Alfar Anthology: Science and Fantasy Fiction Short Stories

By AA VV

The Best 12 Alfar Series short stories of Science Fiction and Fantasy Fiction.
'Perpendicular By Brendan Higgins' - A deadly virus has wiped out three quarters of the world's population. Medical research scientist Dr. Jary Coble had sought -- and failed -- to combat the pandemic. 
'Counter Program' by Dennis Coleman- Miles and the robot servants on space station Ursa Five are programmed to obey humans without question. 
'Red One' by Ivano Massari- Set in a post nuclear war landscape, the elite rebel team of Red One battle against the forces of planetary domination.
'Ticket Please' by Lee Brown- Following a life changing mistake a young man boards a train hoping to leave the past behind. 
'Outpost Omega Seven' by Nina Tozzi- Cathy and Wayne are a young couple who man a remote outpost at the junction of three trade routes in the boondocks of space.
'Beyond This Point There be Ogres' by Robert Bresloff - The last of the great dragon slayers, Salvi believed that he had killed his last dragon. 
'Inducing a Dream' by M. Travis Leake - Kyna is an up-and-coming skyke racer. Courted by a corporation to endorse a product she despises, she exchanges her principles for victory. 
'The Thirst for Power' by Wolcott Wheeler- A paranormal investigator learns that a certain notorious world leader—the most feared and powerful man in the world—is not what he seems. In fact, he’s not even human…
'Fate' by Eddie Grant- Roll was an ordinary teenage girl who's lately been suffering from a serious case of Deja Vu, and horrific dreams. After shocking revelation, her night of fun soon turns into a walking nightmare that will change her life forever.
'King of the World' by Paul Martin- When the Turtle first appeared before an awestruck world, it seemed nothing would ever be the same again. 
'Orienteer' by Clémence Roche - Within a post-apocalyptic world, watch how the clash between the environment affects the mortals who continue a form of survival. 
'The Great Fairy' Tale Hoax by Chava Klahr - Forget everything you ever read about these seven classic fairy tales.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Volume Edizioni
• Release date: May 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9789492488176

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COVER

Copyrights

Alfar Anthology

Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Stories Anthology

ALFAR

Sci-fi & Fantasy Series

Anthology n. 1

ISBN 978-88-9774-72-91

First published : November 2016

Stories

First published: May 2016 © Volume Press

‘Perpendicular’ by Brendan Higgins

‘Counter Program’ by Dennis Coleman

‘Red One’ by Ivano Massari

‘Ticket Please’ by Lee Brown

‘Outpost Omega Seven’ by Nina Tozzi

‘Beyond This Point There Be Ogres’ by Robert Bresloff

‘Inducing a Dream’ by M. Travis Leake

‘The Thirst for Power’ by Wolcott Wheeler

‘Fate’ by Edward L. Grant

‘King of the World’ by Paul Martin

First published: July 2016 © Volume Press

‘Orienteer’ by Clémence Roche

‘The Great Fairy Tale Hoax’ by Chava Klahr

Cover by VolumePressGT

Editor in Chief: Massimo Cimarelli

Art Director: Francesca Eleuteri

© Volume Press

www.volumepress.nl

Volume Press

Roef 12 - 1319AK Almere - The Netherlands 

NL855776821B01 - KvK 64681327

Copyright © Volume Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduce, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publisher, the copy bought is only for the personal use of the buyer, any violation will be prosecuted according to Law.

Perpendicular

By Brendan Higgins

I remember the first time I saw him. It's not like I could forget. It isn't every day you wake up to a stranger sitting at the foot of your bed, waiting for your dreams to end and the nightmares to begin. His face was cold, angular, bathed in shadows under a Stetson from another time. I didn't startle when I saw him. Maybe, somehow, I was expecting him.

Why are you here? I asked, before I even sat up.

His voice clawed forth from the depths of some wretched place.

To show you the way, he told me, struggling with each little word.

I don't remember getting out of bed. I don't even recall agreeing to follow him. My legs were moving and my mind was churning and I couldn't stop either one. We were walking on soft, padded moss. Darkness was fading and a pale blue light was breaking through the trees high above. The trees. They reminded me of the lush oaks and maples against the summer night sky. I would lose myself in them as a child while the katydids sang until dawn. I hadn't seen a tree in bloom in more than three years. I watched these ones sway as the stranger led me deeper into an unfamiliar and uninviting wilderness. And yet, it was liberating. Nothing about my surroundings spelled safety. But the world I had anticipated waking to only hours later was much worse. Gone were supermarkets and shopping malls. Stadiums and entertainment faded like a vapor. All we had left was survival. And most of us didn't even want that.

*****

The virus had come like a thief in the night. The world woke to breaking and alarming news. It had become airborne when it mutated somewhere in the States. Patient Zero was public enemy number one. He was probably dead before we knew what was happening. People grew paranoid. And those that didn't paid for it with their lives.

I was a medical research scientist then, working at George Washington University Hospital. Three of my colleagues and I were tasked with finding the man who brought it here, dead or otherwise. If we could find him, we could stop its spread, we believed. We thought we'd done it within the first week. He was a tourist from West Africa. He was dead, but all the evidence pointed to him as our culprit. So we celebrated our feat. There were no new cases for eleven days. The world breathed a collective sigh of relief. But it was tragically premature. Cases re-emerged, even stronger than before, fomenting a widespread panic.

We had been wrong.

I returned from a macabre odyssey across America not six weeks later. Alone. Shaken. I must have aged six years in those six weeks. I was alive and I probably shouldn't have been. The Washington I returned to had its population cut in half in the time I was gone. And the city was a ghost town. No one even bothered to clean the bodies off the streets. I didn't blame them. That was too dangerous.

It only got worse.

Looters reigned. Business and commerce died with the souls that operated them. Food grew scarce. Wildlife was not immune, nor was the summer foliage. A dense smog crept in and never left. Whatever was birthed in us had risen into the troposphere, and not a living thing on our planet was unaffected. Survivors holed up under ground and waited it out. But no amount of waiting would suffice. The sight of a young family of four, arms locked, tearfully emerging from their shelter and bidding farewell to one another as they allowed for the virulent menace to run its course, was almost too much for me. We so frequently hear about the triumph of the human spirit in times of trial and tribulation. No one wants to know about the ones who abjured. I had a front row seat to it all from my apartment window – my university-assigned safe haven. And I happen to know that those four were not the only ones choosing death over perseverance.

*****

The stranger took me to the forest's edge. He said nothing. And neither did I. The mystery of it all was better than anything I'd endured since the virus rose to power. Better to be kept in the dark than brace for more bad news, I thought. In the distance, a cluster of lights came clearer into view. A sprawling community was secretly thriving in a world on its last legs. At least, that's what I presumed to be true upon a hasty first impression.

Once again, I can't recall going any further, or even deciding to investigate. In an instant, I was alone in a bright, white room, though there was no electricity in this place. It was like the inside of a cube whose edges were imperceptible. It had the gleam of fresh snow – the walls, the floor, the ceiling. It might as well have extended eternally in every direction, like something I had imagined as a child when I'd conceptualize artificial serenity. The stranger was gone. Maybe the rest of the world was, too. Maybe I had finally escaped, like that family of four and most of the rest of us. A voice boomed into the room with pristine clarity.

Jary Coble, it said.

Yes, I responded, without thinking.

I hadn't heard my name in so long. It sounded foreign, but I knew it. I remembered it like an old friend. Solace was all I'd known for seven months, when peers put an end to all fraternization. They left me alone to my research in vain. Until the stranger appeared at the foot of my bed, I'd had no human interaction since they let me be. And now someone was saying my name.

You've been shown the way, the voice said.

What way? I asked. What is this place?

"It is freedom, Dr. Coble. We are freedom."

I'd grown too pessimistic to smile, but I wanted to. I had hoped for hope each day I got out of bed. I had also hoped to be the one to deliver that hope. Part of me was disappointed, to be honest. I was supposed to be the one to end the most abject era of human existence. Me. Someone beat me to the punch. However, this revelation that there was a punch flew in like an angel from heaven and supplanted my pride. We were on the fast track to extinction. And now, it appeared, we weren't. That was enough for even a stubborn bastard like me to lighten up a little.

Did you find a cure? Can we mass produce it?

We did. And we have.

I was incredulous. My knees buckled. And then I was on the floor. I had never felt so many emotions wash over me like they had when those words were spoken. If only for a moment, I basked simultaneously in feral bliss and calamitous disappointment. But all those things were fleeting. Because what the voice said next I could never have prepared for.

Would you like to meet the man who led us out of the darkness? it asked.

The question was too flummoxing to respond to. It was past tense. I felt my head nod, though I didn't command that of it. A door, if one could call it a door, slid open. A familiar figure filled the frame. He wore a sport coat and jeans. On his lapel, an ID badge. He looked healthy, confident, though reluctant. He looked like me. He stepped into the room, a plaintive expression on his face. The door sealed shut behind him. The closer he got, the less I believed it. Sometimes when we look into a mirror, we're surprised by what we see. I didn't think I looked like that, we tell ourselves, as the person staring back betrays the one in our mind's eye. This was no mirror. This was a living, breathing me, or, Second Me. He was the me I could have been – should have been – with a better track record and some exercise every now and again. He was prepared. I was not. But neither of us said a word for what seemed like minutes. When he finally opened his mouth, everything I knew to be true about life and the universe rebooted with a resounding wallop to the gut I'll likely never recover from. The world as I knew it, was a mere fabrication.

*****

You're a clone, I told him.

No, he said.

What's happening here? I'm dreaming?

No, he said again.

My heartbeat sped. I couldn't speak. Fear is a destructive agent. It hinders the spirit and it slays armies. It crippled me in the room as I looked into my own eyes. In spite of whatever he did to prepare for this meeting, it could never have been enough. He wasn't gripped by fear, but he was not unaffected. The door slid open again. He gave me a half nod that seemed to express sympathy, if I had to guess. It was a communicative gesture I'd probably delivered hundreds of times; I just never knew what it looked like. And with it, he disappeared from the way he came.

I blinked, and I had changed locations again. I couldn't recall any dreams between watching myself walk out of the white room and then gazing at a team of surgeons standing above me, so I know I didn't sleep. I'm an avid dreamer. Up until the virus spread, I used to write down where my subconscious had taken me the previous few hours. I had planned to study dreams one day – maybe examine the correlation between one's fantasy and reality. My own dreams were fun, but my tangible, material life was better. The university enabled me to travel, make landmark discoveries, save lives. When the world went to hell, I didn't much see the point in documenting my mind's unbridled fantasies. Dreams used to represent hope. Now they were just empty escapism.

One of the surgeons thanked me for my time, and then they left me there, just as the Second Me had. I sat up, checking every inch of my body. No bandages. No injuries. There were no remnants of whatever they had done. When I stood, I didn't feel lightheaded. I took a moment to gauge my surroundings. It looked like a pediatric room, and it smelled of rubbing alcohol. It was comforting, in a sense. It reminded me of a time when what ailed us was treatable, and doctors still cared. I followed the surgeons out the door, but I was too late to see where they'd gone.

The hallway resembled a hospital's, but not like any I'd ever seen. It was warm and homey, like it could envelop me in an embrace if I would let it. As I began to traverse it, toward a series of doors at the far end, I noticed framed photographs on the walls. They were family portraits. I'd seen them before. In my childhood home. The mother and father were my own parents. The children were myself and my little sister. There we were, ebullient smiles for the camera. And this was but one in a series of many lining that hall. I'd seen each of them before. Obviously, someone had burgled my parents' Gaithersburg home and decorated this place with its contents. Obviously.

In confounded panic, I sprinted for the door at the end of the hall, bursting through it to a sunny day. Birds sang. The trees were so green they might as well have been uprooted from a rain forest and planted here. The sky was just as it was meant to be: vast and blue and adorned with spectacularly white clouds. It was a frightening paradise from which I had to escape.

I wouldn't get far.

*****

I felt the shot before I heard it echo across the knoll. It was like a wild animal leaped from the earth and clamped its jaws into the back of my thigh. That thought rocketed through my head just before the rifle blast reached my ears. I probably yelped like the fleeing coward I was. Clawing at the ground with one hand, gripping my thigh with the other, the tree line through which the stranger had led me here seemed to be drifting further from view. Less than a minute later, the hot breath of a German Shepherd was introducing itself to my neck.

I blinked, and I was back inside. I don't know who picked me up or how they brought me back, but my recent behavior suggested I didn't put up a fight. I had always expected that in the face of turmoil or injustice, I'd be the type that defends the marginalized, or at the very least, would stand up for myself. The virus proved I wasn't the former. And this little hiccup told me I wasn't even the latter. It's a humiliating epiphany – learning what you're really made of.

This room was not like the others. It wasn't warm. It did not remind me of my adolescence, nor of something from my imagination. It looked like a vacated office – like someone had quit a while back and was never replaced. It had the skeleton of a corporate space, yet it was cavernous, if there can be such a thing in a twenty by fifteenfoot box. Again, I was alone, left to my rambling thoughts and misgivings. I played the recent events over and over in my head. How I got here, why I was taken, who these people were, and how or why there was a better version of myself walking the halls. When I became aware that I was lying down, I tried to stand, and the pain shot through my leg like lightning. They had bandaged me up at least. But why they left me in this place was just as cryptic as everything else.

I called for help. Screamed, is more like it. No one came. There were no clocks in the room, though I watched the light fade on that gorgeous day from a window I never could have fit through. I lied there, imprisoned in an anonymous room and in my chaotic mind. I swam in my memories, thinking mostly of my childhood. Seeing those photographs of my family awakened a regret I had chosen to suppress for most of my life. We drifted apart when I finished medical school. There were financial discussions, geographic conversations, and lifestyle chats. None of them were friendly. We all seemed happier the less we saw each other. It wasn't deliberate; the e-mails and phone calls just grew fewer and further between, and then one day they stopped altogether. As the virus ransacked the world, I went looking for them. I found nothing. I told myself they were all right, and that was enough to bring peace to my cold heart. But this place told the truth. These posthumous monuments on the wall indicated they were most certainly not all right. I punished myself for the selfishness that had been so easy to ignore. Then I punished myself for not finding Patient Zero, for maybe the six-hundredth time. When self-inflicted, regret is our cruelest foe, and most intimate companion.

My eyes were heavy. The only light now emanated from the celestial bodies against the inky black sky. They were magnificent. I hadn't even realized I'd missed them. I strained my eyes, and just as I thought I'd identified Jupiter, a bang on the door startled me from my reverie.

Come in, I said, with a wry smile.

A key unlocked the door and it pushed open. Light from outside flooded into the room. My eyes didn't adjust well. When they did, three men and one woman stood in the doorway.

Can you walk? one of the men – the Speaker – asked me.

I don't think so, I said.

Good, he said. Come with us.

How can I come with you if I can't—

I blinked, and we had changed rooms again. It was bright in here, yet the light did not affect my eyes, as if we'd been here awhile, though I had no recollection of our transfer.

We can show you, but you're not going to like it, the Speaker said.

What? I asked, snapping back to reality.

"I said you won't