Haruspex: Part 1 – Cherubim

By the time that they realised it was a cherub and not a small bird that they had prepared for the oven it was too late. Their hunger had been great upon them and they had acted without thought — hunger drove them and hunger had damned them. Was God mocking them that he would [...]

Haruspex: Part 0 – In The Beginning

In the beginning there was light … the blue touch-paper and stand back. Fireworks! God didn’t make the world in 7 days: he found it at the back of a warehouse he’d been renting and had forgotten about. His PA, Gabriel had been going through the books when he found a few shadow companies masking [...]

Grit – Family Matter 1

Weddings and funerals and all the other clichéd bullshit were not something that Grit bothered with, but this was a special occasion … this was someone he wanted to see them lower into the ground. No one would recognise him he hoped, and if they did, what of it? Who was likely to approach him [...]

Grit: First Round 1

His hands were shaking and his mouth was dry – he needed to get a grip or he was never going to be able to fire that gun. Baker had shown confidence in him that he could do this job and he had sold himself well – much better than he had thought himself able. [...]

writer’s block 1: starting block

Directive 451 was passed to halt the dissemination of ideas in print. There was still a small enclave of people, so it was rumoured, who could pick up a pen and knock out a story, but most of the writers had been gathered up and dumped in one place: Block I, or Writer’s Block as [...]

Roulette Reality 1: Fire

Roulette reality one, spin and fire. They called it a hammer, a trigger: it was in truth a massive burst of energy drawn off from a caged singularity that they used to slice and dice reality into chunks that their quantum computer told them were there. Comparing it to a gun seemed somewhat childish to [...]

word gains 1

I know that when they sit there and they read the words that I have put down that they are not reading the story, they are reading me. It is good to sometimes have the distance of anonymity between you and your readers. If every described suicide, every murderer, and every zany idea expressed reflects [...]

Grit: Breather 1

Grit smiled. A fucking rest – just what he needed after all this time spent chasing numb nuts around and putting bullets in the back of their heads. He had the easel set up and he had some jazz playing – Mingus, he felt, was perfect for the painting of watercolours. This landscape was something [...]

Grit: Standover 1

Standover men were muscle-driven machines on the whole – people that had just enough grey matter to know that they were not bright enough to hatch master plans that were going to bring them riches beyond compare, but just enough cunning to know how to trap those who could. Occasionally you would get one that [...]

Grit: Vacuum 1

Grimoire was gone and Grit knew that this would result in a rush to assume alpha dog status amongst the heretofore small fish of the pond. It was a great business opportunity to play all ends off against the middle. None of these jokers would be a big enough threat to him even combined if [...]