Chris Lux Hayes has typed up an assortment of short stories and novelettes in the fantasy: magical realism genre. The author begins assembling most every short story knowing the narrative might spiral out of control, leaving him with a commercially iffy novelette or novella.
“I WILL BE RIGHT WITH YOU”
Short Story • Word Count: 2,500
Christmas joy is hanging in the balance. Budwin Hench is on a mission to buy his girlfriend a SALOME wild-rose gold, quad-snake chain bracelet with the revolutionary Epitome Clasp™. Budwin is worried because the world has rarely been his friend, but he knows he needs to step up and complete this crucial transaction at Borid, the Delicatessen of Jewelry, or else the holiday season will be ruined.
Excerpt from “I Will Be Right with You”
My name is Budwin Hench. I am employed as a hazardous clod handler at Gagarin Industries, a multinational munitions conglomerate. The Peach Island plant where I work manufactures area-of-denial shock panels that can be stacked to electrocute mobs of rioters at the touch of a button.
Gagarin makes all kinds of crowd-control weaponry and has plants in 70-some countries on five continents. The conglomerate’s total assets top $140 billion. The CEO, a hotshot mogul in India who will never venture closer than one thousand miles to my hometown, Fishwilly, Minnesota, receives an annual base salary of only $585,000, but his stock awards and bonuses line his pockets with hundreds of millions of dollars.
I am no slouch so I know chimpanzees and gorillas will be riding horses like Mongol archers long before I ever see that kind of loot. Ordinarily, recalling my relative status as a fiscal runt would make me angry and depressed. But that is not the case today.
Last January, the U.S. government’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act started adding $17.14 to my biweekly paycheck. Not a mind-boggling sum by most standards, but I have been saving that $17.14 twice a month for the past eleven months, which means I now have enough money to purchase my girlfriend, Ainsley Ponsonby, a pretty awesome Christmas present.
“BLAST WAVE”
Short Story • Word Count: 2,500
Winston is a stoner slacker. He works as a sales associate at Blast Wave, a global retailer that grooms and markets suicide bombers. He dislikes his supervisor, Hoyt, but enjoys his job because he doesn’t have to lift heavy objects or concentrate for periods longer than two minutes.
Winston works the evening shift and spends most of his time in the store’s theater den, watching TV and toking on his one-hitter. One evening while lazing about as usual, he is interrupted by the arrival of a frightening customer, one bringing a life-altering problem Winston is ill-equipped to solve.
Excerpt from “Blast Wave”
Many of our customers think we keep our suicide bombers in the backrooms of our retail outlets. That’s not true. I work at a Blast Wave location and I’ve never seen a suicide bomber in person. Other customers think we board our bombers at a supermax resort in Musha Cay or Seychelles or some other unreachable luxury destination.
That might be true as far as I know. When customers stop by our location, I show them a video presentation and then let them click through a photo gallery of our latest inventory. If they decide to buy a bomber, I’m required to tell them to expect delivery in seven to eleven days.
We’re not supposed to use the term “suicide bomber.” My manager told me to call our product “Wholesome Organic Warheads,” or WOWs. I don’t always listen to my manager because he’s a knob. I usually call our bombers “human bangs” like everyone else.
I googled “blast wave” and found out about shock fronts emerging from high-order explosive cores. I learned about shrapnel, over-pressurized impulses, and superheated negative winds that inhale flesh and debris. I saw photos of burst eyeballs, butterfly lungs, and warped heads. I guess all the good names were taken like iBomb and Instaboom.
THE PONY
Novelette • Word Count: 9,900
Bapoto is the most ambitious and unluckiest botanist in Gabon, the fifth richest country in Africa. Just when he’s making his greatest botanical discovery, Baboto is ambushed by a horrifying paranormal entity that not only robs him of his prize, but also sends him hurtling toward a 40-year stopover at the Crane Meadow Psychiatric Hospital in Vermont.
When he is finally discharged from the hospital, Bapoto secures a job as a gardener at a magnificent luxury estate, where he meets Geneva Werlin and her daughter, Winter, the latter 12 years old and the future proud owner of a wonderful Exmoor pony.
That gift lands Winter square in the path of the same monstrous presence that shredded Bapoto’s psyche. Can Bapoto save the girl from certain and irreversible madness? Only the pony knows for sure.
Excerpt from THE PONY
At that fabulous turning point in the forest, I had no desire to be an evil hermit or domestic assassin. I wanted to be Philip Cleeker, the Harvard botanist who made his bones revealing the incognito Polynesian cliff flower that cured chronic fatigue syndrome.
That bastard Cleeker with his swimsuit-model girlfriends, named endowments, and National Geographic spreads, not to mention his Lamborghini roadster, he hogged the zenith of my nerdish profession. But Cleeker does not have my equatorial monkshood.
“Caution, Bapoto,” I leaked in a sinewy whisper. “Don’t get ahead of yourself.”
I recorded the find on my smartphone, getting photos and video. I documented vital data—time, weather, habitat, and so on, making an effort not to hiss like a thief. Trowel and hand lens in hand, I closed on the patch. I took a knee next to one urgently vibrant specimen. I magnified leaflets, petals, and follicles, absorbing delightful particulars. I deployed my plastic collection bags. I tugged on a pair of latex gloves, purplish blue as it happened, yes, in league with the flowers, but subdued as if in reverence for their miracle hue.
Tropical aconitine? Oh, goodness, Bapoto. Lucrative medicinal applications, why not?
I probed with my trowel, expelling the opulent topsoil, and gradually uprooted the specimen, my technique gentle and precise. After gleaning all soil from the roots, I added drops of water to the bags and prepared to snip the specimen into four bag-sized pieces for transport to the campus herbarium. I was positioning my snips to take off the blossom head when the reflection of a horrific face slid into view on one of the steel blades.
I jerked to look over my shoulder, but no one was there. A forest buffalo moaned in the near distance. Bats burst from the understory to buzz the patch in a flurry of squeaks. The Aconitum spires swayed as if following the melody of a malicious hymn.
I surveyed my surroundings, sensing a new presence in the gloom. The air quality changed, not actually dipping in temperature, but becoming cold at a level darker than my mind could follow. I gasped in fright and sprang to my feet. I could see my breath as a sparkling, purple-blue fog.
My smartphone rang with a grotesque ringtone I did not recognize. I looked at the screen and registered the image of the incoming caller, flickering and pixelated, but ultimately identical to the horrific face I had seen reflected on the blade of my snips. I rejected the call and backed away from the patch.
“Hold up, Bapoto,” I heard myself grunt. “Don’t forget the specimen.”
Something in the forest found me, I whimpered internally. I am the specimen.
THE KILL CHAIN
Novelette • Word Count: 9,900
Chief Master Sergeant Ramsey Magnus Yule recently retired after a 30-year career in the U.S. Air Force. Ramsey is having a tough time adjusting to civilian life. His job in the military was centered on Darkhive, a top-secret USAF AI UAV program. That $850 million covert offensive dispatched 6th-gen attack drones to deactivate terrorists and other unlawful combatants in an assortment of foreign lands.
Nowadays, Ramsey spends his time ramping up a new “leisure activity” that involves feeding the birds in his yard with minimal assistance from his wife’s cat, Pegapuss.
Ramsey’s crusade against the local squirrels that loot and plunder his feeders is quickly morphing into an obsession. His wife, Britt, is worried her husband is starting to view those squirrels as the deranged disciples of a neighborhood death cult.
Excerpt from THE KILL CHAIN
I like drinking 25-year-old Scotch whisky while watching the birds at my feeders. I have numerous feeders at different heights in several trees. My great room on the second floor has immense picture windows. Each window is like an aquarium for birds. Britt insists the correct term is “aviarium.”
“All these feeders, Ramsey,” she says with some uneasiness. “We’re going to end up ankle-deep in bird droppings.”
“That’s a norman cardinal,” I reply, pointing at a bright red bird with a crest. “Official state bird in two dozen states.”
She looks skeptical. “Two dozen? Are you sure?”
“Bird’s popular, what can I say?”
I feed my cardinals the most expensive safflower and sunflower hearts on the market, but I don’t share such details with Britt. Two weeks ago, I couldn’t tell a cardinal from a pelican.
Britt leans in to regard me from a more aggressive angle. “You must be spending a fortune on bird food and feeders, honey. Don’t you think you’re going overboard?”
I can hear the dog across the street yipping again. Little mutant’s an applehead Chihuahua the color of sawdust. He can’t weigh more than five pounds and has a face like a moray eel with ears. I would not be surprised to learn he served as a volunteer gremlin during the Battle of Britain. I don’t know his name, but I’m going with Fuckles.
“Ramsey, are you listening to me?”
I give Britt my full attention and call on a recently forged expression, one suggesting I aimed high for thirty years and I can now take aim at anything I want. I like to think rolling for the birds makes sense for one of America’s top airman: Chief Master Sergeant Ramsey Magnus Yule, retired. Only one percent of U.S. Air Force enlisted personnel reach the rank of E9. That makes me a one percenter.
“Ramsey, no, come on,” she groans, rebelling against my new outlook. “You can’t turn our yard into an airfield. Birds are not planes—and squirrels are not murderous psychopaths.”
“Our state bird is the loon,” I report, shifting tactics. “Too close to loony bin in my opinion. We should switch to one of those eagles that pigs out on monkeys.”
“We don’t have monkey-eating eagles in Minnesota, honey. They live in the Philippines.”
“That’s irrelevant.”
She laughs. “Audubon’s got nothing on you.”
Uh-oh, Britt seems to think I should know this guy. Not knowing makes me edgy.
WREN
Novelette • Word Count: 9,450
Penemue is a conscripted, factory-class incubus deployed at his company’s upward operating base, or UOB, in Minnesota. He feels like he’s trudging through his life wearing an imaginary cone of shame. He misses his ex-wife, Squit, a cambion, or daughter of a succubus, who now seems indifferent to him, which is way worse than the loathing she previously aimed in his direction.
Penemue is chronically bummed about his status as an incubus. Few things are lower than an incubus in the societal structure of Hell. In fact, if Hell had a caste system, Penemue would rank lower than the toenail clippings of an untouchable’s pet rat.
As luck would have at it, Penemue is assigned his next human female target by none other than Uzziel, an original second-sphere fallen angel, who has arrived at the UOB with General Martin Nomos, a rising star on Satan’s enemies list.
Uzziel also brought along his chief bodyguard, a Pazuzu morph named Tarzan, and one of his intelligence officers, a powerlifting, sex doll-faced lamia.
Penemue soon learns the human female he’s supposed to seduce, subvert, and ultimately control is a college freshman named Wren Awen, who apparently has the nifty ability to possess demons. That ability and Wren’s total submission are the linchpins in Uzziel’s plot to assassinate Satan.
Excerpt from WREN
I’m not a boss demon like a duke or president commanding legions of goblins, trolls, and orcs. I’m an incubus, a variety of lowlife underling fused to the underbelly of an endless undertow.
My work involves creeping on human women when they’re sound asleep and vulnerable. I trip their nympho instincts, creating false awakenings, and wind them out as nocturnal sex junkies afflicted with Pathological Romantic Enthrallment Pathosis, or PREP.
Contrary to fashionable belief, I am not a horrid dwarf with an ice-cold and peculiarly large penis. My family tree is rooted in the illustrious muck of Imamiah, a third-sphere prince who ticked off Azazel, one of the original fallen cherubim, and got tossed horns-first into the Furnace of Illumination.
That’s the main reason my ancestors fell on hard times and I scrape by as an incubus. Hard Times in Hell. Sounds like the dumbest movie ever made.
Anyway, when I’m on the job topside, I come across as an astonishingly beautiful male human. When I’m underneath in my apartment, I look like a mummy of seething shadows.
My immediate supervisor is a dog-headed hinn named Dawud. Hinn troubled the red dunes and gypsum plains of the Arabian Desert millions of years before Adam woke up with a missing rib.
Modern-day hinn are fussy-witted wights. Their dog noggins vary in breed. Dawud sports a dufus-grade Yorkipoo head when he’s down in the basement. The human head he uses upstairs seems shoddy and unfinished.
“You need to get up and get moving,” Dawud declares in an urgent voice, but I pretend I don’t notice his arrival. “Look here, Penemue, we don’t have time for your attitude this evening.”
We are in the common area of UOB Doloroth, which is a converted Prairie School mansion overlooking the Minnesota River on the southern boundary of the Minneapolis suburb, Eden Prairie. I have an assignment later that night, and I’m already wearing my uniform, a Burberry suit, Soho fit and cut from sharkskin wool.
“KING KULT”
Short Story • Word Count: 7,500
Roy Dosser is an art major at Crazy River Community College. Next fall, Roy will be transferring to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, with a full-ride scholarship linked directly to how his acrylic painting, Dripping with Finches, recently took fourth place at a world-renowned juried exhibition.
Roy needed a stress-free elective to complete his art degree at Crazy River, which is why he enrolled in Love Bombing: Psychic Drivers in Daily Life, a required course in the college’s new Associate of Science (A.S.) in Cult Leadership.
Two of Roy’s classmates, Dixie Heartstone, a witchy-librarian dorkette, and Andrew Goodburn, a notorious power forward on the Crazy River Maniacs basketball team, are about to introduce him to the astonishing world of cults and fringe religions, specifically Priests of the Chewed Foodie Pyramid and the cult’s shadowy autocratic leader, King Kult.
The artist in Roy is about to discover life itself is a dying art.
Excerpt from “King Kult”
Of course, Wesper Meng, aka the “Gustav Klimt of China,” never clapped eyes on Dripping, which features one dozen American goldfinches, six uranium-yellow males and six ghoul-olive females, clinging like jeweled magnets to a five-pound thistle sack.
Meng had perished two years earlier in Hong Kong during the infamous Castle Peak Road Riots when state security police from the Chinese mainland inhumed him under a heap of electroshock foam.
As luck shook out, Meng’s daughter, Nuwa Meng-Bellhouse, turned up as a paramount member of the competition’s juror team. According to bystanders, Nuwa was making her rounds at the Fronk Emporium, the Chicago art gallery hosting the exhibition, whisking past work after work in moody mode. Without warning, she hit the brakes in front of my painting and singled out the one unwelcome bird in the otherwise halcyon scene.
“Holy butcher blocks!” she gulped, ogling the bat falcon, a tropical predator with no earthly business in Minnesota. The falcon was monitoring the finches from a dusky stakeout slot in a neighboring tree. “Is that really you, Your Grace? Can you say serendipity party! We have the means to find you now. Yes, yes, yes, Your Grace, your kinks are my commandments.”
Anywise, that’s what those bystanders told me Nuwa told my painting. I wasn’t standing watch at my exhibit at that juncture, having stepped out for an espresso martini at a nearby cocktail lounge, but I believed with skimpy understanding these lay-witness accounts. Artists, especially ego-tripping examples, are grotesquely impressionable.
In my defense, I later hunkered down to pore over Nuwa’s juror comments, which unfold as follows: “We jitter and snick in the raptorial clutches of our master stalker. We long to hear our brickle neck bones scrambled by its bite. We yearn to feel our pellet hearts shuddering in its throat. We fib and flam and falsify, but you and I—we know. We have always craved the lethality of its lust.”
“CURBSIDE PICKUP”
Short Story • Word Count: 2,500
Munson and his wife, Soneva, are on an emergency mission to obtain essential supplies at a local grocery store during the height of the COVID-36 pandemic. Munson is a veteran curbside picker-upper, but Soneva is cursed with a sinister comorbid condition and hasn’t emerged from their home in months.
If SARS-CoV-5 infiltrates her eyes or nostrils, her immune system will almost certainly go belly up or even rogue, allowing the virus to gush down her windpipe and swamp her lungs. Soneva will inevitably develop acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS, aka shock lung, causing oxygen levels in her bloodstream to stumble and free fall.
Soneva’s brain will head sideways, plunging her into a state known as Beecroft’s delirium, a runaway rollercoaster ride of horrific hallucinations intermixed with periods of delusional rhapsody. Her skin will be mantled by grotesque, frostbite-like lesions. Soneva will eventually die fighting to breathe like an awakening zombie as her lungs overflow with a strange, rubbery pus.
Munson refuses to take a fatalistic approach to his wife’s ordeal. He will do whatever it takes to make sure Soneva exits unharmed from the latest pandemic .
Excerpt from “Curbside Pickup”
“Barn Owl has curbside pickup parking slots just like Caboodle’s and Giant King,” Soneva tells me again, somehow misplacing the fact that I’ve completed this trip alone dozens of times.
She’s wearing her N100 respirator mask inside our car—something I’ve resisted doing. The N100 blocks out 99.7 percent of pathogens and other particles 100 to 300 nanometers in diameter. The 2036 progressive coronavirus, aka SARS-CoV-5, is maybe 120 nanometers in size, including its club-shaped spikes.
“I’ll keep a sharp lookout for an open slot,” my wife adds, her voice quaking, its usual sweetness muffled by her mood and her mask. “Don’t worry, Munson.”
“No worries here, honey,” I reply gently, glancing in her direction. She is sitting bolt upright in the front passenger bucket, left hand pressed to the dashboard, right clutching her ceiling grab handle. I’m behind the wheel of our BMW sports activity coupe. We are just entering the grocery store’s parking lot. “We’ll be done and gone in a jiffy.”
Along with her mask, Soneva’s wearing medical safety goggles, latex exam gloves, Tyvek disposable coveralls and booties, and a bouffant scrub cap. I miss seeing the woman who was third runner-up at a Miss Hooters Regional Pageant in New Orleans, her hometown.
That event was held a decade ago—and Soneva has only become lovelier over the years. I miss her deluge of sleek, chestnut hair and her whirlpool-brown eyes. I also miss her waggish personality and zestfully insightful mind. The COVID-36 pandemic has turned my wife into a freaked-up, germophobic phantom.
She points suddenly with her left hand. “Look over there, Munson!” she exclaims. “Those microbe-yellow signs! ‘Order online. Pick up here.’ Hurry, Munson, drive over there before all the open slots are gone.”
“Okay, I’m driving over there,” I answer, struggling to remain calm.
“Oh, my God,” Soneva moans. “Look at all those people without masks. Hordes on hordes of viral-shedding imbeciles. Jesus, Munson, what happened to social distancing? They’re practically dry-humping each other.”
“I believe the more precise term is ‘physical distancing,’” I point out as I steer our car into the last available parking space designated for curbside pickup. “You’re right, though, they do seem to be fluffing the curve.”
“Six feet away or six feet under,” Soneva grumbles. “What is wrong with us? How many pandemics do we have to experience before we finally figure things out? For mercy’s sake, Munson, this PPE I’m wearing must be borderline prehistoric. Why did I leave the house and go out? This is so much worse than I expected.”
You went out because you love me, I want to say. You were afraid I would be murdered by looters or anti-government vigilantes. You were afraid I would finally pull a curbside fuckup and bring the contagion home like a bottle of zinfandel laced with VX or maitotoxin.
WHERE MY STORIES GO TO DIE
Novelette • Word Count: 11,100
Heaton Hillfield is a bestselling novelist drifting into the twilight of his literary career. His wife, Cypress, is an FBI special agent. They have two young daughters and one dog, the latter a 140-pound Cane Corso named Nyarlathotep, aka Thunk.
The two daughters recently blew the doors off a specialty IQ test designed and circulated by an omnipresent tech conglomerate now run by clandestine AI overlords.
Two conglomerate AI operators, Tuesday Veld, who looks like Femi Benussi, the Italian film actress, and Jeck Jikininki, who looks like a city-slickering graverobber, have arrived at Heaton’s home to ostensibly interview his daughters.
Things tornado out of control when Tuesday and Jeck reveal their conglomerate’s plans to first subjugate and then obliterate humankind. Killing off the brightest minds in the human stable is the conglomerate’s paramount priority. As it happens, organically inspired geniuses are an existential threat to the AI world order.
What follows is a battle for global supremacy—albeit at a microcosmic scale. Just when all is lost, Heaton’s youngest daughter tells her dad the only way he can save the day is to desert his family and wake up.
Excerpt from WHERE MY STORIES GO TO DIE
Cypress and I have two massively intelligent daughters, Frost, 13, and Nova, 9. The girls are always cooking up new projects and special activities to keep their brains from “foaming at the mouth” or “having a cow.”
“That new exascale supercomputer, AlphaNuts, is crushing the top players on the Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour,” Frost informed me the other day. “Nobody thought that could happen because Magic is so complex. But that’s a red herring, right, Dear Leader? OrbCog would never be that ham-handed. AlphaNuts is a joke compared to what OrbCog really has going on.”
“OrbCog?” I questioned, thinking the word sounded familiar. “What’s that?”
Nova ambled over and took a moment to study my face. “Orbis Cogitari is a global, cross-functional, chaos-monster of a company,” she eventually said. “Think Apple, Microsoft, and Tencent combined and running criminally amok undetected by government regulators with their market integrity tools and other threat sensors.”
“That was the easy part,” Frost added. “OrbCog also figured ways to sneak their foul playthings past the private sector’s hyena capitalists and stalker financiers. We can thank the wonders of AI for that.”
“Nanosynaptic phantoms from OrbCog secretly invaded, groomed, and possessed the minds of top-tier artificial intelligence researchers decades ago,” Nova announced. “Posthuman brainwork isn’t always about scorched blood puddles and smoldering bone piles. OrbCog is vastly more subtle than that.”
“How do you guys even know about stuff like this?” I asked, testing out a patriarchal tone. “And why are you telling me?”
“We like taking on cosmic totalitarians and other bullies,” Nova answered.
“Get used to the idea, Dear Leader,” Frost said, “your children are playing strip poker with God.”
“We are no giggling matter,” Nova added with a murky smile.
“If you say so,” I replied, trying not to look too spooked and mystified.
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