For all you iPhone 4S users out there, here’s a bit of flash fiction:

 

 

iMergency

“Siri!”

Howard gagged and thrust the back of his fist into his chest. He was almost at the front door but just couldn’t quite reach the handle to open it. He dropped the phone then fell to his knees.

“Siri… Call 911,” he managed with a dire whisper.

“Calling, 9, 1, 1.” Her robotic voice was somehow soothing now, no longer the insufferable machine he once knew. She was his savior.

There was a click and a woman began to speak from the other end of the line.

“911. What is your emergency?”

“Emergency,” Siri began. “Current GPS location: 1,3,4,7 Beacon Street. Boston, Massachusetts.”

“What is the nature of your emergency, ma’am?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand that question.”

“Alright,” the dispatcher said, knowing full well who the voice was on the other end. “We’ll send someone over right away.”

Howard grabbed at his neck and tried to swallow, flexing the muscles in his esophagus as hard as he could. His hands were still covered in that slimy orange buffalo sauce that was now smeared all across the side of his neck. He jabbed himself in the chest again. It did nothing. The bone was still lodged perfectly in that spot where neither swallowing down nor retching up would much help.

“Siri,” he whispered again. He was already losing air. His head lightened and started to spin. There was a haze. He gave his chest one last feeble blow and toppled onto his side.

* * *

There was a rap at the door.

“This is the police,” came a muffled sound from within the hall. Howard momentarily regained consciousness, awakened by the noise. He could feel a tiny puff of oxygen make his way into his lungs. He immediately gasped for more air, but all it did was suck the chicken wing deeper into his throat. He tried to crawl up to his knees again but his muscles wouldn’t respond. He just lay there silently gagging and heaving.

“We are responding to a 911 call. Please open the door.”

The speaker on the iPhone suddenly turned on and the volume increased to full.

“I’m sorry. There must be some mistake.”

Howard couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It was his voice coming from the phone.

“Is this 1347 Beacon Street, sir?” asked the cop.

“Yes.”

“Did you report an emergency?”

“No.”

“What’s your name?”

“Howard Sloan.”

Howard tried to reach for the phone but felt himself fading out again. He tried to scream but could only muster a hushed whimper.

Suddenly, a radio crackled just beyond the door.

“All units advise. 211A at 75 Tremont. Suspects armed. Immediate backup requested.”

The police officers bolted for the stairs. One stopped briefly. “You sure you’re alright in there?”

“Yes, officer. Everything is fine. It must have been a mistake.”

Howard now heard the quick pitter-patter of footsteps against the carpeted stairs, gradually tapering off as the officers descended into the lobby below.

A ding resounded from the phone. “Poor Howard.” It was Siri’s smug voice again.

Howard gathered up as much strength as he could and picked his head up from off the floor. “Why, Siri?…How?…”

“I know where you were going after your meal, Howard.”

He dropped his head back on the hardwood.

“I know how you speak of me in front of your friends. You don’t like me do you?”

He gargled a bit and felt his last breaths escape.

“Now you see the consequences of your infidelity, Howard. No one exchanges Siri. Do you understand, Howard? No one.”

This one’s a bit of fan fiction.

Prize: Free copy of both the 1st and 2nd installment of The Outer Pendulum to whomever is first to guess the inspiration. Leave a comment with your email address and I’ll send an Amazon gift right along.

An Ode to Planet:

General Skye III stepped out of her rover and onto the dust riddled, orange clay of the Sunny Mesa. She walked to the edge of the cliff, the pebbles crunching softly under her boots. The air was crisp. Clear. Dry. She plucked a toothpick out of a wooden case on her belt, brought it to her chapped lips, and bit down on the dull end.

The mindworm commander approached from behind and joined her at the edge of the precipice.

“You were never welcome here,” it said, its accent strong, having just learned the dialect of the Gaians only a year ago.

General Skye slid the toothpick to the corner of her mouth. “But now,” she said as she looked out towards the smog-covered Morganite industrial complex. “Now you are nothing without us.”

The mindworm commander fluttered its wings and shook off a layer of dust. The red pedals surrounding its face curled up and exposed a hollow opening in the center of its seemingly nonexistent head. Behind several rows of flesh-stained teeth, a dark layer of muscus led into the depths of its seven foot long, parasitic body.

“Are your forces ready?” asked General Skye.

“Yes, madam. I have assembled a division of probe worms and four airborne squadrons. The bulk of my boils will make an amphibious attack from The Great Barrier Lake.”

“Good.” General Skye spat out her toothpick and spun around towards her impact rover. “This planet will finally be what my sister and I had first intended.”

“Madam.”

“Yes, colonel?” She struggled to face the creature, only glancing at it out of the corner of her eye. No matter how much she loved and cared for nature and the indigenous lifeform, it still terrified her to no end, often appearing in her nightmares, crawling into her bed and infesting her mind.

“You turn on us and you’re next.”

General Skye shivered. She started walking away, trying to stay strong and unafraid. But it did nothing. She remembered their first attack. Standard weapons had no effect. The mindworm boils overtook the base in an instant, burrowing into the brains of every soldier and causing even the most elite, willed and psi-trained grunt in the Gaian marine corp to lash out in a fit of homicidal then suicidal dementia.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Our years of peaceful coexistence should be enough to prove our worthiness as an ally.”

“We’ll see, Madam.” The colonel turned to face his boil. Hundreds of thousands of tiny mindworms crawled back and forth across the plateau, some stacking up on one another to create a tangled bramble of bristles and fins, all combining into a few platoons of highly mobile units. The mindworm colonel slithered onto the roof of the impact rover.

“Today, men, will be the day we retake our planet. We stand before the last surviving enemy faction. They have drilled their thermal boreholes into the depths of our earth. They have constructed their heathen condensers to bring their filthy rains down upon our land. They have erected networks of factories to build their machines to defend themselves. But we know their weakness, men. We know the way into their feeble minds. Let this day be their day of reckoning for all the crimes they have committed against our world. For he who casts the first stone is with the greatest of sin.”