By Simon Drax
September 22, 2009

(Be sure to check out The Simon Drax Blog for Simon's Weekly Rap with Mori Kim Marr)

* * *

There was a sound in the dark. It was a dry rasp of a breath, the cough and cough and cough of an old man. He sat by the intricate lattice of a nighttime window, his bald head a trembling dome in the shadows. About him ticked many clocks made of wood and metal. The old man coughed. The clocks ticked.

*  *  *

The cracked door of the wrecked vehicle bulged, shuddered, then swung open. A soft prism of light cut the dark of the wide flat road. Shadows moved. Thin, spiderlike. And three children emerged from the corpse of the car, slipping out of the open hatch with eerie grace.

They stood together on the tarmac, identical in their features and manner: pale and expressionless, white hair, tiny clenched fists. They were dressed in their Sunday best, little jackets, little ties. Their eyes began to glow, blue.

“Get—” Frost began.

Her right arm snapped level, sleeve yanked-back; the bronze tube of her pulse cannon popped from her forearm with a KLAKKTK! 

“—back.”  Piercing shriek, and a quick white shaft flashed toward the children, passed through them like a ghost. The conjoined wreck of the two vehicles exploded in a sudden and violent pyre that belched an ugly gush of debris. Thick smoke churned and bloomed into the night sky.

The three children stood as they were, unaffected. Three children unblinking, silhouetted against the crackling fire.

Their eyes glowed again, this time brighter.

Billy and Trista and Mori froze in mid-motion, mid-order, mid-curse. They were all still reacting to the explosion. “—unnh.”

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