
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/
You would say that, wouldn't you?




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.
