Lost Children

Lost Children A collection of tales by Nerine Dorman Copyright © Nerine Dorman 2014 Published by Ba en Ast Books at Smashwords   Copyright © 2014 by Nerine Dorman   All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.   Ba en Ast Books 22 Glen Alpine Road Welcome Glen 7985 South Africa   Thanks   First of all, a huge thank you to Carrie Clevenger and Icy Sedgwick, both of whom have aided and abetted me when it comes to crafting my short stories. Icy also put up with my nit-picking when it came to the cover art. Thanks must also go to HJ Lombard for the use of his photograph (go check out his photography at www.cadmusstudio.com), and to Gayla Drummond who helped with the interiors and formatting. Meg de Jong also played a role in helping me hunt down assorted gremlins.   A Note from the Author   If you’re reading this, thank you for buying and downloading Lost Children or going the extra mile by buying the print version. A short story collection by one author can be considered a vanity, and this one is nothing else but a small vanity on my part – an attempt to record my writings that otherwise might’ve slipped through the cracks. I’d like to take a moment to share a little bit about these tales of fantasy and horror and where they come from, since I always enjoy it when my favourite authors give a little background to their creations. “On an Empty Shore” was written partly as a challenge and partly as an exercise in serial short fiction. For this I must thank my co-author Carrie Clevenger who was absolutely ruthless in her eye-rolling, and who helped me establish the narrative. I’ve learnt so much from her when it comes to the art of short story writing. This was initially published on my blog a few years ago, but this is the first time it’s collated properly in reading order. I couldn’t resist adding “Class Outing”. It’s a piece of flash I wrote ages back and circulated via FridayFlash.org. I can’t help my nasty giggles every time I read it. As for balon trees – they came crawling out of my nightmares. “All that Remains” first appeared in Chaosphere Magazine Volume 4 in 2012. Since the magazine itself might not be widely accessible, I felt I’d like to make the story available for my dedicated readers. I grew up in Hout Bay, and the location that appears in this story is a fictionalisation of a house down the road from my childhood home. To this day, I have a morbid fascination with old buildings that are often shut up and neglected. Sometimes stories evolve. “Homecoming” initially saw the light of day as a story called “A Pearl for Anel” which I had up on my old Fictionpress profile. I revised it for FridayFlash.org but it also served as a seed for another story entitled “Only the Stars and the Void Between” that appeared in Apex Publications’ War Stories anthology in 2014. The idea is simple: you can never truly go home, which is a theme that recurs in many of my tales. “Pinion” is a little breath of fresh air. Which is why I wedged the tale between the two gloomier ones before I plunge you back into claustrophobic despair. Jonny Copper came to me fully formed in a waking dream, and I might still slip him into a novel-length work or two in the future. If anything, he has a little of the Trickster in him, and I suspect he might be a bastard son of Odin, the All Father. He walks between worlds and often appears in people’s lives when they need things stirred up a little. I had a lot of fun writing “When in Africa”, and the story started out as a rant about tourists but then evolved into something else when I thought about my African who’d have a thing or four to say about foreign tourists in the not-so-distant future of our country. “Night’s Caress” was probably the most difficult story to write, because it had one or two false starts over the years until I figured I was going about it the wrong way. I changed viewpoint character, turned this into a flash piece and it just seemed to work. At any rate, this is one of the first short stories I ever sold (and got paid for). I’m not even sure which online publication it went into, but I guess it doesn’t matter because that site has been long gone for a while now. So it is fitting that this little lost soul has a place to rest here among my others. “Shame” was a difficult story to write. Firstly, I was concerned about how I portrayed people of colour, since I’m a child of the old republic who’s often unsure of her place in the new South Africa. This is also an uncomfortable telling, as it cuts a bit deep for me on many levels. Many thanks, however, go to The Prof, who read an early version of this tale and reassured me that I wasn’t completely off base. And a big thanks to Louis Greenberg who gave this a beady eye. The worst kind of horror in my mind is when events occur beyond your control. Growing up during the transition in South Africa was scary and exciting at the same time – I often felt as if things were happening over which I had no control. Of course in “Shame” I take a worst-case scenario view. Darkest blessings, Nerine, 2014     On an Empty Shore I: For Once We Weren’t the Greater Evil   Where were you when the zombiepocalypse happened? Nasty piece of work, wasn’t it? They didn’t see it coming, the dumb f***s. One moment everyone went on like the world wasn’t going to come to an end, chasing their daily lemming-grind. The next boom! neighbour ate neighbour and everything just shuddered to a standstill. Me? I noticed the s**t was going down when I came out at night to see the streets were all but deserted. Lots of sirens. More than usual for Cape Town by night. And, of course, the other weird factor: no street people. Doorway after doorway was empty of bodies wrapped in blankets or makeshift cardboard shelters. No easy snacks for nocturnal lurkers like me. At the time I was doing what any self-respecting vampire would do at night –prowling and keeping an eye out. For what, I wasn’t quite sure. There was no acting the big dude for the likes of me. Not like those snooty fanged bastards in their penthouses who got their food brought up to them all discreet like. I had to do my own hunting. Being all high and mighty didn’t help them when things turned to s**t. By the time the warmbloods called in the army, it was too late. Damn zombies pretty much chewed their way through everyone who put up a struggle. What a waste of perfectly good blood. Zombies were only after one thing: meat. And they weren’t too picky about the condition they found it in, so long as it filled the gap. This kinda left us vamps at a loose end. The clever warmbloods who survived were armed to the teeth and extra freaked out, which made it tricksy for the rest of us to get a meal. In the end vampire turned on vampire, and this is where it was better to be streetwise. No one ever paid me – Joost Brink – any attention when I was alive. They paid me even less attention once I was undead. Small, skinny ex-junkie. Not important in the grander scheme of things, hey? This saved me when the almighty papaya hit the proverbial fan. The old ones at the top were the first to go, if they weren’t clever enough to go into hiding. Which they weren’t. They expected their loyal lieutenants to keep them safe. The lieutenants did what any self-serving creature of the night would. They looked after number one, and number one wasn’t the boss man. Who knew? The things I saw during those first nights of fire, blood and terror – I am glad vampires don’t dream because if that were the case I’d have daymares. Or whatever you’d call it. Dunno. It’s kinda twisted that a monster like me would want to puke after seeing stuff like kidlets all ripped into bits; the horrible gnashing mouths chomping onto tender flesh. Lips blue in death smacking as fat dribbles between the gaps where teeth had been knocked out. Even I never killed kids, okay. An old man made his last stand, cornered in his driveway. Armed with only a nine-millimetre pistol, he fought off a mob of walking dead. He took out one with a head shot at almost point-blank range, but by then it was too late – too many of the rotting things clawed and moaned at him. The truly f*****g hysterical thing about this whole drama was that the zombies simply weren’t interested in other undead. Not that I claimed any relations to the shambling rotten things, but as far as they were concerned, we belonged among their ranks. The night I discovered this I would have pissed myself if that were still possible. I’d walked straight into a pack of the beasts, and bumped into a creature that may once have been a secretary or a sales rep, had half her skin not hung off her in loose sheets. Grey meat gleamed in the low light. We bounced into each other and I staggered back a step then froze, half expecting her and all the rest to fall upon me the same way they dismembered warmbloods. To my f*****g disbelief they shoved past me, as though I were just a lamppost or some other obstacle in their path. They did not even pause to sniff in the air. Bully for me. I should have smelled them, but there were parts of the city where the overall stench of rotting meat was so strong I sometimes overlooked the obvious. I tended to go on sight rather than smell. I wouldn’t make that mistake again. It still didn’t help that my food was in short supply. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to turn to zombies for a Happy Meal. Their blood, such as it was, was viscous and black, and smelled like they looked – days-old road kill. I preyed on the lost, the hopeless, much as I had before the zombies took over, but somehow now, despite my hunger, I simply lacked the taste for the kill. I used to see myself as an angel of death, and wouldn’t drag out deaths, if it even came to that. The warmbloods who cowered in their nooks and hidey-holes were even more pitiful than the dregs I used to cull. I just couldn’t do it. They clung to life like kittens drowning in a bucket. Often, I slunk back to my lair hungrier than when I awoke. Mind you, a starving vampire was about as frightening as a horde of zombies. I stalked the deserted streets, stepped around cars discarded like oversized toys. I stooped to feeding off feral dogs, of which there were many, and besides, the infernal things tried to hunt me on occasion. I may have been the runt among the vampires, but I wouldn’t allow mere dogs to make me roll and show my neck. Cape Town was weird without the cheery bright lights or the low rumble of traffic. From time to time I’d see the flicker of candles from a number of the high-rise buildings, tenacious warmbloods barricaded from the gore-fest in the streets below. For the most I let them be. It’s almost as if for once, they deserved a break, the poor bastards.