Bewere the Night

It was hard for Amber to get used to talking all the time, to street signs and clothing with logos on them. The world was a huge advertisement for itself, and it stank.

Amber spent most of her days outside the county courthouse in the part of town that was all pillars and thick slabs of concrete from the old days, and littered with the homeless and ratty fast food joints from the now. She was a protestor, though the sign she held up was incomprehensible. She chanted, with the few other people who had rallied around Salmon and Berg, “Free Berg!” was a popular chant, and someone on an acoustic guitar had come up with some new lyrics to the old Lynyrd Skynyrd song. They had destroyed some property, but not very much, and hadn’t hurt anyone. Even Redwood had only hurt himself.

A thin man with significant sideburns asked Amber if she wanted to check out a copy of PW. Amber opened her mouth to tell him no when she saw the little Chinese girl, her knees high as she climbed the steps to the courthouse. She was on a leash and holding it was the mother. The father was there too, his hand clamped hard on the wrist of the boy who had once held a stick that had once been tipped with a man’s eye.

“Yeah, please,” she said.

The guy sidled up to her and opened to a two-page spread. “I wrote this article,” he explained. “It’s about how we, you know, reject anti-civ anarchism as fundamentally playing into the hands of the capitalists.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, it’s just giving up the fight. Individual acts of terror just bring state repression, and the fact is that we have seven billion people on this planet. If we all lived like hunter-gatherers, there would be a huge population crash. The only reason the bourgeoisie keeps the proletariat alive is because they don’t want to do any work themselves, and—”

Amber grabbed the paper. “Thanks. I’ll read it myself.”

“Okay, well we have meetings too … ” he reached into his messenger bag for a leaflet. Amber grinned inside. The local socialists were still a revolving door of stupid freshmen—she knew this shtick down cold.

“And that’s a dollar, by the way.” He tapped the edge of the paper. “What kind of socialist sells a newspaper?” Her eye wandered to the parking lot.

He nodded. “Yeah, well, see. The paper isn’t free. We live under capitalism, after all, and the printing press isn’t a worker collective, yet. Plus, when you just give out papers for free people don’t read them. When they pay a dollar, and some people even pay five to support the movement—”

“Look asshole, I’m not paying you a fucking dollar!”

He tried to grab the paper back but he was weak and Amber strong. She darted away from him and grabbed his messenger bag. “Paper for the people!” Amber shouted, and she flung the bag in the air. It rained copies of Proletarian Worker and then she kicked the socialist right in the knee, making his leg buckle. The other protestors cheered and then the cops, always itching for a chance to use their truncheons, were on them, but Amber was already gone.

Amber wasn’t worried. She wasn’t hopeful either. She was wedged in the hatch area of the SUV, one much nicer than civil servants could afford, and whose hood was hot to the touch. Unlocked too. Careless parents, the parents of that Chinese girl, of the boy with the stick. Had Amber been thinking, she would have even thought herself clever for showering and taking care of herself these past few days—surely she would have smelled like rotten wood and ripe human and filled the vehicle with fumes otherwise. Stink lines rising from the top of cartoon garbage can. She took a deep breath. Nothing but flowers. Not even a thought. No thought, no obstacles. Amber was beyond good and evil now, beyond boredom and engagement for that matter. She had her journal and the moon was full even as the sun still stood over the horizon. Plenty of light, but even she couldn’t read what she had written in her time living outside. There was something in those glyphs and strokes though, something older the words, older than symbols. Just what she had been wanting all along.

The family was sedate when they got in the car. The boy—Jeremy, but Amber didn’t think things like “Jeremy” now—wasn’t with them anymore. It didn’t matter. The drive seemed long. The sun had gone down and the moon sailed away, as if Amber was being taken around the curve of the world, away from the city and into the woods. But the trees she saw out her window were slaves of lawns, Holocaust survivors forced forever to mourn for their brethren whose bodies made their own coffins. Homes. McMansions. The car parked. The parents got out and collected the sleeping little girl from her car seat and took her away. The girl stared at Amber but didn’t say anything.

Amber slid out of the SUV easily enough and landed on her hands and knees. Everything smelled wrong. There were sounds, real ones. A breeze and crickets, but false sounds were more insistent. Tinny laughter. The buzzing of lightning trapped in wire cages. Wind in walls. She loped toward the family’s home and peered through the window when she reached it. They were watching TV, but it was all just flashes of color to her. She could smell them through the glass, smell how hot they were. Amber did have a final pair of symbolic thoughts before she threw herself through the window and took the child by the neck in her mouth and crunched, one last bit of culture before she finally sloughed off all that she had been like dirt on skin.

This is a fairy tale!

And I’m the hero!

THE COLDEST GAME by Maria V. Snyder

The screech of a small child being tortured woke Lexa. At least, that was what her alarm sounded like at four in morning. I feel your pain, girlfriend, she muttered under her breath as she swatted the clock before her roommate could growl.

Why? Why did I ever volunteer for the five a.m. shift? Lexa asked herself this every single Friday morning. The answer remained the same. Because I’m an idiot and fell for Ben’s bullshit claim that the morning shift is the most exciting. It wasn’t.

Grabbing her shower basket, she schlepped to the bathroom down the hall. Her choice of shower stalls remained the best thing about this time of day. Ah, dorm life.

After a scalding-hot shower, Lexa returned to her room. She dressed in the dark—jeans, sneakers, and a shapeless navy Penn State hoodie. Twisting her long brown hair into a knot, she tucked it under a navy baseball cap before leaving.

An early November fog blanketed the silent campus. Street lights reflected off the white mist. No one around—the only time Penn State’s main campus was this quiet. It matched her gloomy mood.

She’d been in a funk since Lauren, her younger sister had been killed by a drunk driver over Memorial day weekend. It deepened when Jason, her boyfriend of three years dumped her in September. Now failing thermodynamics, Lexa thought she’d never see daylight again.

Lexa headed toward the Walker Building on the western edge of campus. At least she had her own key now. Last week Ben had forgotten his, and they had botched the forecast in their haste. A couple radio stations had complained. What did they expect anyway? They were getting free weather forecasts from a bunch of student meteorologists after all.

When Lexa cut through West Halls, a strange icy feeling slipped down her spine. The campus was relatively safe, but her imagination conjured up all those horror movies that Jason had dragged her to see.

Perhaps she should have arranged for a security escort—some jock doing his good deed for the day, but she’d never felt unsafe on campus until now. She dismissed her anxiety as a product of her overdramatic imagination.

Just before she entered the short cut between Irvin Hall and Jordan Hall a low anguished growl emanated from the shadows. Logic urged her to run. But she savored the feeling of fear for a moment. Since Lauren’s death, she’d been going through the motions of living, trying to keep the painful storm of grief contained inside her. She felt nothing else.

Lexa lingered a moment too long. A black mass launched from the shadows. She fell back, banging her head on the cement as the heavy beast landed on her chest. In a flash, white pointy teeth dug into her neck. Burning pain