Prose

After seven years of work, ‘Caveat Emptor’ was published in Aussie Speculative Fiction’s Leo Anthology. It started out as an 80 000 word novel and became a short story. I wanted to create something fun, hybrid, sci-fi and post-apocalyptic with a tinge of fantasy set in my home town of Borloo (Perth), Australia. Aussie druid cyborgs, anyone?

Excerpt 1: Caveat Emptor

Will opened his eyes to discover he still couldn’t see.

A cold, musty breeze seeped into his mouth, nose and lungs, bringing with it the sour taste of dirt. He realised he was still standing. He steadied himself using a wall that materialised helpfully from the darkness. But it was no plastic-plated corridor of Serdran. It was a rough, rotting wall of stone.

Will screamed.

Then, in the gloom before him, two bright blue points of light appeared.

Phew, it’s probably a rescue party.

Will stumbled towards them, shuffling his slightly-too-big standard issue shoes past (and occasionally into) piles of rubble.

“Here! I’m alive!”

His call echoed back to him.

As he approached the lights, he saw they were cased together in some metal object. They shifted a little. Then, they blinked.

“Run!” a voice shouted from somewhere in the darkness. “Draw your weapon!”

The voice had such a strange accent that Will could barely make out the words. It sounded like the scrape of metal – harsh, from a dry, strangled throat that had breathed in smoke, swallowed dust. Will couldn’t tell what gender the speaker was, or even if they were human.

A stream of fire pitched from the darkness to roll at his feet – a torch. It illuminated everything in dull light: the wide concrete floor expanding into piles of rubble, traces of the metal beams that built the skeleton of the ceiling, and the huge metal-clad electric-eyed monster that stood before him.

Will screamed again.

“Draw your weapon!” the voice yelled.

The creature snarled and it sounded like the hiss of pistons or escaping air, revealing long needles in its mouth instead of teeth.

“I don’t have one!”

A second object came flying through the air, landing with a loud clang. It was a wide, shining saw with a handle wrapped in bandages.

“I don’t know how to use that!”

“Then it’s time to learn, mate,” the voice replied, and out of the darkness swirled a figure that seemed to burn in the torchlight. They held another torch in one hand and a wide, rusty saw identical to the first in the other. It flashed in the firelight. Will scrambled away.

Their – her? –  hair, long and wild, swung through the air just like the blade. The monster snarled at her. She snarled back.

Then she threw the torch into the monster’s face: it hit with a clang and a burst of sparks. She ducked its jaws, then its frenzied tail swish, in a firelight-shadow-filled blur. Was it made of electrical wires? Or was that strange reptilian skin?

Ramming the wide-toothed saw between the metal plates on its neck, she sawed back and forth through electrical sinews. The monster hissed with broken vocal chords like metal across concrete, smoke billowing from its back, dark blood flowing from the wound. She yanked the saw out again. Then, its legs gave way and it hit the floor with a smash that echoed.

The figure growled at the monster’s body, lumps of lizard-skin oozing blood between metal plates and sparking wires, with sharp yellow teeth. She turned and walked over to Will, sheathing the blade on her back in one fluid movement. She wore long sleeves, a serrated, gouged black breastplate and long pants, all splattered with blood. Her hair was braided back harshly, practically knotted, and in her asymmetrical face, one eye was brown, the other green. A scar sliced faintly down the centre of the green one, and another along her cheekbone.

She smiled, and her left incisor showed. She extended a hand that glinted with blood – “Rhona Vafara.”

Will fainted.

Will woke up to find a pair of mismatched eyes centimetres from his nose and two rusty saws either side of his neck.

“Don’t scream again, or I’ll kill you.”

“Get off me!” Will struggled, but her biceps put his to shame and her hips were heavy on his stomach.

“No. You’re a spy.”

“No, I’m not!” Will continued to wrestle against the brute strength of her arms. “Get off me! You’re… violating me! Help!”

Rhona dropped a saw and shoved her hand over his mouth.  “Emptors follow screaming.”

“MmmRrrinGmMMM!”

Rhona sighed and got off him, keeping a saw levelled at his neck and her hand over his mouth. Will slowly sat up. She’d used the torches, he presumed, to light a small fire on the floor between the piles of rubble. The firelight flicked up them; they shone dully, glinting with shards of broken glass. An iron pot sat nearby, as did a carrying pack, covered in red dirt.

Then, as if opening some horrible orifice, Rhona took her hand away. Will kept quiet. Rhona sighed.

“So, how’d you get here? I find you in the Dark Caverns, surrounded by Emptors” –

“The what?”

“Dark Caverns. Used to be called” – Rhona squinted – “Perth Station, but who knows what that means. Dark Caverns. Surrounded by Emptors. You know; big metal lizard monster?”

“Stuff like that is still wandering around out here after the war?”

“Robots don’t die, Will. Not unless you kill ‘em.” She glared darkly at the Emptor’s hulking body.

Will tried to breathe silently, watching it. “Are there… more?”

“Probably,” she shrugged.

Will narrowed his eyes. “How do you know my name?”

“Your identity card. William Former, 18/4/3063, bunk 7102, ID number 120810, huh?”

“You can’t look at my ID card. That’s illegal!”

Rhona smirked. “Out here, nothing is illegal. Legal, either. I live a nice, peaceful life” –

“Peaceful?”

“…where nobody and nothing can touch me. So, if anyone, any spy, comes and messes it up…”

“I’m not a spy.”

“Then how’d you get here?”

Will thought about it.

“Last I remember, I was programming an emergency evacuation portal… and I fell through.”

“You fell through an evacuation portal? While programming it?” Rhona had started wiping the blood off her blades onto her trousers.

“Yeah.”

Rhona shook her head. “No. That’s what they want you to believe. You’ve been brainwashed. You’re a spy.”

“I am not!”

“You say you mean no harm?”

“No! I mean, yes!”

“Then, you’ll have no reason to refuse the ritual,” she hissed.

Will recoiled a little. “What ritual?”

“Hold out your hand.”

He did, slowly, trying to stop it from shaking.

“Other way.”

“Oh.”

Rhona grasped it, her warm, slimy hands leaving bloody fingerprints. She yanked up his sleeve, Will’s wrist exposed and white. His heartbeat quickened.

Rhona’s own hands were tanned, calloused, still glinting with blood. She rolled up her own sleeves. A wire poked out of her left arm.

“There’s a wire” –

“Yeah.”

Rhona took a deep breath and reached for her dagger. Will began to shake, eyes wide.

“Please don’t! Don’t do it!”

Rhona raised her dagger, shining in the firelight, eyes inscrutable – “I will do what must be done.”

“Oh God, oh God.” Will squeezed his eyes shut.

Nothing. Rhona cackled with ugly laughter.

“You don’t really think I’m going to cut you, do you? Chop off your hand and sacrifice it to the blood gods? Idiot,” she snorted, putting the dagger down and studying Will’s hand. “That’d be barbaric.”

“You threatened to kill me five minutes ago!”

Rhona chuckled. “Oh, lighten up.”

“Yeah. Hilarious. What are you actually doing?”

“Reading your palm.”

“There’s nothing written on it.”

Rhona rolled her eyes.

“The Fates are telling me all about you,” she said, as if that was far more sensible.

“Fates? Like in those old… fairy tales? Ha ha, Rhona. Such a joker. You know, you’d really get it in Serdran for your funny old ways. First the dagger thing, then this…” Will chuckled, trying hard to smile.

Rhona stared at Will, lips pursed, eyes narrowed. One brown, one green.

“Uhh… you’re serious?”

“Yes.”

Will shook his head. “Impossible.”

“Possible.”

“Made-up.”

“Real.”

“You think you can tell things about me from my hands?”

“Don’t you think your hands show who you are and what you do with them?”

Will hid his hands in his pockets.

“Guilty conscience, Will?” Rhona smirked.

He paused.

“No. I’ve never done anything with these hands to be guilty of. Well, except this one electric door… But that’s all I do with them. Wire stuff.”

“That’s all? I bet you eat. Learn weapons training. Shoot any infidel they tell you to.”

Will shook his head. “What?”

“You don’t even…” Rhona’s eyes darted downwards. When Will stared blankly, she sighed. “Ya know?”

“No.”

“You’ve never touched yourself?”

“No.”

“You’ve never touched someone else?”

Will shrivelled up his nose. “Definitely not. We don’t… touch things in Serdran.”

“Never?” asked Rhona.

“Yeah. Because we’re supposed to be concentrating on building a city; surviving. We can’t go around indulging our… feelings.”

“How do they even police that?”

“There’s cameras everywhere.”

“Even in the bunks?”

“Of course.”

“What about privacy?”

“Sorry?”

Rhona stared. “But… come on, Will. You must have feelings.”

“I don’t think so. Well… maybe a bit, once,” he whispered, looking determinedly over Rhona’s shoulder.

Rhona went and tended to the fire.

“It’s important to feel feelings sometimes. Otherwise you get all pent-up. Like a boiling cooking pot.”

Will sighed and shoved his hands further into his pockets.

Will returned to the place near the wall where he’d first appeared and looked for the portal vacuum. Yes, there were two: dilapidated, dusty, severely out of order.

“So, Serdran thinks it’s a good idea to have evacuation portals that lead to this radioactive wasteland?” Rhona said from behind him. She watched, chewing on something.

“It’s not supposed to,” Will replied. “I don’t know why it’s here.”

“Well, this used to be a busy city. Imagine it, people coming in and out, all the time…”

They looked around at the silent platform and the dark, cavernous roof.

“Maybe I can fix it.”

“You better,” Rhona said. “Otherwise you die out here. I mean, it’s lucky the Fates told me not to harm you in your palm, otherwise you’d be dead already. But as it is?” She shrugged at the portal. “I swear, if you’re a spy, and you tell them about me…”

“I won’t,” Will said. “Trust me, nobody would believe me. Got any tools?”

“Besides you?” Rhona muttered as she walked away. She called over her shoulder – “I’ve got a saw.”

“Got that thing fixed yet?”

“No.”

“Then come and eat.”

Will returned to Rhona’s camp to find her cooking something black and charred over the fire. She tore off a hunk of whatever it was and took a bite, chewing with her mouth open, her teeth sharp and glinting with saliva.

She eats like a monster… I guess that’s all she’s had to copy.

She stripped the bone bare, and her tongue worked around it, long and slick. Will wanted to look away, but couldn’t.

“What?” Rhona asked, shrugging aggressively before swallowing.

“What’s it made of?”

Rhona nodded behind her at the Emptor.

“…Oh my God.”

“Unless you happened to fall through the hole with a bucket of oatmeal, you’ll eat what you can to survive.”

Will braced himself and started eating. The meat smelled like herbicide. He supressed his gag reflex. It wasn’t so bad after a while.

“Want some more?” Rhona asked when he’d finished.

Will stared.

“More,” Rhona repeated.

Will shook his head. Then nodded. Then shook it again. “Can I?”

Rhona looked him up and down. “They starve you. You’re like a stick.”

“Not much good crop land.”

Rhona shoved some more meat at him. “Eat.”

“Will. Get here!” Rhona hissed from the campfire. “Quietly! You know nothing of stealth.”

Will hurried over, and Rhona shoved one of her saws into his hand.

“Battle stations.”

There was quiet whirring noise. In the darkness, Will could make out a familiar shape.

“Rhona, that’s just a utility bot” –

Rhona hit him with her full body weight and Will found his cheekbone pressed hard into the dust, the teeth of the saw glinting inches from his face. Behind them, something hit a pile of rubble. It cracked and slid in a cascade of broken glass.

“…that shoots darts,” Rhona said, back on her feet.

Will looked up at the thing. It wasn’t just a bot. It had long, knife-like claws designed for precision – wiring, bomb-defusal – and again, springy lizard legs; an organic suspension system. It’s body was just a metal box with a few vents, and the head, on a slender, flexible neck, was a metal cone with no eyes, no mouth – nothing but shining chrome and an open letter-box slit.

“There’s… other types of Emptors?” Will said, scrambling off the floor. Tiny, glittery shards of glass stuck on his arms. He held up his saw. Adrenaline turned his mind to sawdust.

Rhona’s hand darted out and fixed his grip.

“There’s more than just Emptors out here,” she said. She jerked her head up. “And up there. In the light.”

Then she shoved him nearly face-first into the concrete again. More rubble fell behind them. “The darts, Will! You take the back of it.”

Will ran around the back. He gritted his teeth and slammed the saw into the boxy metal body. It glanced right off without even a dent.

The thing rotated its head a full semi-circle without moving its legs. Again, the whispering sound of a dart. “Duck!”

“On it,” Will said, already standing up as a rusty pipe burst behind him.

Rhona launched herself at it, sawing at the thing’s neck. “I’ve seen cane toads as big as cars and snakes with iron-plated skin… giant mechs with antennae like ants.”

The bot started to turn its head again. “Some of them were mistakes, I’m sure, mistakes they couldn’t kill” – Rhona dodged the swipe of its shining, blade-like claws – “so they just let ‘em loose anyway. Who cares if they kill the enemy?”

The bot locked Rhona’s saw in its claws. Rhona struggled against it. With a whirring noise, it rotated its claws and twisted the blade from her grip, and it clashed to the floor.

“Starglast my guts!” The bot slashed its blades through Rhona’s shoulder, tearing through her worn shirt and skin with ease. She hissed, and it sounded exactly like an Emptor. The second claw gouged at her face. Rhona ducked, but the last blade sliced through her left eyebrow. Blood ran into her eye. Screeching so loudly the metal skeleton of the caverns seemed to vibrate, she launched herself at the monster.

Will ducked under like he’d seen Rhona do and swiped at its legs with his saw. They tore the skin, and black blood splattered the concrete as the bot stumbled. A few hot drops sprayed onto his hand. He manoeuvred around it and smashed his saw into the claws with a metallic crack. He hit it again and again, and one claw broke. It swung, held on by a few wires.

Rhona didn’t acknowledge this. Instead, she launched herself at it on the side without a working claw and put it in a headlock.

“And up until a few years ago, I saw new things too,” she said, teeth gritted, her blood dripping onto the bot’s body. Will stared as the bot tried ineffectually to swivel its head and use its claws. “They were still making military weapons that could think and feel. What’s the point of a weapon if you can’t control it?”

Rhona bent the bot’s neck double, blood pumping rhythmically from her bicep, and grunted as it snapped.

“Huh? What’s the good in that?”

A small stream of smoke rose from the bot’s body. Then, its legs gave way and it hit the ground with a crash. Rhona looked at the smoking heap, then kicked it, her steel-capped boots making a loud dint in the metal. “Gah!”

Will looked at her, covered in blood again, and then down at his saw. It shone silver, and he could not tell which spots were rust and which were blood. Six of the teeth had sunk through the lizard flesh, and they glistened dark red in the firelight. The saw dripped oily dark blood. He shuddered and wiped the blood splatter off his hand, but it smudged, still warm, staining even more of his hand red. The metallic, eye-watering smell of it mingled with the burning wires.

He took a few deep breaths, but they were full of singed hair and smoke. Rhona seemed to warp weirdly as she retrieved her saw, melting through the air, and nausea clawed at his gut. He dropped to his hands and knees and dry-retched.

“Kind of funny, isn’t it?” Rhona walked over, kneeled down and patted him on the back. Will could feel the glass shards slicing into his sticky palms; pricking, warm heat. “Most of Australia decimated; Serdran growing out of a pile of bones… only the Emptors and Starglasts and whatever other creatures they cooked up really thrive.”

A few drops of Rhona’s blood dripped onto Will’s shirt. Her voice was perfectly even. “Two sides go to war. The weapons win.”

Will forced himself to stand, keeping the contents of his stomach down, and gestured to Rhona’s face. “You ok?”

“Yeah. Lucky I don’t have to replace this eye again. You?” Will nodded. “Thanks for – uh – you know. Stopping it from slicing out my voice box. Bet it’s got wiring tools… take them, use them.”

Will nodded again. He started picking over the trashed metal.

Rhona sighed. “Well, it’s always been this way. And this is the way it’s always gonna be.”

“What, did the Fates tell you that too?” Will murmured.

“I don’t need the Fates to tell me humans will always be shitty.”

Want to find out how Will gets in a fist fight with a cyborg? The Leo Anthology: Leo | Universal Book Links Help You Find Books at Your Favorite Store! (books2read.com)

During my degree, I was fortunate enough to work in a lot of different styles with lots and lots of different characters. There were a few, however, that stuck in my mind. Below are two of these personas that really captured my imagination.

Excerpt 2: Star

Star dumped a bag on the ground, sat on the curb and stared at her shoes, the same colour as the bitumen they were stomped into. She rustled through the bag of beautiful navy leather. Inside was a nail file, two bus passes, three phones and two purses. She took one of the phones – embarrassingly pink with a Sailor Moon sticker – and opened it. It had no lock. I mean, seriously, Star thought, who doesn’t put a lock on their phone? She read the text again – ‘Give it back.’
Star chuckled. Then she texted, ‘Come to corner James St with $200.’
She put it in her skull-patterned skirt pocket, still smirking, until the smile dripped off her face.
Then she took out a lighter from her skirt and flicked it, making sparks. She paid no heed to the headlights speeding past. After a while, she checked her skirt pockets, then the pockets of her leather jacket, leaking the smell of smoke and old books.
She gave up and shoved the lighter back into her pocket; took deep breaths of night air, exhaust fumes and neon lights. Then she got out her pocket knife and started cutting at the strands of her fishnet tights.
Footsteps behind her made her jerk around, gripping the knife harder.
“Really?” Keira said. She stared down at Star on the curb.
“Goddammit, Keira,” Star said, folding her knife up and shoving it away. “What are you doing here? You better go.”
Keira posed with arms crossed and rolled her eyes so dramatically they nearly disappeared into the back of her head. Her baggy pastel pink jumper consumed most of her body, but her purple miniskirt just stuck out at the bottom.
“Uhhh… let’s see. I’ll give you five seconds, Sherlock. Five… four…”
Star stared at her. “Oh my god.”
“There you go. Wasn’t too hard, was it?” Keira snapped. “Why’d you do it?”
“That was your phone? Shit! I thought” –
“It was ok to steal someone else’s?”
“Keira! If I don’t” –
“What, does your Dad run a crime syndicate?”
“Shut your – just shut up!” Star jumped to her feet.
“What are you gonna do, stab me?” Keira asked, her hands flopping around in her jumper.
Star paused. “Keira… my Dad – you know he can’t work…”
Then she took out Keira’s phone and shoved it at her. “I’m sorry.”
Keira took it and handed Star ten dollars. “Discount for friends, right?”