Rat-A-Tat: Short Blasts of Pulp Read online

  RAT-A-TAT

  Short Bursts of Pulp!

  Copyright © 2014 Pro Se Press

  A Pro Se Press Publication

  The stories in this publication are fictional. All of the characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing of the publisher.

  All stories are the property of their respective authors

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  60%

  By Russ Anderson, Jr.

  UP FROM THE DEPTHS OF TARTARUS

  By Mark Gelineau

  DEEP… BELOW

  By Jaime Hudson

  BLOOD FROM STONE

  By Nick C. Piers

  THE MILE HIGH KILLERS

  By Joel Jenkins

  A NEW YARSIS

  By Edward J. Indovina

  HEADPHONES

  By Adam Lance Garcia

  BONE CRUSHER

  By Kevin Rodgers

  THE WELCOME WAGON

  By Mark Gelineau

  MINOR PLANET MAMBO

  By A. Stuart Williams

  KILLING TIME

  By Ken Janssens

  CALIBER

  By Ralph L. Angelo, Jr.

  ASTIGMATISM

  By David White

  THE WITCHES OF CARCASSONE

  By Philip Leibfried

  RECALL… REDUX

  By Jaime Hudson

  MERCY KILLING

  By Teel James Glenn

  CEMETERY GAMES

  By James Bojaciuk

  GOLDEN WOLF AND THE POD MEN

  By James Hopwood

  ESCAPING ATLANTA

  By Logan L. Masterson

  THE HANGED MAN: THE 3 CANDLES

  By Mark Gelineau

  A LAST RIDDLE

  By H. David Blalock

  ADMINISTRATIVE DUTY

  By Nick C. Piers

  WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS

  By James Kinley

  ONE DEAD DATE

  By Edward J. Indovina

  THE DOORMAN

  By Adam Lance Garcia

  NO MORE RUNNING

  By H. David Blalock

  PRIDE OF THE INTERNET

  By Nick C. Piers

  THE WORLD OF MAGPIE DARK

  By Mark Bousquet

  60%

  By Russ Anderson, Jr.

  “Michael Bragatoni,” Amber said, referring to her notes. “17 years old. Straight-A student, the kind who’s smart without trying, so doesn’t really try at anything else. Did some time in juvie at 14 for making bombs.”

  I almost didn’t hear her. The itch for a cigarette was in my fingers, my nose, my taste buds. Ten days, and the doctor said I was past the physical addiction. It sure as hell didn’t feel like it, though.

  “We’re sure those are his shoes?” I asked. They were black Nikes, splayed in the dew-damp grass. One had been tipped over, the other was full of water. I glanced around my feet, looking for a lawn sprinkler, but didn’t see one.

  “Pretty sure. The mother reported him missing yesterday. We wouldn’t have even started looking for him yet if not for the disturbance call.”

  “The kid hung out here a lot?”

  “That’s what the mother said. She’d told him she didn’t want him over here, but it’s like having a puppy, you know? If you don’t train them when they’re babies, they’ll never listen to you.”

  “Where’d all that water come from?”

  Amber grinned that grin that told me she was about to give me a headache. “That’s where it gets weird. It’s too much to be dew, right? Pollard took a sample and tested it. He says it’s almost pure H2O. Too clean to be rainwater and it sure didn’t come from any tap. Pollard says the spring water you get out of bottles isn’t even this clean.”

  I spit out the gum I’d been chewing and pulled the smashed pack of Dentyne out of my coat pocket. One addiction for another. What was the damn point? I hooked a thumb at the shoddy Victorian home Michael Bragatoni had left his shoes in front of.

  “Anything I should know about this Morris guy?” I said.

  Amber returned to her notes, content with the poke-poke she’d given to my ulcer. “Dominic Morris. 42 years old. No rap sheet. He had some sort of shop in the basement. Nobody knows what he was doing down there, but he blew the grid twice over the last 18 months. His car is missing. Looks like he left pretty fast.”

  “So… he’s either a pedophile or a murderer or a mad scientist.”

  “Or all three,” Amber agreed.

  “Let’s check it out.” I started for the house, shoes squishing in the water and the grass and something else – that gum I’d just spit out, probably. Or dog crap. I sighed, but didn’t stop to scrape it off. If Dominic Morris was gone, he wouldn’t mind if I tracked it into his house.

  ***

  “Look at this!” Pollard demanded, shoving the cage under my nose as soon as I was through the door. Pollard was our lead CSI tech – tiny and mouse-like, demented but brilliant. It wasn’t the first time he’d nearly injured me with his enthusiasm, but that didn’t make it any less irritating.

  At least until I looked in the cage.

  It was one of those plastic jobs you get for gerbils, and at first I thought it was empty, but then I saw movement in the shredded paper on the cage floor. I had to squint, but I finally figured out what I was looking at – rats. Maybe a dozen of them, scurrying around the bottom of the cage. Not one of them was any bigger than a pencil eraser.

  “What the hell–?”

  “It gets better.” Pollard grabbed me by the arm and pulled me across the dusty foyer, toward an open door and the rectangle of darkness behind it. “Wait until you see the basement.”

  ***

  A horse the size of a yellow lab. A cat smaller than a mouse. And in a cage in one neglected corner of the dank, dirt-floored room, what looked like an African elephant, no bigger than a miniature poodle.

  “We’re still piecing it together,” Pollard said, darting around the other techs, pointing to banks of strange machinery, overstuffed filing cabinets and, of course, the miniaturized fauna. “But this Morris guy was brilliant. I don’t think this was any kind of breeding experiment. I think he made these animals small—artificially.”

  I shared a look with Amber. It was that look that said we both thought Pollard was off his nut. It happens so often, it has its own look.

  It was interrupted by Pollard poking me in the chest. “You’re made mostly out of the empty space between your molecules, detective. I think Morris developed – I don’t know – a ray or something to compress the matter down into that empty space while still retaining its original shape. It seems like science fiction, but it is feasible.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “What does that have to do with Michael Bragatoni?”

  “Bragatoni was helping Morris with his experiments. God knows how they met, but… we think there was a falling out.”

  “Foul play,” I agreed. Now we were back in my territory.

  “Right. Now, have you noticed how damp it is down here?”

  I shrugged and nodded. It was pretty humid.

  “A lot of your physical makeup is empty space, but there’s a whole bunch of water in there too. It’s about 60% of
your mass, in fact. The thing is, water doesn’t compress so well.” Pollard cupped his hands and twisted them together, like he was squishing a ball. “So Morris’s ray – let’s just call it a ray for now – we think it must have compressed the empty space and ejected most of the water mass. So when you zap something, you’re left with a much smaller animal standing in the middle of a big puddle of pure H2O.”

  He paused, gazing at Amber meaningfully. “Pure H2O.”

  I heard Amber gasp, and I thought of that squishy thing I’d stepped on when walking away from those sodden shoes, the thing I’d taken for my old gum.

  “Call homicide,” I croaked, my throat suddenly a desert. I had a feeling I was about to take up smoking again.

  U P FROM THE DEPTHS OF TARTARUS

  By Mark Gelineau

  November 1916, The Battle of the Somme

  Shuddering in the muddy trench, watching the sun dip down lower in the sky, the boy felt his terror building. Every moment of his time here on the front had been horrifying, from the rats that came in the night while he huddled in his bunk, to the crack and whine of an errant bullet from a German sniper when he stood up too tall in the trench. But nothing equaled the special fear that came from being selected for a "pirate crew", the name the Sergeant Major gave to the raid teams who went out at night and crossed No Man's Land to harass the Germans in their own trenches. This morning, his name had been called, and tonight he would be going out in the darkness.

  He was sure he was going to die out there.

  He missed his father. He missed the mountains, and climbing with his father, and Eckenstein, the grizzled old mountaineer who traveled with his father's survey team as they scouted the course for the new railways. For the hundredth time that day, he fervently wished that he had listened to his father and stayed with the survey team. But he was young and headstrong, and the world was at war. So at sixteen years old, the boy had gone off to play the soldier.

  God, had he been the fool.

  The sun sank lower and the shadows lengthened. Looking down, he saw that his hands were shaking. Soon he would be going over the top of the trench, out into the darkness, amongst the barbed wire, and the dead, and the...

  "Oy, Private! You alright there lad?"

  He looked up to see Sergeant Major Bedford standing over him. The hulking Sergeant Major had removed his helmet and covered his face and hands with black powder, making him look like one of the Masai tribesmen the boy had met while traveling with his father in Africa. The memory made him wish for his old life all the more.

  "Y-yes, Sergeant Major," he stammered. He tried to hide his shaking hands in his pockets, but the Sergeant Major's eyes caught the movement. The burly man moved over and slid down to sit next to him.

  "First jaunt on a pirate crew, lad?" he asked. Exeter nodded. Bedford made a noise in his throat and then pulled a small tin out of his pocket and handed it over to the boy.

  "Burnt cork. Spread it over your face and hands. Keep you from standing out in the darkness."

  With numb hands, the boy took the tin and began to apply the gritty powder to his cheeks and chin. The Sergeant Major watched him, then pointed. "Don't forget your eyelids too lad. Everyone forgets the eyelids the first time out."

  As the young man finished, the Sergeant Major stood up. "Be ready to go in two hours lad. Before then, check everything you got on you. Nothing loose or rattling that might give old Fritz the nod that we're in his yard eh?" He reached again into his pocket and pulled out a long, thin boot lace. "Take this and tie your trench-knife to your hand. Keep you from losing it in a fight."

  He took the boot lace and looked up at the man. He wanted to say thank you, to say pick someone else, to say anything at all, but he had no voice. Instead, he just nodded again.

  Bedford looked at him for a long moment. "You stay right behind me and do as you're told. Be brave lad, and we'll see this night through." With that, he turned and headed down the trench.

  The boy watched him go, and then pulled out the trench knife from his belt. With trembling hands, he began to tie it to his palm with the Sergeant Major's shoelace.

  ***

  Darkness.

  Darkness and the cold, smothering embrace of the earth were all that he knew. It filled his mouth, his nostrils, wrapped around him like a cocoon. He tried to move, to shake his limbs free, but the weight of the earth upon him had him paralyzed.

  With a scream muffled by a mouthful of dirt, the boy realized he had been buried alive.

  He forced himself to calm down, to stifle the blind animal panic that tore at his mind as a reaction to the darkness and the suffocating pressure all around him. His thoughts raced to retrace the events that had brought him to this end, this horrific fate.

  Think, blast it! What had happened? Think back.

  He remembered the moment of fear and adrenaline as he had followed the Sergeant Major and the other members of the team over the top of the parapet and out into the blasted hellscape of No Man's Land. He remembered every agonizing minute of that crawl, waiting each moment for the bullet that would end his life. He remembered reaching the German wire, and how the twang as one of the men cut it had echoed in the still night, and how he knew then that the sound would alert their enemy to their presence and spell their doom. But nothing had come and he had followed the others over the lip of the German trench. He remembered all that.

  The boy tried to move his neck but the pressure of earth upon him held him utterly paralyzed. The only reason he had not already suffocated was that his arm was crooked in front of his face, creating a small area free from the dirt and allowing him a pocket of air. A mere sliver of space, but enough to have saved his life.

  He tried to stifle the sobbing gasps and think. It was so hard to piece things together. He had followed the Sergeant Major over the lip of the trench. There had been a fight, brief yet brutal. He remembered that. The Sergeant Major going straight over the parapet and catching a German officer out for a smoke. Another one coming up behind, and the boy jumping at him. Striking at him with knife and fist. The struggle and the blood and the thrill of standing victorious and alive over an enemy that would have gladly seen you dead instead.

  Then nothing. He blanked beyond that moment. What had happened after? What had put him under the ground? Had he lost the fight? Had the knife gone into him instead, and this was how he would spend eternity?

  The boy gritted his teeth and howled a muted roar again into the dirt, replaying the melee in the trench again and again, each time forcing the memory to go a second further, then a minute more, pushing past the block.

  He remembered taking papers off the body of the officers, turning around and catching the eye of Sergeant Major Bedford, the big man motioning with his trench club. He had turned to look and seen the entrance to the dugout, the underground bunker. It had yawned in the darkness, the flicker of hurricane lamps showing long steps leading into the depths.

  Then suddenly, a gunshot had cracked the night and angry shouts sounded all around them. One of the team had been discovered and the Sergeant Major had called to him to come on, to rush forward and join the fight, to help free the rest of the team.

  And the boy had run.

  Instead of following the Sergeant, the chaos and the fear had been too much for him, and the boy had panicked, rushing headlong into the darkness of the dugout, desperate for any safety.

  And then, a sound like thunder and the world had crushed in on him.

  Now, in the present, the boy finally understood what had transpired. British artillery, his artillery, had shelled the trench line, unaware that a raiding party had gone out. A bureaucratic mistake, a runner late with a delivery, or dead from a sniper's bullet. It did not matter. What mattered was that the roof of the dugout that he had been standing in had taken a direct hit, and now he was buried alive 25feet below the surface.

  This was the punishment for his cowardice.

  Sixteen years old, and he would die a horrific death in the ear
th because he had allowed his fear to conquer him

  Something inside him snapped at that. He thought back to the mountains he had climbed as a child. There, he had been fearless. The clean, cold air of the peaks, the hard stone gripped under his fingers. The cry of a falcon as it circled the heights. There he had known courage, so he could damn sure find some now. If he was going to die, it would not be down in the tight darkness of the bowels of the earth, in a coward's grave.

  If he could only see the light of day again, he would never again let fear master him.

  His fingers flexed, tensing with the force of his vow, and he felt something in them, smooth and hard and comforting. The hilt of his trench knife rested against his palm, tied there with an old boot lace. Now it might save his life. As he tensed, he felt the blade of the knife move.

  It had moved! That movement brought him hope, and with hope came determination. This was the answer to his prayers and his redemption. He would rise from this grave, climb back to the surface, back to the mountains, and the clear skies, back to the heights like a falcon taking wing. He would find his courage in the light and the clean air. Back and forth he moved the blade, clearing space. Back and forth he moved his arm. Minutes stretched on, became hours, days, weeks, years perhaps. Time did not matter in the darkness. But each inch of movement was a step toward freedom. Back and forth, back and forth.

  His muscles ached, his throat burned, but he worked tirelessly for God knows how long. Then, without warning, the boy felt the dirt before his blade give way, sliding into nothing. He pushed and worked his arm forward and felt it burst through into empty space. With a growl that was almost inhuman in its violence and desperation, he pushed forward, realizing what the emptiness was. The stairway. The reinforced stairway that had led into the dugout had survived the blast. He scrambled like an animal, clawing his way into the empty space.