Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy Stories

"No. No. No," Van Richter whined. He slapped a hand against the steering wheel. The hover car, its battery reading empty, puttered to a halt on the scenic roadside. Without adequate thrust, it sank down into the grass. The twenty-forty hover model would never have done this. Goes to show, Van thought, newer isn't always better. "I knew we should've recharged back at the last station," said Ula, his wife. Arms crossed, she stared at the road ahead, unable to see Van's irritated glare. "What are we going to do now?" Van took a deep breath. When the ire subsided, he said, "Relax. Emergency roadside will send someone." He pressed a button on the dash. "In the meantime, enjoy all the trees. You don't get much of those in the city." Surrounded by tall, green conifers, Ula glanced their way and then back at her husband. "If I wanted to see trees, I would've chosen to live out here like some cyber-social recluse."

His irregular blood pump sped up in reaction to the silence. Wind should have filled the sails. Instead, they hung limp—dead. With no wind in the sails, Allen sat perfectly parallel to the cutter's mast. Green pre-dawn starlight glinted off the reflective surface of the glass flats surrounding him and the cutter. Pre-dawn calm on the Lacus Glass Flats meant death. The cutter's long skates made no "skitting" sound, completing the terrifying silence.

Father first awoke the topiaries the morning after Mother died. Shrubs wriggled loose from their dirt when he passed, dormant bushes burst free and scampered across the countryside. Thus it went for eighteen years. I lived my life knowing that Father could awaken plants, but I did not realize what I, his daughter, could awaken.

Jackson looked up from a cat video at the sound of flopping sandals on the floor he'd just cleaned. His expressionless middle-aged face bore the slightest frown. Was she management? She looked more like a tongue depressor escaped from a gardening expo than a supervisor. However, he didn't know all the ship's managers, so he placed his device in his pocket discretely. He picked up his mop from the floor and examined her progress. She left a trail of echoing "THOP" sounds across the hall's tiled expanse.

“Go on, dear,” urges Janice, pushing her through the door of the First Contact Community Centre. “Trust me. This is exactly what you need.” Maya’s not so sure. What she really needs is an evening away from her problems. All those hundreds and thousands of problems scurrying through her cupboards and burrowing under her carpets. Who’d have guessed an alien invasion would have quite so many legs? She shudders, sitting down beside an embarrassed looking lady with thick rimmed glasses and braids, and tries her best to look invisible. “Welcome,” says the man from the newly formed Inpestation Information Board. “Thank you for coming.” “Of course I’m not here for me,” Janice tells the people in the next row. Just loudly enough for the entire room to hear. “Maya’s the one with the horrible creatures.”

Donnie's window muffled the clank of swords and the pop of rifles as if they were being played from an old radio. He hopped from his bed, walked over his array of toy soldiers on the floor, and watched the bright display along the shore. When he woke the next morning his neck ached from sleeping with his head on the sill. The beach was calm and quiet in the dawning light. "Just a dream, Donnie," his dad said at breakfast, when Donnie told him of the battle on the beach. "This summer home is old and creaky. You're just not used to it yet." "Eat up," said his mom, pushing a plate of pancakes in front of his doubtful face. When his parents settled into their Adirondack chairs on the porch with their coffee and their books, Donnie went down to the beach. An unusual rusty odor haunted the salty air as he walked along the edge of the water, letting the waves wash over his feet. Something brushed against his ankle. Bending over, he plucked a small bullet casing from the water and rolled it his fingers, then he walked toward the fort.

The ting-a-ting-clank announcing a customer caught me off guard. No one came in Moore's Gas & More in July. We didn't have air conditioning. Even the taffy got squishy. I popped up from the candy row and gave my jeans a yank. "Can I help you?" I squinted at the customer standing by the corn chips, backlit by the window. I guessed woman because she was short. I figured she wanted the john. "Back there." I pointed past the air filters. "Only got one. Uni-sex and all." She stared out the window like a little kid, her fingers hooked over the magazine racks. "I'm Cinny if you need anything," I said. I resumed my candy shelving, singing Gloria Estefan under my breath. I had a good set of pipes. Mama said my voice was sweet enough to soothe baby birds out of the nest, whatever that meant, only I was too awkward to sing in front of folks. The customer scuff-scuffed into the candy row like she didn't know to pick her feet up. I turned and I figured out she was a he, and the strangest little he I'd ever seen.

"Fishie?" Little Evan asked over the sound of his mother flushing the toilet. Ray stepped between Evan and Cecelia, squatting down to look into Evan's watering eyes. "I thought you said that Fishie went to heaven." Ray took a deep breath, keeping eye contact. "Evan, ... Fishie, ... well, he did some things... He's gone to a bad place."

Gerald saw the shadowy figure twice before; drifting between corpses in no-man's-land, wavering in the dark. Nerves, he convinced himself. But this time, as it stood in the trench only feet away, there was no easy explanation. His rifle leveled on the intruder. "Identify yourself!" Behind the folds of hood topping the black-robed figure, an even voice answered: "So, you can see me."

Major Pax's bony hand rested next to Sam's eliminated white pieces. A light bulb illuminated the chessboard they battled on to pass the years. A bomb from a previous conflict had started the war, a mindless mechanical device that exploded at an unfortunate time. They—the Blancs—took less than an hour to launch the missiles from the safety of their cubicles. The Noirs did the same, and the thriving world was gone. Sam had to contact each Blanc citizen to determine his or her status. He had compiled a list of numbers to call long ago, but had forgotten the original source or if it was in a particular order. Sam started calling once the radiation levels allowed.