Atmospheric Fantasy

Last Orgy of the 13th Reich       The muzzle of Commander Schmidt's pistol tasted of gun oil and burned powder, undercut with metallic blood and salt urine from when he had discharged it not twenty minutes before inside the subhuman woman, his favourite from among the joy division. She lay now, brown eyes staring glassily at the ceiling upon his silken sheets, midnight black hair fanned out beneath her, once lustrous skin already the colour of muddy ash. He removed the gun from his mouth with a sob, ashamed at his own cowardice as he took another swig from the bottle of cognac he held in his other hand before staggering to his feet, heading across his quarters to his desk and pushing the corpse of his radio operator from the chair. He wiped the bloody foam and the glinting remains of the last cyanide ampoule off of the polished teak with the sleeve of his uniform shirt, and read the decoded orders again. LIQUIDATE RESEARCH CAMP 9. EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY. ...

Rubber Relic       Looking in my side mirror, I saw the cop who’d checked my documents and taken down my registration stare down at her clipboard for a moment, then tilt her head, lifting her radio up to her mouth. I caught a glimpse of myself frowning as I turned my attention to parking, turning the van round on the concrete strip so the back doors were as near to the unit’s shutter as I could get them. I noticed my knee was jiggling up and down as I lit a cigarette and picked up my cap from the dashboard, pulling it on in the way I imagined a man with nothing to hide would. The padlock on the shutter had rusted in the eleven years since I'd last shut it; I had meant to come back and change it, but I never got the nerve up. I figured after dad died I could put some money from the house toward getting a company to come down, crate everything up and dump it in another state. At least this way I was saving some cash. The shutter came up, and I stared for a...