(“vituð ér enn, eða hvat?”)
—
People aren’t the only things that die. Sometimes stories do as well, when there’s no one left to tell them. Here, now, in the space between the turning of the page, everything comes unraveled. And, for one bright moment, I see.
The Unnatural Order print proofs arrived and… yes. Yes, that’ll do nicely.
(Now if only Ingram wasn’t loading at a snail’s pace for some reason I could start shipping these babies out…)
They broke through the fog on the outskirts of the LB campus. Looking up at the huge, gleaming glass-and-steel monstrosity, Sigmund felt nearly light-headed from relief. They’d made it. Whatever stuff came next, at least they were out of the fucking fog.
He could see stars, in the sky above the tower. Too many for a city, maybe, but at least it was a sky. Not the horrible gray-white nothingness.
The car took them around to a side entrance, a ramp down into the private parking garage. The one Sigmund had been in that time with Lain. A huge set of roller doors greeted their arrival. Sigmund had just enough time to wonder how they were going to get in without a pass card, when the doors began sliding upward all on their own.
He decided not to go staring at horse teeth, and all that.
… also looking at all these covers lined up together I definitely have A Type, and that Type is “pastel blues and pinks with black-and-white contrasts.”
So yeah. 2020 was A Year but, somehow, we actually managed to get out an anthology? Admittedly on, like, the literal last day of the year—and with print versions still pending—but, like… we did it! Unnatural Order is out and is an Actual Thing you can buy and read?
Holy crap.
(Jax‘s cover art is still amazing, also. Sorry I had to ruin it by putting dumb words all over it…)
It’s the sound that wakes me. Something like an angle grinder crossed with a dying pig. A hideous cacophony, intruding on the warm and silent darkness in my head.
I want it gone. Now. I’m going to open my eyes, and get out of bed, and I’m going to hunt down whoever approved roadworks outside my fucking bedroom window and I am going to sue them down to the bone and salt the ground with their children’s bankrupt tears.
Opening my eyes isn’t as easy as it should be. The noise is roaring and my eyelids stick, and when I manage to prize them apart—
“Hurngh!”
Light.
Oh yeah you remember how I was editing that anthology of monster stories? Yeah, that’s still happening…
(Psst you can also pre-order the book here.)
Opening his eyes was a bad idea. So was breathing; greasy ash filling his mouth and nose instead of air.
Sigmund lurched upright, onto his hands and knees, coughing and retching and rubbing his ash-filled eyes. The stuff was everywhere—he was buried in it—clinging to his clothes and skin and hair, covering him with its gray and oily film.
“Jesus. Gross.”
Wayne tried not to stare. She really, really did. Not in the rearview mirror and not directly, either. And it totally wasn’t her fault if she had to take a lot of left turns, and that meant a head check via the passenger side. Just because they were stuck in some grotesque, depopulated hellscape didn’t mean she was free to forego all the rules of the road. And if, during said head checks, she just happened to linger over the . . . being in the passenger seat, just a little. Well. Who could blame her?
Holy crap, she was driving in a car with a god.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
One drop, one second. Almost like clockwork.
Drip. Drip.
Sixty seconds in a minute, three thousand six hundred in an hour. Eighty-six thousand four hundred in a day.
Drip.
Impossible to be sure without measuring, but assuming one drop equaled a minim, that meant five milliliters a minute or three hundred in an hour. A thousand in a liter: three and a half hours, give or take.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Six hours: one point eight liters. Twelve hours: three point six.
Seven point two liters per day.
Drip. Drip.
About two thousand six hundred and twenty eight liters per year. For one thousand years. So two point six megaliters, give or take.
Or, to put it another way, about one Olympic-sized swimming pool.
Drip.
