Science Fiction

279

A collection of three stories which follow the trail of Quasar Force Officer Alexander James Roglitz after he's been given one last partner unlike any he's ever worked with before!

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Silver Sphere Sightings

“Does he hit you?”

No, he’d never physically struck me that I could recall. Terrible thoughts of violence in his mind had felt
like the real thing on more than one occasion, but had he ever really raised a hand against me? No. All the time,
the terror and anger pulsing through his frequently intoxicated mind. The way he’d always considered David
before even giving me a spare thought. David always got the bigger portion of food. David always got the Goodwill
sweater with the fewest holes and stains, the largest, thickest blanket. When Daddy found a wallet and turned it in to the police and been rewarded by the grateful owner, he’d asked Dave if he wanted to try an ice cream cone.
Asked if he wanted to walk down to the water for a swim. Asked if he’d like a ride on the handlebars of the bike.
He would try so hard to avoid even looking at me and think cruelly, “You don’t mind, do you, Alex? You don’t
give a damn if I favor your brother. Your sweet little brother. The one who clung to his parent when the aliens
came. The one who was afraid to let go because the aliens might take him. Might take his daddy. You don’t mind.
You don’t care because you know you let go of your mommy’s hand. And now she’s gone. Gone forever because
you let go, Alexander. Your mommy’s gone and you never even cried. Your brother cried for months when you let
his mommy disappear. I lost my job because I couldn’t get my wife outta my head even when I tried drowning her out with cheap whisky and vodka and beer and wine because you let her go AND YOU NEVER EVEN CRIED!”

Which wasn’t true. Not that Daddy ever noticed because he was so busy trying not to all the time, speaking to me only when he had to in a flat monotone devoid of the feelings I was able to read from him anyway. It was mental abuse and in avoiding it, I’d learned to function as an independent. To be a loner. And it had helped me to care for my brother when Daddy died after my eighteenth birthday and Dave was still only sixteen, almost seventeen. No, Mom, I don’t want this self-proclaimed monster anywhere near me. I didn’t hate him; it was sheer indifference. I once felt sorry for the man because sometimes the guilt for the way he treated me would build in him like a thunderhead on the horizon and overwhelm him. The rain would fall first, steady and cold until he’d
sent his sons to bed, and I could hear the distant rumble in my mind and see the flashes of deadly white ribbon
snake down to lick worn and tired Russian earth. I would drift to sleep slowly, listening to the steady rumble and rain outside my mind, as accessible as looking at it out of a window, and as unavoidable as trying to hide from it as it beat a hellish staccato on the roof and rattled the house’s very foundation with its powerful thundering peals. I would sleep fitfully, knowing that although I had no control over this inner tempest I was safe in my room and wouldn’t get drenched, then wake hours later to the ghostly sound of pain-filled moans rising from the floor beneath my bed. Sweat would break out on my small body as cold as the moisture collecting on the outside of a
beverage glass. It was Daddy, I knew, in the basement, the inky, moldy black, feeling so much like a demon or
beast that he felt he belonged down there where they lived. The guilt would wrack inhuman screams from him. A
scream for his wife long gone. A scream that pleaded for the life he’d once lived. A scream for the way he treated
me, the son who so much resembled her; not warmly as the son they had created, but as a person who just happened to share his home with him. Two New Yorkers passing on the crowded street, but never really seeing each other at all.

And I would scream, too. Bloodcurdling answers forced into my pillow, the pillowcase wet with saliva and
tears and snot because I still didn’t understand my new capabilities and was helpless at that age to block such a
strong inward flood of enraged emotion. So I’d be washed away into a steamy black sea where I could feel the
slithery tentacles of violent insanity caress me seductively beneath the waves.
 

READ all of chapter one at the following link:

http://www.geocities.com
/qman003/Q169chap1.html