If short stories are your thing—and the
shorter the better—you can find tiny tales from a wide variety of genres in 365
Days of Flash Fiction.
Some of them have been produced in answer
to challenges put out by other writers, like the tale of Hasken’s choice:
Hasken’s Choice
This was written in response to Chuck Wendig’s Flash
Fiction Challenge set on 30 August 2013. I had no title, no idea what the story
would be, but I randomly rolled my setting and was given “a penal colony set up
by space-faring elves”. This is what came out. It was posted on my blog on 2
September 2013.
The first guard doubled over at 1800 hours.
Dusk. According to one movie, ‘magic hour’. None of the inmates had heard of
the movie, let alone seen it. If they had, they would have recognized old
history – an entire species wiped out by the ingenuity of man. No wonder the
elves had been angry.
The dragons had
been a trap – an elven trap, vengeance on the human race, any race who dug so
far into the world for nothing more than mineral wealth. In truth, it had
probably been a trap meant for the dwarves, the world-eating hives of
kesteringus, or the Venusian mole men who murdered creatures of fire and acid
whenever they could.
Knives in the gut,
Hasken thought, seeing the figure topple as he set another seedling firmly into
its pot. Poor bastard.
Hasken had not
approved of the idea, and the others had exiled him to the potting sheds. No
one liked the sheds; they were death traps for most months of the year, but
this month Hasken was lucky. He wasn’t dealing with spike-throwing anthrogens,
head-biting kalloskathies, or symbiotically-linked carnivores. This month, he
was dealing with sap-covered, thorn-encrusted, stink-oozing floriskanths.
Nothing a good pair of protective gloves and a gas mask couldn’t deal with.
Piece of cake by comparison.
The second guard
fell off her hadrosaur at 1805. The hadrosaur stood, staring out at the
horizon, while its rider curled into a ball, groaning at its feet. Hasken
caught his glove on the thorns, swore as he carefully disentangled his fingers
from the grasping points, ungluing the glove from binding sap. A cuff over the
back of his head reminded Hasken cursing was forbidden.
Hasken apologized,
crooning gently. Some of the other inmates were deliberately cruel, earning
exile from the potting sheds. Most avoided the duty where they could. Hasken
was one of the few who relished it. He waited for the guard behind him to move
on. The guard did not.
Looking up, Hasken
saw the guard staring out through the fence at the hadrosaur. Hasken supposed
he should do something about that, but didn’t. He hadn’t agreed with the plan.
It was stupid and cruel; it sickened him and he wanted no part in it. Not even
the small one being offered. He followed the guard’s gaze, gasping as though
just noticing the beast and its fallen rider.
1811.
The guard moved
like lightening, slapping a hand on the emergency alarm, and jamming a
long-barreled pistol against Hasken’s head.
“Don’t move.”
“The skanth,”
Hasken said, locking himself in place, resisting the urge to sweep the pistol
away and jam the thorny sap-coated seedling into the guard’s gut. He’d been
accused of murder, had indeed committed it, and had never regretted it. The
death wasn’t why he’d been imprisoned.
The dead man
hadn’t been able to admit sabotaging the air processor, and Hasken was only
half-way through repairing it when the ship’s security team caught him. Half
fixed, half broken – it all looked the same to the captain, especially when the
dead man had been meant to be in the life support area, and Hasken had not.
Why was he there?
A deterioration in
air quality and change in the sound from the engines pumping the air, whenever
that technician was on shift.
How had he noticed
that?
The fact he’d been
carrying his own testing equipment had only been held against him. The fact his
room shared a wall with the plant equipment, ignored. What had he hoped to gain
blackmailing the shipping line?
In the end, Hasken
had been jailed for murder and sabotage. He’d been hoping to reach Earth, put
some of his theories into practice, regrow something on the wastes, replant…
Bad luck to have found an elf-hating saboteur on the cruise line for which he’d
gathered a fare. Bad luck to be implicated in one of the most serious of
space-lane crimes.
“Finish it, but
slowly.”
Once the guard had
stepped back, and was dividing his attention between watching the door,
watching Hasken and watching the hadrosaur beyond the fence. Hasken set the
floriskanth seedling in its pot, tamped down the earth, and disentangled his
fingers before setting the pot beside the others. When he was finished, he
placed his hands on his thighs and stayed, kneeling on the floor.
At 18:16, the
third guard crumbled, releasing his grip on the shock chains keeping his
velociraptors in check. Screams rose from the prisoners harvesting tubers two
enclosures over. The elf guard swore. At 18:17 he groaned, and dropped to his
knees, keeping the pistol aimed at Hasken’s head by sheer force of will.
At 18:18, Hasken
watched and made his move as the pistol wavered. He rose, turning as he gained
his feet, avoiding the first dart. The guard did not get to fire a second;
Hasken kicked the gun from his hand, while reaching behind a row of floriskanth
seedlings and potting tools.
“Here’s something
I prepared earlier,” he muttered, pulling out the tuber he’d stashed there
earlier. It was the only antidote he knew.
The guard had
curled in on himself, by the time Hasken reached his side. Pulling the elf into
his lap and locking him against his chest with his forearms, Hasken tilted the
elf’s head back, relieved when the guard’s mouth opened in a groan. With a
grunt of effort, Hasken twisted the tuber so that it broke, crushing the fibers
at its core and releasing a mixture of seed-encrusted pulp held together in
mucous-like sap.
Any runnier, and
he’d have failed but, by the time the raptors had quelled the uprising in the
field, and reinforcements had taken back
the buildings where inmates were still struggling with locking
mechanisms biometrically attuned elsewhere ,Hasken had guided the oozing mess
between his captor’s lips. Not a single prisoner made it past the inner fences,
but only one guard survived.
Hasken had sworn
he would never again be caught with a dead body on his hands.
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