’s negligee.

Panic threaded into my system, and I realized that all of me was just now waking up, like an old computer booting up for the first time in months. A spark here, a current there, and I was on the loading screen.

Please wait…

My muscles jumped on their own, bumping my knees against the (lid of the) box. I frowned, both hands seeking my ceiling now. I was prone. I was on a cushion, thin as it was. Not exactly for sleeping. I think I knew where I was, but I didn’t want to try to rationalize just exactly how I’d been put into that situation.

A sound overhead. Distant but true, I wouldn’t mistake it in this bubble of absolute quiet. The scratching my fingers were doing, matched by something far away. Far but getting closer.

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand out as my scalp crawled with the foreboding that shit was about to go awry once that sound reached me. The scrape-shuffle-scrape sound filtered down, through cottony stuffing and into my little private prison. I swallowed the desert back in my mouth and gritted my teeth, feebly attempting to quell the mania building in my brain. I couldn't wrap my head around this.

I'd lose it if I even tried.

Scrape

Shuffle.

Scrape.

A pause in the monotonic clockwork of it, and I was holding my breath. Mentally. I had nothing to breathe. My mind shuffled that thought back to priority 999 and continued motoring along.

Scrape.

Shuffle.

Scrrrraaaaape.

More silence. The din in my ears picked right up where they'd left off and I had the strangest image of standing in front of my tv with the channel set to three, before the screen started to turn blue and mute out...there was static. I blinked in the nothing. I was wearing socks, but not shoes.

My fingers were dried branches. My tongue was leather. I tried to speak, and once reassured that wasn't back to normal operating procedure, I let off stressing my system.

I wasn't fucking breathing.

The scrape-shuffle overhead, or underneath for all the fuck I knew, was replaced with a rapid digging. Like a dog. A big one. A weird DigdigDigdigDigdigDig noise, terrifying me more than the scrape-shuffle ever had.

I opened my hands and pressed them palms-up deep into the satin. I pushed. A creak.

DigdigDigdigDigdigDig...

It was getting closer now, and when I was at the breaking point, something struck the top of the coffin.

Coffin, yes. I was in A. Fucking. Coffin.

I screamed.

Bio: CARRIE CLEVENGER

Carrie Clevenger, (also known as Carrie Cleaver) worships Maynard and dreams of cephalopods on trains and other oddities in Austin, Texas. She doesn’t have to write the next great novel, but it’d be nice to at least leave a smear on the way down.

The hub of her evil network is here: http://shadowsinstone.blogspot.com/ or on Twitter @shadowsinstone.