SF Drabble #500 "Up On Old Round Top"

Billy reached into the cooler, fished around in the ice, careful not to lean too far in the rickety lawn chair. “I think there’s only one left.” He pulled out a beer, one of the cheaper ones: they’d drunk the primo stuff first.

“Want me to go on a run?”

The ground trembled, and they looked down into the city to see an immense dust cloud rising where a building had just fallen. The distant Kaiju roared, arms swinging wildly, as if angry it could not destroy the building twice.

“Pretty sure they'd have closed when the sirens went off.”

Prisoner Alpha

So it’s an easy shift. No problems. You stand right here, and check in on the radio every half an hour. There used to be a chair, but they stopped letting us sit down after Portney fell asleep. Every once and a while, maybe once every three or four months, one of the big bosses comes down. You don’t have to check IDs or anything, Head of Security will be with them every time. Anybody else comes out of that elevator, you turn ‘em right back around. Don’t let them go down the hall. Nobody gets down the hall unless they’re with Head of Security. And son? Don’t go down the hall yourself. Ever. Don’t get curious, and figure, oh, no one will know because there’s no cameras. Even if you hear noises, don’t go down the hall. What kind of noises? Son, you’ll know it when you hear them.

SF Drabble #488 : “The Buried One”

“Pull it up!” Red shouted over the din, gesturing wildly with his thumb. “Pull it up!”

The drill stopped the unnatural shuddering and started rising out of the bore-hole. Before it was all the way up, reddish brown liquid began spraying out at the edges, then seeping out as the bit cleared the rim.

Someone called from above, “What the hell?”

“That ain’t oil.”

The rig shuddered like in a mild earthquake, then lurched suddenly, almost throwing Red off his feet. He yelled up, “Remember that crazy-ass scientist who told us not to drill here?”

“Yeah?”

“Still got his number?”

SF Drabble #477 “Rent Controlled”

She ran as fast as she could in bare feet, having left her heels somewhere around tenth street, between the deli and the laundromat. Further back, the world was ending.

She never watched monster movies as a child; too easily scared. Her brother, her older brother, he would watch them, and mother would say, ‘look for the zipper!’ to remind him that it was just pretend. But she could never find the zipper, not peering around from behind the laz-y-boy. She could never find the zipper, so it stayed real.

The monster was dropping buildings all over downtown. Real enough.

Hydrophone

“What is it?”

He rewound the tape, turned up the gain, adjusted the 31-band equalizer to filter out some of the white noise, played it again. “Not sure.”

“One of the target hulls crushing on its way down, maybe?”

He just shook his head, played it again, held the headphones tight against the sides of his head. “Sounds biological. Maybe geological. Maybe. Like a thermal vent at the bottom or something? But my bet is biological.”

The tone of the Admiral’s voice was dismissive. “It’d have to be huge to—”

“You brought me in because you’ve been lighting off atom bombs under water, and now suddenly your sub guys are hearing strange noises. You brought me in, me, because I’m the expert, and I cash the check whether you believe me or not.” He took the earphones off. “Just saying.”

“I apologize.” The Admiral held up his hands. “So what kind of… biological… are we talking?”

“Well, you’re right about one thing. It would have to be huge. Bigger than a blue whale, maybe twice as big. But that’s not what worries me.”

“What worries you?”

“Every time we hear it, it’s at a shallower depth. And it sounds angry.”