@dennycore.bsky.social

@dennycore.bsky.social

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Dennis Conrad. English/special ed teacher, aspiring weird fiction author perennially working on a genre-confused psychic spy thriller and distracting myself from it by writing horror shorts Author website: https://dennisconraddotcom.wordpress.com/

First, Emma goes to the formicarium and generates a great, fleshy flowerbud overflowing with sweet nectar at the bottom of each separate colony and, with a few twitching sketches of her fingers, creates an intricate maze for each. Immediately the three groups of ants all start flowing toward it in their myriad riverlike movements. It’s the sort of thing Mother dismisses as “mindless indulgence” for these little kingdoms and used to reprimand Emma for curating, but now just scoffs at. Normally, Emma would stick around to watch this, but she’s more concerned with the plan she’d thought of a week ago and has been waiting for one of Mother’s extended sojourns to attempt.
“Oh.” Matt sounding vaguely disappointed yet unsurprised, the tone which he’d taken for most of his life. “Well. Shit.”
“Excellent. Start writing this down.” The Minister snapping in the direction of the young man who had recently been elevated to the office of Secretary of War of the United States of America, the young man who had just brought this idea which was morphing into the Minister’s in rapid timelapse before his own eyes, the young man who the Minister only very recently before had been sending on coffee runs; and the Secretary, some proud ancestral spirit in his breast screaming against it from deep within, for the love of god he took out a notepad and poised a pen above it, eyes looking up at the towering Minister filled with something like pleading. Kilgore had to look away.
They watched for a time, watched the rampant speculation, the looks of shock and horror frozen on the faces of the gathered and thoroughly useless onlookers. Stretching out toward a moment of modern era-defining history as if seeking to be a part of it. Looking at the point at which the world or at least society as it was known could spiral out into nonexistence, wanting to claim in the world’s death throes that they had some minor part in it as a shocked face on a camera.
Sizing up to the punching bag. Classic fighter’s stance. He feigns a jab before coming in with an uppercut. As it impacts the punching bag he pictures Monday Maury’s jaw shattering against his fist; dodges to the side and hits with a metal-fisted lead hook, hard enough to send Tuesday Tom’s eye flying from his socket; bobs and weaves into a withering series of jabs straight into Wednesday Will’s stupid, unfeeling eyes; hops back before coming forward into a powerhouse uppercut sending slack-jawed Thursday Theo flying back; the bag swinging back forward as Friday Fred, who Deckard elbows hard in the mouth, imagining chipped teeth flying in every direction; briefly putting aside his chivalrous ways to hit the loathsome Saturday Sally square between the eyes with a powerful lead cross before finishing off greasy-faced Sunday Steve with a two-fisted spiking downward punch, breaking the punching bag off its chain and necessitating some quick maintenance of the sort he’s quickly grown used to.
The Alaska Facility. It was the kind of name mentioned only in furtive whispers accompanied by meaningful glances. A name that had become a curse, not only in the four-letter word sense but in the old world bloody-mary bad karmic mantra sense, a devilish kind of place—say it three times, if you dare. Maybe the Minister’s gonna pop out and drag you there in a cloud of cigar smoke. Or Emma Bolzen will crack into existence behind you and screw your head on backwards. Eric had created a lurid image of it in his mind, a sort of blacksuits and labcoats cloak-and-dagger type place, pilfered UFO remains and test weapons of all sorts lining the walls, the birthplace of conspiracy and international intrigue. A government place so shrouded in mystery that most of the country had not believed it existed outside conspiracy—himself included, about four out of seven days of the week. As their hideous beetlelike VTOL approached the place, he gazed upon a huge unwholesome black metal stain of a building, a massive twisted black gargoyle jutting out crudely from the icy coastline.
The study looked to have been quite nice at one point—a plush red carpet, bookshelves that looked to actually be made of real hardwood—perhaps the one authentic room that had been seen thus far, making it all the more sad that it was half-destroyed. One of the several plush armchairs had been turned on its side, a leg torn roughly off and tossed into some corner; two huge reading lamps were on their side, shattered and twisted; each of the built-in bookshelves looked to have been torn down, zigzagging left and right onto one another’s level, with old books piled on the floor in wide swathes. Eric wasn’t an investigator, but it looked as if the General had, at possibly several different points judging by the distribution of the damage, gone on furniture-destroying rampages in this room; several empty dusty liquor bottles that had rolled into shadowy cobwebbed corners attested to repeated outbursts, one of them rolling along with the sweeping hem of the General’s bathrobe as he ushered them through the door.
sickass motherfucking shadow the hedgehog/Sephiroth crossover art credit to Ellipses-Ultima. I don't know you but I love this https://www.sonicstadium.org/gallery/image/6990-movie-shadow-sephiroth/
All the while the jungle had pulsed outside. There had been no activity that first day downriver except for several groups of birds scattering at the sound of their thrumming engine and a cluster of caimans surfacing to peer at the ship with their beady eyes, and except for the constant cacophony of animal sounds hissing and howling and blending together into a rasping drone throughout the day and only intensifying in the night. A feeling crept in that the whole squad noticed, that they felt deep in their bones. That sound like a solid presence crowding in on them, even as they cooked and watched stories and showered and fished and played poker with their eyes always darting out the window at that inky black night. At those trees crouching at the edges of the river like crowds of bent old devils with green beards dragging, watching the boat through invisible eyes that seemed to flash in the spaces between.
The commanding officer, a Mr. Chernov, crouched behind his overturned desk, a pistol in his shaking hand. “He won’t try it,” Heloise said confidently. “You, you, you” - Chernov sobbed. “Indeed, I’ll, I’ll kill myself, you sons of bitches!” “No he won’t.” “FUCK!”
Eric took a step back, his hand involuntarily flying to his belt, suddenly arrested at wrist level. One of the New Mind men had grasped him, a huge bullish man with that dull zealot’s stare shining out from a jungle of black hair. He looked to be nearly twice Eric’s size, so his eyes widened when Eric reversed the grip, going thoughtlessly into his specops training, using the man’s weight against him to pin him to the floor. In an instant Eric Rodriguez had the cultist beneath him, a knee thrust into the small of his back and his sidearm drawn and against the man’s black-haired head; but so too did the rest of them have their weapons raised, drawing down from every corner of the warehouse. Eric felt cool metal against the back of his own head, glanced to the side to see the Sorceress holding a pistol to him. He could feel her slightest tremble through the tip of the barrel, could see the uncertainty in her eyes.
A word doc that starts out normally before shifting into my cat’s artistic additions. Full text: dropping the gun that he suddenly remembers he had just fired with and missed. “You can see where it’s gonna be,” the tall mirror-eyed figure said sardonically, shaking its head, gaze blazing visibly from side to side like a lighthouse. “How did you miss?” Shifting back to the girl misreading the dull yellow lights flickering along the combat drone’s body as hesitation instead of engagement and getting slammed to the floor by its abrupt lunge at her midsection. She gasps.ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooozx;lhgkkkkkkkkkkb’pppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppghpppppptfrrrr3gkhl The scene goes dark. The voice echoes in again, black whisper from the void. “...They called me the most powerful being in existence…You know why that is? …I went through hell
“I’m looking for people like you, Liana." The Minister waved down the bartender for a beer and took a long swig before continuing. “Hear you’ve been doing private eye work? Got a pretty strong combat training record, too. The former seems like a waste of the latter.” “Interesting, how much you know.” “The thought of war work ever cross your mind?” “Not in the way you’re suggesting.” “We’re talking about a premier team,” he pressed on. “Top level tactical insertion. Very important shit. World-changing.” “And what’s your motive for tracking me down specifically? There’s millions of empaths out there. I know a couple combat moves, but I’m sure that’s not primarily what you need an empath for. So tell me, Minister. Why me?” He shrugged. “You just seemed like the sorta woman we’re looking for.” Liana chuckled. “Your conditioning’s good, but not good enough to hide pure bullshit.”
The meeting room itself was shadowy, light thrown at strange angles from a dozen green-shaded desk lamps that lined the table in a staggered formation. The Minister was sitting at the head of the table, fingers steepled, great plumes of cigar smoke caught swirling spectrally in that dusty greenish glow. Flanking him on either side of the table were the Colonel and Alex. All three were staring at a TV; Alex staring wide-eyed and fearful, the Colonel with a look of deep-lined grim concern, and the Minister with a flat, blankly intellectual expression.
Anna Goodhawk began her day at 6 AM. It had been made painstakingly clear to her over the years that she could start it far later if she desired, that she could sleep in as late as she liked. It had even been made clear to her that she could entirely skip a day if she wished, that she could stay in her room and have meals brought to her and look at the literature she was given and the limited TV access she was allowed and put off whatever duties were required of her until she was ready to perform them. Within reason. Really she had a lot of freedom over her routine, but she chose to take her breakfast at 6 AM because it allowed her to view the sunrise exploding over the solidified lava pits to the east and if there was one thing that she did not find unpleasant about this place, it was the sunrise. If there was another, it was the lizards, the little blinking beige-and-brown lizards that poked their heads out of their dens and skittered over to her after years of feasting on her crumbs and listening to the things she cooed and murmured to them in the morning hours. She was seventy-seven years old and had officially been dead since she was in her forties.
To Emma Bolzen’s left was the true form of Ilsa Richter. Reliant on her illusions, her real form was a shrunken shriveled thing, half-mummified, barely alive. Twitching helplessly, mouth gaping open and failing to draw breath. She would be dead in minutes, but Emma Bolzen would not grant her such reprieve. There were a series of loud, slow snaps; Ilsa Richter’s left leg forced suddenly up so her ankle touched her temple, the hipbone exploding; the arm snapped and twisted and wrenched behind her head; her other leg forced behind her back at a grotesque angle; and as she watched Liana realized that the Reality Warper of the SS was being imploded, compressed into a microscopic point, folded and contorted as she let out a rattling raspy sound that could have been a scream that suddenly, with a violent wrench of the neck and a last messy crunch, was extinguished.
Eric can’t be sure when he crossed that line into feeling utterly assured that he would die. He’d certainly never pictured it like this—beaten to death by an angry mob of civilians in a dingy Kyoto apartment building. And even when he’d first been ganged up on—even after that abortive attempt to scare them off with his gun—he’d felt, dimly, that there was no way it would end like this. Perhaps it had started to become more clear when he’d lost a tooth but no—he mused, as he was slammed up against a wall by his neck for the eleventh time—that had come before he’d drawn his gun. But at some unclear transitional point he’d gone from feeling fairly assured he would, somehow, fight his way free of this seething torrent of humanity, to feeling fairly assured that he would, eventually, be knocked down onto this linoleum floor and be unable to rise. Whatever the case, he was deeply feeling this by the time he took a bike lock to the temple.
That Ciudad del Frenteojo was more lifeless than Iquitos was a given—it was more lifeless than anything that had life at all. Many of the buildings’ doors yawned open, the totally empty spaces within echoing with Liana and Eric’s footsteps from outside. But the lifelessness here was evident in ways beyond the obvious, down to the bones of what construction there was. There was no evidence of life in the city’s downtown. None of the mixture of styles or clashing improvisations that came about when many people came to live together from happenstance. Life itself had never had the opportunity to make its stamp upon the place and blossom in its unpredictability. Nothing like Iquitos’ blend of sturdy indigenous wood-built structures mixed in with the European-style architecture of later capitalists. Every building was geometrically planned to exist exactly where it was, placed like pieces on a game-board by the whims of a corporate middle manager, whose actions themselves were dictated by the higher-ups who would never be closer than thousands of miles away from this city they were funding. It was all board-approved, shareholder-recommended, focus-tested down to the humblest corner. Functional and architecturally undaring, nice to look at and quickly forgotten.
Had Liana any presence of mind at all she may have been mutely surprised by the sight of Machu Picchu. She’d always had an image in mind of towering, impersonal ziggurats; instead, it was more noticeably modern and relatable than what she’d expected, a once-bustling citadel of stone clustered together on this olympian mountaintop. In spirit, however it lacked none of the grandeur that she had already imagined; misty as it was, it felt peopled by the shifting whirling spirits of the long-dead, echoing sounds of the mountain wind like their despairing howls in the throes of Old World disease. So strangely haunted that, gazing down at the fog-choked valleys below, she swore she saw vast spectral tentacles, half-glimpsed monstrous forms swirling in the windswept mists. The emotional resonance of civilization-scale trauma made manifest, the last doomed terror of an empire in collapse. As if the emotional stain it wrought upon the earth remained to this day. As if it echoed with the resonance of recent events, the murky question of some inconceivable disaster in that other hemisphere looming over these towering Andes.
Liana watched the first boarder start to come over the guardrail, dropped to a knee and fired a shot through his head. She got a split-second glimpse of the first of these soldiers she’d actually seen—this one masked over the bottom half of his face, eyes widening in sudden surprise at the liquid crimson bloom in his forehead, snapping back with arms flinging from the railing, tumbling end over end to splash into the river below. The other auras were getting more yellow than red now, the fear subsuming the soldierly instinct. The second climber hesitated a moment, just long enough for Liana to pop over the rail and shoot him down as well. This one died instantly and dropped like a stone into the teeming muck below. The fear spread deeper through those other ten and even with the amount of men she’d killed in her years, even with the long-accustomed depersonalization of sniping down these little color-coded aura-blobs, she hoped that it would be enough for them to turn back.
More of the spectral forms are wrenching up from the river that is not a river, more of them are opening fire and opening their empty jaws in voiceless screams, black voids of despairing mouths and empty eyes and ghostly gunbarrels facing him in their dozens. Great clusters of them moving in lockstep as if bound together by invisible threads; and indeed Deckard can see those threads tying them, tenuous things of gossamer and ash that glow and break when he fires through one figure and watches great cordons of them dissolve with every shot. “Kill them all.”
When the men came into view, black-clad, balaclava-covered, murmuring to each other things that were almost certainly in English but which sounded to Liana like some demonic speech, they carried their pistols with what looked like military precision. State-of-the-art killer’s hardware glittering in the low light. They both raised their weapons as they stepped into the doorway, sighting into each corner of the room as if barely noticing the teenager’s presence, rooted to her bed, eyes wide and white and shining with silent panic.
This is Deckard’s fourth bank-job in his fourth city, always different crews and locales. Each goes about the same. A quick thirty-second walk to the bank’s front door stretches to hours; shuddering anticipation, breathing slow with effort, pulling his mask on an instant before the others, a few faces in the lobby comprehending as they spot masked men coming through the glass doors, handguns drawn and rising, empty bags gasping for cash, punctuated as their pointman kicks the doors open with a clatter. All four heists, this same moment, the moment of crashing silence as they stride into the establishment, as those who have not yet noticed the coming storm look up and see it’s too late. An occasional whimper but never a scream. A moment of pure uncomprehending fear for all, robbers included. A moment of silence that seems to go endlessly on, always this moment, strange calm, mad calm, then— “Get on the fucking ground.”
tiny adorable evil cat plots in the morning light
And she dove in—his memories unwound in a confused tangle, he felt it all unravel, a childhood slipping like smoke through his fingers, impressions of names places all there at once, a bark of laughter, tears, streaking snapshots of Tokyo on fire and blasts of sand and blood and screams on Juno Beach and the black of night in a winter Alaska sky the inhuman sounds ringing out from the grim monolith behind and the redwhiteblue of the flag draping Goodhawk’s coffin, the cold of the pounding rain, a thousand boardrooms and a thousand barracks and a twirling mayhem of the masses looking up at him and shouting and screaming in what might have been excitement and might have been horror—he could no longer distinguish between such specificities—impression of a void-black shape looming, searing agony spiderwebbing through his head, the flashes and burns of synapses being snapped, connections being severed, dancing lights of nothingness as it all came spiraling apart. He couldn’t even feel himself screaming.
Down the corridor from the ripped-down reinforced door there’s a long blood-trail that starts on the left-hand wall, a great splatter followed by a long, thick line of red showing where the second guard’s face had been slammed against the concrete with extraordinary force then agonizingly dragged along, face being pushed so hard into the wall that soon the blood-trail becomes mixed in with solid remnants of what had once been that face, bits of flesh and bone and brain and eye-jelly flattened into the mad stretched impression of a visage and after a twelve-foot run of such mess the body lays crumpled against the wall and even the hardened masked forensic team that’s surveying the scene has not yet deigned to turn the corpse back over to see what horrid ruins remain.
Then a sudden sibilant sound from one of the Peruvians behind; immediately the grab-ass atmosphere was gone, and each of the six soldiers was peering about into the jungle, rifles raised. “Think I saw…” the speaking Peruvian slipping into Spanish for a quick “¡Mierda!” and firing a shot into the trees; Artyom saw what he saw in a blink, the flash of someone sliding through the jungle ahead. And all at once they were plunging through the brush, Artyom squeezing off a burst that obliterated a whole treeline. He saw that shadow, that unmistakably humanoid shadow slipping through the trees again. The void of an eyepatch over one eye. “It’s her!” He started pointing wildly after the form as it vanished into the brush. “The empath!” The rest went crashing after, knowing their prize was near, firing loose potshots through the foliage at every twitching leaf. Corporal Konstantin crashed through into a clearing first, the four Senderistas moving somewhat more subtly in his wake; and behind, Artyom, feeling a sudden trepidation, flickered a glance over his shoulder. When he turned back to the clearing it was just in time to watch the top of Konstantin’s head shear off.
It didn’t take long for the commandos—mostly native Senderistas, with a few fish-out-of-water Russians mixed in—to determine that the five Americans in the brig were turncoat bandits, all of whom professed an immediate enthusiasm for communism and a readiness to join with the Soviet cause. The Peacemaker asked them all to pledge their intention to fight for the working-class and gave them a few lines of the Communist Manifesto to repeat back to him; he had them line up to be uncuffed and, once nicely arranged, had the five commandos assigned to them unceremoniously shoot each of the bandits in the head and dump them overboard.
“So just what are you in it for then?” Deckard asked, punctuated by thunder and a bolt of lightning throwing them all into the flicker of the mansion’s shadow. That light reflected in the Professor’s eyes. “I dunno.” Seeing Deckard’s blinking disbelief he continued: “I should be teaching, man. I’m supposed to be giving a class on the European Romantic poets right now. I wasn’t even one of the political ones. Maybe that’s why the kids started coming to me when they started rounding up radicals—I was safer. And when they came for the kids…well…we defended ourselves. And after that…” pausing, he gestured around at the assembled partisans and their weapons, at his own tank that rumbled steadily behind them. “Repeat that same story in a thousand varieties across the city and…” gesturing finally to the General’s barricaded mansion looming over them like a Gothic cathedral as a wordless end to his tale.
Laying down to listen to music she reflected on the other things that had made her decide to take her stepfather’s pistol that was now laying back behind her pillow just out of sight, so heavy and shining and metal, laying back there like a dark stone absorbing the sludge leaking from her brain. She thought of how she had always noticed this funny little pink tinge around the auras of a few men when she was young—some obscure uncle she hadn’t seen since she was ten, the elderly neighbor down the street who’d been around since she was eight, the guy who ran the convenience store—the first person she ever noticed that pink on when she was four—and how it had taken her until the relatively recent experience of puberty, along with her extended contact with pubescent fellows, to make her realize just what that pink aura represented. Four. She remembered the shine to that convenience-store owner’s eyes and shuddered and thought again of that pistol, that pistol she could swear she smelled some kind of metallic oil on growing stronger, stronger in her nose.
The river-drinker said his first words in a long while: “Found a fish.” Tossing the fish in question over his shoulder to splat onto the ground between Condori, Liana and Eric. Eric was no marine biologist, but he was fairly certain the translucent, semi-phosphorescent sharptoothed anglerfish that thrashed at his feet should have been nowhere near this river. Finally, Condori said the words someone should have said a long time before: “What the fuck is this.”
The boundless expanse of what unfolded beneath Liana curdled her stomach. The trees lashing their branches like tongues of acid flame. The mountains, ever closer, bending toward them like looming monstrosities. Strange lights glinting at their peaks. The undulating black ribbon of river rolling endlessly alongside. She focused, tried to tamp down that disquiet and focus on the task at hand.
In that instant Deckard dips just beneath a spray of machinegunfire and answers in a single crushing burst from his sawed-off, an explosion of buckshot that tears apart the shooter and the entire storefront behind him in a shower of sparks and blood. Considering, a moment, that his shotgun is a double-barrel, Deckard decides not to let that second shell go to waste and, whirling, brings it to bear on an opposing shotgun-toter coming in for an ambush and squeezes off another blast that smashes apart the shooter and most of the alleyway he’s standing in. Still twirling, always keeping that telekinetic and Hoshi in at least his peripherals, Deckard lets a hand bearing two fresh shells drop to his hip, quickly drawing the two spent smoking husks out and slotting their replacements home quick enough to genuinely disturb any observer. A single chunky clunk and it’s done. Settling into that sawed-off kick, he takes aim at a man in businesswear raising a pistol.
They were swept through the facility then, away from the prison complex and into the other darker half of the place, where harsh fluorescent light gave way to something hazy and filmy. Open prison-rooms and rec areas narrowed into conspiratorial tunnels and crawling labyrinths of offices and testing chambers, the lightning turning shadowy and dimbuzzing, the corners full of inky darkness perfect for concealing clandestine activities. As they passed so many unlabeled sealed doorways Eric could occasionally hear the muffled sound of industry from behind some, twitching mechanisms assembling or disassembling, humming and crashing machine-sounds. The soft babble of thinking men’s voices, snatches of syllables from hitherto unmapped branches of science. The occasional soft sob of a human test subject.
She sat at the bar, elbow on the table, a resolutely downward-faced head cradled in an upturned right palm, the left curled round a very near-empty glass of whiskey. She breathed as the dark music thumped heavy in her chest, stared at the sweat travelling agonizingly slowly through the glass before upending it and sending a swift burn down her gullet. Liana spared a moment’s glance through the glass’ bottom, distorting the bartender into a fleshy smudge, twisting his removed-yet-concerned aura into a diseased yellow cloud that clung to him.
The Minister stood on the rooftop landing pad like a stoic necromancer atop his tower. As the VTOL’s spotlight shone upon him his glasses reflected them, mirrored insect eyes, his teeth flashing briefly in a spectral grin. The VTOL landed amidst a rapid-fire pinging flurry of sideways ice rain; yet the waiting Minister seemed utterly unbothered, clad in his regular business suit, tall and unshaking in the bitter Alaskan freeze, somehow holding a wildly-fluttering umbrella steady in the shrieking gales of icy wind, contorting it perfectly that he remained dry and unbothered. He seemed to dwarf all those armored-and-masked big guys that were always clustered about him, his personal terracottas. As the VTOL opened and the heavily-jacketed squadron piled out shuddering and rushing through the greetings and clearances the Minister seemed to be the least uncomfortable of all, his black-gloved hand like cold metal as it shook Eric’s. He even lingered behind the rest as they crowded into the rooftop entrance, soaking in some last bit of the harsh Alaskan night, crossing the threshold just as the doors snapped shut.
Text, out-of-context snippet from a work in progress story: "But it’s not the sky he’s looking at now. The sky he’s looking at is bloodred. The sun shining in it is void-black, a great black hole torn through the red sky. Void-black yet somehow shining, a paradox that makes his head throb like it’s trying to escape from behind his eyes. What he had once thought of as the Andes loom on the horizon, but with the rumbling vibration of grinding stone they shift subtly like impossibly large hooded figures, giants that breathe and stare with unfathomable eyes that Deckard realizes now that he can see fading in and out of existence on their slopes. Eyes full of alien intelligence far beyond his, looking down on him from high above."