Spider Star

The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
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"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin

"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine

"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review

"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly

"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
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Free Short Short Story: Scarlett by Mike Brotherton

July 31st, 2009

I’ve been updating some old files and thinking about getting back to some short story writing. I came across this short short I wrote back in the late 1990s. Got a few nibbles on this one but it never sold, although I still like it quite a bit. At least as far as vampire stories go. Even I’m guilty of writing them. Warning — this isn’t a story for kids. Anyway, enjoy!

Scarlett
by Mike Brotherton

The ringing phone woke me from my dream.

In my dream, a demon had possessed me and I was laughing and shouting incoherent curse words at my mortal pursuers, but that reality faded immediately with the harsh noise of the modern world. As I fumbled for the phone, I hoped the demon would take control and cuss out the bastard who’d called in the dead of night, but I answered in my own sleepy, sticky voice. “Hell-hello?”

“It’s time, Bob.” A female voice, calm.

I was instantly awake, heartbeat accelerating. I touched the scar on my wrist. Could it be, after two years? “Scarlett?”

“Time to fulfill your promise. Come to the crypt.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Now.” The line went dead.

I first saw Scarlett walking into a 6th Street bar on a Saturday night. I didn’t normally follow strange women into bars, but accountants have fantasies, too. Mine was vampire women. Not real vampires, of course, but women who walked the walk. Most cities, if they’re eclectic enough, enjoy a handful. I’d grown up jerking off to Vampirella comic books, and still preferred them to Playboy.

Scarlett was decked out in black: leather bathing suit, velvet choker, cape, and thigh-high boots with four-inch heels that resounded like cracking bullwhips as she walked along the sidewalk. She had the obligatory long, straight dark hair, milk-white skin, and painted lips she used to sneer at the catcalls.

Exquisite.

I followed her into six bars. People stared at her, some in disgust, some in lust. I wanted to approach her, but heavy-set, middle-aged, balding accountants don’t hit on women like that. Some other guys did, but after ten or fifteen minutes walking around at each place–trolling, it seemed–she left alone.

Toward midnight, she headed away from the bars, down a dark street little more than an alley. It wasn’t the kind of street I’d walk down in broad daylight. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here, I thought. I followed as if hypnotized. I was six steps into the alley before I realized I no longer heard her boots striking pavement. I paused.

“How much do you want me?” A voice as smooth as honey flowed from behind a dumpster.

I gulped, and took a step back.

“Don’t go.”

“W-who’s there?”

She laughed. “Don’t you know who you’ve been following?”

My eyes had adjusted to the dark and I saw her pale flesh. Her hand beckoned. “Come here.”

I remembered a quote, Yield to temptation…It may not pass your way again. Behind the dumpster smelled sweetly of rotting fruit. Rats scurried nearby. The dirtiness only made it more exciting. I was already hard.

“A trade,” she proposed, “What you want for what I want. Fair?”

I nodded without comprehension, but, as if I were in a dream, committed to my role.

“Better do you first,” she said, and squatted down. She unzipped me. My God, I didn’t last a minute.

She stood and leaned close, pressing my back into cold bricks. I smelled myself on her breath. “My turn,” she whispered, and unbuttoned my collar.

She nibbled at my neck. It hurt. I outweighed her by a hundred pounds; I could have stopped her, but it only got me hard again. Her teeth finally broke skin. She only sucked for a minute. She pulled back and stared. “Fair enough?”

I gasped.

“My name, by the way,” she said licking her blood-red lips, “is Scarlett.”

After that, I saw Scarlett at least once a week and started wearing turtlenecks. We traded sex and blood. That was it; we knew each other no other way. We did not have dinner, go dancing, discuss friends or family, watch TV. She wanted to be a vampire, and I wanted a vampire, and we tried to cheat a mundane universe.

She kept a house on Hawthorn Street. I never saw the upstairs. We met in her cellar, her crypt: black drapes over the walls, low-watt bulbs in fake torches, fog machine in the corner, and Scarlett’s polished coffin. For a year, bliss.

Then I blew it.

My curiosity got the better of me and I decided to follow Scarlett in the daytime. She emerged from the house and blinked in the morning sunlight. Her hair was pulled tight into a bun and she wore a brown pantsuit. She got into a Ford Taurus and drove to the parking garage of an office building. At the time, I didn’t think she saw me.

I came to her that night, but I was impotent.

I offered her my blood anyway. She expertly slashed my wrist with a scalpel–she’d come a long way from clumsy back alley gnawing. Normally she avoided the dangerous targets, like the wrist, but not tonight. She sucked me, grunting, until I passed out. When I came to, Scarlett hovered over me, unvampire-like tears ruining her mascara. “Oh, thank God,” she said. “I thought I’d killed you.”

She raised a glass of orange juice to my lips. I drank, stunned, then asked, “It’s over, isn’t it?”

She nodded, still crying. “I want you to promise me something. After tonight, I know I can’t trust myself, but I trust you. Will you promise?”

“What is it?”

She told me. It was so ludicrous, and she was so hysterical, that I finally agreed. I didn’t think I would ever have to do as she asked.

The cellar door was unlocked. The inside was almost as I remembered it, except for a pale man on the floor. I expected him. He didn’t look all that different from me. A little thinner, a little younger, perhaps. But there was one major difference.

He was dead.

I expected that, too.

Scarlett was inside her coffin, in costume, perfectly made up, including the mascara. Her arms were folded across her chest. One hand loosely held an empty pill bottle. Sleeping pills. On a table next to her coffin rested a hammer and stake, the tools she had left for me.

I picked them up. I pretended I was dreaming, watching myself act from the outside. It wasn’t me. I was possessed by a demon, oh yes, and the fantasy was again mine. I felt my cheeks lift into a strange smile as I looked at the beautiful but damned vampire sleeping before me, too dangerous to be permitted to remain within the realm of men.

I raised the hammer to keep my promise.

End

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