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Category:
Science Fiction
Publisher: Sortmind Press
Type: Fiction
Pages: 134
Copyright: 12/18/2021
ISBN-13: 9798786921992
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
A feckless young architect falls in with a sixteen-year-old’s dubious trucking venture. Drug-addled Randy bemoans his fate as a slave employee in New Fascist Australia. An archeologist arrives on a tiny artificial gravity platform to give a scholarly lecture to barbarian colonists. And the Conscious Reach Corporation sets out to cure an entire city’s mental illness.
Four surreal stories with bizarre underpinnings and uncanny twists. “Roadblock” features a feckless architectural school graduate who falls in with a sixteen-year-old’s dubious trucking venture to the rural south, only to confront mystical construction strikers.
In “Randy and Laura,” drug-addled Randy bemoans his fate as a slave employee in New Fascist Australia, working a gas station night-shift with Laura, who longs to escape both his insane delusions and a trauma Randy isn’t equipped to understand.
“Perpetual Starlit Night” explores an archeologist’s arrival on a tiny artificial gravity platform in deep space to give a scholarly lecture to barbarian colonists who declare her a criminal like themselves.
Finally, “Damage Patrol” describes how the Conscious Reach Corporation proposes to cure an entire city’s mental illness, one tormented soul at a time.
Excerpt
Diesels roared and giant trucks downshifted, brakes hissing. Jim inched the semi through the mess. He’d been driving for two hours and his head was shot. A highway patrolman snarled: “I said get those damn headlights off, mister!”
“What?” Jim rolled his window down. “You mean--me?”
Oceanmouth reached over and snapped the headlights off. Gone was the gray rear of the truck in front. Gone were the countless semi-trucks and cars milling over two lanes and two shoulders.
“Move it on over to the side of the road!” came the yell.
“What the hell?” Jim shouted back. “I can’t see a goddamn thing!”
Were they being arrested? All these trucks and cars being arrested? Was the penalty to drive without headlights? How could anyone see where they were going?
“Don’t talk back to me, mister! Move that pile of crap over now!”
“Do as he says, man,” Oceanmouth said. “This is damn serious.”
“But I can’t see--where that truck is--” Jim hauled the sluggish wheel over and somehow got the semi onto the shoulder. He couldn’t even see the steering wheel he held in his hands. God, had he gone crazy? Something wrong with his spinal cord? Epilepsy? Brain damage? Everything was solid black. Nothing to latch onto.
Jim sat with his heart hammering. He was cut off from everything except that cop voice: “Turn the engine off and stay put. Your life may depend on it.”
Jim felt the engine shut down, and realized Oceanmouth had done it. “What’s the problem, officer?” Oceanmouth called across him. “Got a strike going here?”
“Yeah, and this is the worst one I’ve ever seen. They’ve stopped all work on the interchange to Drulgoorijk. It’s a total mess. Might take all night to straighten this one out. You people stay put and don’t honk your horn like all these other idiots. Might attract some gunfire.” Behind them, a car approached with its lights on high beam, and Jim heard the cop scrunch into the gravel to deal with the newcomer.
“What’s going on?” Jim said. “Why are we stopped here?” But the oncoming car was splashing its glare down the middle of long lines of semi-trucks and cars parked to both sides of the road. Then Jim saw the barricade.
Chain link fencing, barbed wire, trash barrels, and pickup trucks were strewn across the roadway. The blockage looked a hundred feet deep to Jim, occupying the entirety of a bridge across the steep banks of a stream. “My God! What the hell?”
“Strikers,” Oceanmouth said. “You read about ’em in the papers every so often. I was caught in a road strike a few years ago. We just have to be patient.”
“Why? What’s going on?” The new car’s headlights went off, and Jim heard it crunch onto the shoulder and its engine shut down. Everything was solid black again.
“I’m not sure. Let’s check this out.” Jim heard the passenger door open and then Oceanmouth’s feet stamping on the gravel.
“Hey! Stay put, man. Or that cop--”
“Don’t worry about him. We’ll just sweet-talk him. C’mon, man, let’s see what’s going on.”
To open the door and jump took more courage than Jim thought he had. For all he knew the ground down there had ceased to exist. But his feet struck pavement and he felt his way to the front of the truck. Only now did he realize how chilly it was out in the country, and he found himself inching towards the hot engine.
What an idiot he was. He hadn’t even brought a coat for a four-hundred-mile trip. It had been freezing all night this week and he should’ve known.
“So it’s construction workers this time, huh?” he heard Oceanmouth saying.
“That’s right,” came the cop’s voice. “And that’s never happened before. We get a strike and a roadblock every few months, but it’s usually factory workers, or else a trucking company. We’ve never had road builders go on strike. We’re trying to get negotiators out there now to ’em, but they won’t talk.”
“Wow …” said Oceanmouth. “Road workers. That is new. They’ve always been against anyone who went on strike on the roads.”
“On … strike?” Jim said.
“Who’s that?” said the cop.
“That’s my partner Jim. Don’t worry, he won’t crack.”
“Hello, Jim. I’ve just been telling people to stay in their cars or trucks so we don’t have people going insane out here from the darkness. But if you’re like your friend here and won’t crack, it’s okay to come on out and stretch your legs.”
“What’s happening?” Jim heard the hysteria in his voice as he launched his question into the unknown, still unable to see Oceanmouth and the cop who stood only a few feet away. He knew Oceanmouth was wrong. The total absence of light, of any means of judging space and distance, was about to make him scream.
“The workers on the interchange a couple miles up went on strike,” the cop said. “They’ve stopped all work and they’ve blocked this highway at the bridge here, and all the other roads leading in here.”
“But why are the lights out?”
“The lights always go out in a strike.” Here Jim felt a pat on his arm. He knew the cop was three feet away, so this had to be Oceanmouth reassuring him. Jim began to have a sense of himself, the cop, and Oceanmouth as volumes in this blackness. Though Jim couldn’t even see his own body, and the giddy feeling had been rising that his own voice had no real point of origin, Oceanmouth had just confirmed that his personal volume did exist.
“See, Jim,” Oceanmouth said, “strikers always make these roadblocks at night and demand the headlights be put out. If they strike near a town they’ll put out all the lights out in the town. And they want all the engines turned off, too.”
“But we need light!”
“Well, it’s usually a better idea to comply,” the cop said. “Some of these strikes have gone on for hours at night, and if you burn your lights you’ll just run down your battery. So we’ve got to conserve energy. We’re too far from the nearest town as it is, about a hundred miles.” Jim figured the cop himself was edgy and glad for a chance to shoot some bull with truckers.
“But can’t one truck put some lights on for a few minutes, then another one, then another one? That way you could see what you were doing.”
“There’s nothing to see. We’re not doing a damn thing here but waiting. How long it’ll be nobody knows. Highway construction workers, that’s new. Never been done before. They’ve always been the best paid of anyone. Might take weeks for all I know.”
“Besides,” Oceanmouth put in, “didn’t you see the strikers in the roadblock, Jim? The guys with rifles?”
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