Fiction River: Fantasy Adrift by Fiction River Page A

the old woman. I found the gnarled length of polished driftwood she’d used for a walking stick not far from the entrance to the cave where a set of footsteps in the sand abruptly stopped. I traced the footsteps back inside the cave until I came to where the knife had fallen, but it was not to be found. It was as if it had vanished with the old woman.
    When I came out, the boy’s eyes were open. He stared about him in wonderment. “I was going to kill you,” he said.
    “I know.”
    A hank of wet dark hair fell across his forehead. Blood trickled from his nose. “You saved me.”
    “I know.”
    “What do we do now?”
    I turned away from the cave entrance and faced the length of the beach and the clusters of houses piled along the shore with their shining windows.
    “We go home,” I said, and held out my hand.

 
     
     
     
    Introduction to “ Generations”
     
     
    And now, a moment to breathe. Like our previous two stories, Steve Perry’s “Generations” takes a familiar tale and breathes new life into it. Unlike them, this story adds a bit of much-needed levity to the mix.
    Ever since I edited Pulphouse: A Hardback Magazine , Steve has been my go-to guy for the off-beat. He was one of the first writers I invited into Fiction River, although I had to wait for the proper issue to showcase this story.
    Because his career now spans four decades, he knows that editors can be an unruly lot. He has certainly worked with a bunch of us. Steve’s published everything from prose to TV animation. An Emmy-nominated, New York Times bestselling writer, Steve still finds time to write novels. His latest, The Vastalimi Gambit is part of his Cutter’s War series.
    About “Generations,” Steve writes, “I like taking old tropes and trying to come up with new twists. I call these my wild-hair stories, and the ones that are the craziest are generally those for which I don’t expect there to be any market. Fortunately, I don’t get these urges very often. Pretty much every time I’ve had one of these loony notions, Dean and Kris have laughed and bought it. They’re passing strange, these two….”

 
     
     
     
    Generations
    Steve Perry
     
     
    Ziegelstein heard Stroh’s ching on the room’s com. “I’m here,” he said. “What’s up?”
    “We’re coming in hot! B.B. is a klick behind us and gaining!”
    “Jesus! Is Stocke is with you?”
    “Yeah. B.B. has got some kind of new toy, like a vortex thing. Took out my place like it was nothing, flattened Stocke’s like a fucking tornado, too. We’re screwed, Ziggy!”
    “Maybe not. How soon are you here?”
    “Three minutes.”
    “I’ll stand by to open the gate. Get inside quick.”
    “I’m not sure the gate or the mines will stop him, brah. That weapon of his blows through everything.”
    “Yeah, well, we’ll see how it does against the new fields.”
    “Watch out for the damn tree!” Stroh yelled.
    That meant Stocke was piloting the rover, and they were off-road, too.
    Stroh said. “Two minutes, if Stocke doesn’t smash us into a tree first.”
    “Fuck you!” Stocke said in the background.
    “Standing by. Com off.”
    Ziggy wiped at his mouth. It was only a matter of time, they had known it was coming That hairy-faced bastard B.B. was always going to be a problem, never a matter of “if,” but “when,” and the day had arrived.
    Crap.
    Ziggy had done as much as he could. He had solar-powered drones in the air, variable-field mines planted. The building was mostly armored in stacked, layered ferro-ceramics, and the force fields were brand new, installed two weeks ago, double-reverse polarities with shift-phase warblers and fourteen million rotating combinations during each phase, and good luck on finding a key to open them.
    But B.B. was bad, you had to give him that. When push came to shove, he was fast, tough, mean, and definitely smarter than most. Step crooked with B.B., he’d eat you alive.
    It was a small terraformed world, even