Losing Sarah

“Are you still wearing that?” his sister-in-law asked him as she drove them to Megamall through the torrential rain.

Carlo looked at the small black pin on his chest, stark and bright on his faded orange jacket. He shrugged. “I keep forgetting to remove it.”

Erika only looked at him for a while before her 9-nine year old son, Jasper, clamored for her attention. Carlo looked outside the car window where the streets were being swept clean by the typhoon rain.

He didn’t feel like accompanying Erika and Jasper to the mall and its crowd. But his sister-in-law had asked for his help, saying that she needed someone to watch over Jasper while she ran her errands. Carlo had acceded to her request, feeling that he had been neglecting his nephew for some time. And besides, he liked Jasper.

After separating from Erika, Carlo brought Jasper to Powerbooks. He didn’t want to but he wasn’t sure where to take a 9-year-old boy.

Sarah and Carlo never had a chance to become parents. But likewise, going to Powerbooks brought too many painful memories. They both loved books and they respected each other’s silences as they individually prowled the shelves. There would be times when they would hang out for the whole day at Powerbooks.

At the entrance, Jasper immediately ran towards the colorful children’s section. Carlo hesitated and then took a step inside. It felt strange to be inside a bookstore without Sarah. But then, it felt strange to open even a book. All of their books had piled up gathering dust at their small one-bedroom apartment.

As he wandered through the various shelves and book bins that proclaimed a sale, he looked at all the books with their white pages full of text he didn’t recognize and the different covers he couldn’t bother to care for.

But then the side entrance that led outside the mall flew open in a storm burst of rain and wind and all the book pages on the shelves and bins started to flap and thrash. As the shouts of dismay echoed through the store, he saw people raising the books they were reading in alarm.

He picked up one book and opened it to see all the pages had Sarah’s face printed on it over and over again. He dropped the book and picked up another with the same result. He turned around to see all the flapping pages had Sarah’s face on them.

He fell to his knees and started laughing uncontrollably. He didn’t know when the laughter started to become howling tears.

Tooth and Nail

(First posted here. It didn’t win but it was still fun enough to write and now I have a kernel of an idea for the start of my alternate history stories.)

Dictator Ferdinand Marcos was a crazy bastard but he did some good.

For example, Martial Law? He had his reasons for it, the primary one being to kill all monsters. Big-assed, flying, digging, crawling, teeth and claws, bloodthirsty monsters. They were coming out of the woodwork and it took all Marcos and the government to put them down without panicking the public in the ‘70s.

Of course this took a toll on Marcos’ New Society with accusations of corruption and killings. Marcos couldn’t reveal we were actually fighting a war of shadows at that time and this would later cost him when the military took the side of civil society in Edsa ’86.

Truth is stranger than fiction. Take for example Jabidah Massacre. Remember that? Where more than a hundred Moro soldiers and officers were recruited and trained to invade Sabah? And when the operation was aborted, it was said the soldiers were summarily executed by the military?

Well, there’s an even more interesting story behind that one.

Feed

There were two feeders crouching over his garden that morning.

“Goddammit,” Anton said as he reached for his carbine.

He peered through the window to see if there were any lurkers and then unlocked the gun hatch in the center of the  back door.

“You assholes! Get off my garden!” he cried, aiming the rifle at them.

The two ignored his imprecations even as the sound of their chewing came clear to him.

New life

The antiseptic, white corridors were empty. Closed sliding glass doors lined the walls, all blank and featureless.

Dr. Alan Saldano took a step forward, clutching the scalpel. He jumped when one of the glass doors slid open, the laser light blinking as it sensed his approach.

He was the only one left of the research team. In fact, he didn’t know if anyone was left alive on this level of the lab.

“Hello?!” he cried. “Security, can you hear me?!” The lab-wide intercom remained silent.

Skin

They were burning bodies again.

Manuel averted his eyes even as the smell of burning flesh overwhelmed him. At least the bodies this time weren’t human, he thought, though the limbs on the bonfire seemed human enough.

He carried his groceries to the small apartment he was renting on the avenida. As he was unlocking the gated door to his unit, a Humvee bearing a troop of American soldiers carrying high-powered rifles swept by with their siren red lights streaking the darkened street.

So far, the military sent by the United Nations had been successful in liberating Manila from the invading alien forces. But there were still pockets of resistance throughout the city. As he walked up his apartment, he thought he could hear muted gunfire in a distance.

A Reunion at Revelation Rock

“Are you gonna go my way?” the driver asked, the dust from the dirt road settling on his rusty pickup truck.

Of the two men walking at the side of the road, only the younger man looked up.

Dressed in torn jeans, military boots, and a ragged Dead Kennedys t-shirt, the man smiled though his dead white eyes still looked at the world hungrily. “Gladly. Always good to see a helping hand.”

An Aswang Love Story

Dude looks like a lady, the Englishman Tom Doesil thought as he glanced at the person crossing Malate Circle at 3 o’clock that night.

Tom grinned despite himself as he slowed down his rented Honda Civic around the rotunda. You’d think that after being in the country for almost six months and doing NGO work for the World Bank, he’d have an easier time judging Filipino faces.

He studied the person in the distance. Truth be told, the figure was too masculine to be a woman – the shoulders too broad, the Adam’s apple too prominent in the throat, and the features too strong despite the Chinese cast to the face.

Working over the Holidays

Day 120, December 25, Christmas Day.
From the Log of Engineer Thomas Indra-de Leon, The Aureus Orbital

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…

I can now officially announce that this is my first Christmas in space.

I’ve already tried to fix things inside the Aureus to make it appear more festive. Unfortunately, I don’t have too much in terms of colored paper and my Christmas lights consist of the on-board monitor’s flashing LEDs.

The Sleep of Prey and Predator

“Like a virgin,” she crooned as she touched the pale full lips with a finger, “Touched for the very first time…”

The body on the bed didn’t respond and she laughed softly. She rose from the bed, the sheet sliding off to reveal her naked form. She glided on the room’s soft rug to the window where she had a view of the towers of Hong Kong all lit up in the distance.

Bored with the view, she headed towards the bathroom and passed the mirror. Her reflection moved past, her body shifting from that of a black hag to a curvaceous woman of Asian descent. She stepped on the cold bathroom tiles.

Memoirs of an Ex-Zombie

Purple haze. It’s all a purple haze in my brain, man.

It’s hard to think of before, when the end of the world came and the infection spread. People screaming and dying, being chased by these zombies, cars exploding, governments collapsing – it all sounds like one hell of a bad B-movie.

Personally, I didn’t give a shit then. I was in a world of my own smoking my grass and just cruising through life, you know? But then I got bitten by this half-assed zombie while trying to score and next thing I know, I was becoming a zombie myself. One moment I was alive, the next I was dead and mad-on against the next guy.

But here’s the funny: I wasn’t really “dead”, more like “brain-dead”. They called ‘em “zombies” on account of some kid screaming at TV reporters in the early days and it spread.