Lee S. Hawke - Division: A Collection of Science Fiction Fairytales

C opyright 2014 by Lee S. Hawke

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental. Reproduction in whole or part of this publication in any form without express written permission from the author is strictly prohibited, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

For more information, go to www.leeshawke.com.

ISBN: 978-1-925299-00-7

T o my mother , for reading me stories.

T o my father , for giving me dreams.

T o my readers , for picking up this book.

THE DIVISION

Rain on the windows,

creaking doors,

With blasts that

besom the green,

And I am here,

and you are there,

And a hundred miles between!

O were it but the weather, Dear,

O were it but the miles

That summed up all

our severance,

There might be room for smiles.

But that thwart thing

betwixt us twain,

Which nothing cleaves or clears,

Is more than distance, Dear,

or rain,

And longer than the years!

Thomas Hardy

O nce Upon a Time , there were fairytales.

Now that doesnt tell us where. Or when. Or how. But wherever they were, they explored the things that matter. Like Beauty. Like grief. Like humanity and heroism and evil, or even just falling in love.

The following stories are not Cinderella in Space, or Snow White with Robots. They are fairytales set in the apocalypse, or on a spaceship, or in virtual reality. But they still explore the things that matter.

You can decide whether everyone lives happily ever after or not.

O nce upon a time , I got very, very sick.

Everything that could happen to me happened. I got a fever. I got rashes. I vomited upon contact with anything remotely resembling edibles. I got aches in places that I didnt know existed, and a cough that seemed to start from my toenails. By the end of the first week, I had gone from praying that my family wouldnt get it to praying that I would die.

My family got it. So it goes. They died.

But I didnt. Die, that is. At least not then. Instead, I got picked up by the military.

I learned as a kid that homo sapiens would rather fight other homo sapiens than microbes. For one thing, its easier. And theres something satisfying about knowing somebody else is the bad guy and seeing them laid out on the street in front of you. Something human.

Microbes? The little bastards just go hide, multiply, and come back to bite you when you least expect it.

I was in and out of hospital a lot as a kid. Chronic recurrent multifocal osteomyelitis, also known as CRMO, also known as pain. It took them a while to figure out that my own bones were swelling up and attacking me, courtesy of some random gene that they couldnt even identify. I dont remember much, but what I do remember was that when I was stuck in a white room, I watched a lot of television. I saw the coolest and latest new toys the army was playing with, the dust in their arenas, the suits arguing over how much money they were going to throw at them. I found out later that over those same weeks, three doctors quit so that they could re-introduce themselves to their families, and one nurse quietly injected herself with ten times the recommended dosage of benzodiazepine. Turned out shed gone so far into debt that she couldnt see out the other side.

She wasnt alone. I went into remission. I grew up. I read the news like everybody else, poring over my smartphone on the train to work. I read about West Africa, about Vietnam, about Bangladesh. Places that seemed far away until they werent. It was right there in front of us, in black lines on white websites; we read and we comprehended the foot soldiers of the Apocalypse, and then we just put away our phones and logged into our emails.

We might as well have just overdosed with sedatives.

H omo sapiens would rather fight other homo sapiens than microbes. But once we make up our minds, I dont know if its all that different.

I woke to a white room, on a stiff white bed. I craned my neck and blinked stupidly. To my right was a unit mounted on the wall that looked like a cross between a toilet and a fax machine. A small sink perched nervously above it, as if afraid it would fall in. Opposite that was a door, so finely cut into the surrounding wall that I saw only the eyehole at first. And then in front of me, squatting on its mount, was the television.

Id seen jail cells that looked more hospitable.

Oh, and one last thing. There was a speaker in the right corner, far out of reach. It crackled as I stared at it, trying to convince myself that this was all a fever dream. Any moment now, Id wake up to my mother rearranging the pots downstairs and my sister breaking the walls dancing to that ear-shredding stuff she called music.

Instead, I got three seconds worth of static, and then a voice: Tamun Jabbari. My name is Doctor Prasad. Do you understand me?

To my shock, I did. The fever had done odd things near the end, Id been muttering to the walls about green unicorns and ham. I cleared my throat and it felt like scraping blood pudding off a china plate. I hurt everywhere, but as I did a mental inventory, I also recognised the feeling of lightness. I was getting better. I didnt even remember how close Id been to death. Only the old, metallic taste of it lingered, like cold iron.

Doc, I said. I sounded ninety years older, a hundred. Where am I?

I couldnt see her, but I heard it in her voice: something relaxed. My name is Doctor Prasad, she said again. And youre safe. But your mother and sister are dead. And so is young Ms. Colier, who sat across from your cubicle. And the shopping clerk who handled your groceries on Tuesday the 2nd. And his daughter. And the girl she rode with on the bus to school. And half of her teachers. She paused her machine-gun fire for a moment and aimed for the heart. All up, 47 deaths in under a week and another 359 believed infected. But youve survived.

A minute passed.

Mr. Jabbari?

I stared at the palms of my hands. The world behind them was hot with guilt and horror, filling up the holes the fever had left in my skin. Mr. Jabbari, she said again, and now she sounded severe, impatient. I heard it through a thick mist of fog. People were dead and I had killed them. I didnt even know how Id first gotten sick. It could have been Jacks cough when I saw him two weeks ago, but something sat wrong in me at the thought. Hed been walking around, not a mess on the bedroom floor like Id been. It could have been

Mr. Jabbari, she repeated. She was definitely annoyed now. Im telling you this so that you can help people.

My hands dropped. I saw the four white walls enclosing me through blurred eyes. I was now almost positive that one of them was a one-way mirror. I stared at it and imagined white faces. How?

I flunked biology in high school. Dont get me wrong, I loved it. I loved knowing how things worked, and given my history of chronic illness, it felt a little like self-preservation. But I could never get a hold of the right names, let alone draw the diagrams in the exams, and so I ended up dropping it and taking up history instead.

Still, I remembered enough of it to understand that what Dr. Prasad was telling me didnt make any sense.