All 2 entries tagged Fiction

Sleeper Reaper

Jack Bauer storms into the building, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. He takes down hostile after hostile with pinpoint accuracy.

Without even noticing it, my attention moves away from the TV. My eyes don't close, but I fail to take in anything of the ongoing excitement. It drifts away into nothingness, and my body starts to shut down for the night. I'm falling asleep in front of the TV – a regular occurence, I'm sure. But for me, this lapse could be fatal.

The peaceful nothingness fades to burning heat. My body is slowly engulfed in pain, moving from my arms to my chest to my face. My skin turns bright red, and I moan the only cry I'm able to. Someone rushes to my side, but by this point, I'm oblivious to everything but the pain. They were probably too late.

The scientists told me I have melatonin anaphylaxis. I just tell people I'm allergic to sleep. It's treatable of course, or at least it usually is. My case is unique, the doctors say. Unique enough to kill me.

: 07 May 2006 17:17 |  Tags: Fiction Hennell Sleep Stupidity Writing |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

My NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo is a challenge to write 50,000 words in one month.

I was challenged by my friend to compete, and so this was done in the one and half hours before midnight.

It's 498 words according to NaNoWriMo; 514 according to my text editor. That's 1% of the way to 50,000, which I think is decent.

—

"Aren't you going to shout after him?" asked Brent. "Something about him not getting away with this, maybe."

"What would be the point of that?" the snozwangler calmly responded. Behind him, a turret slowly toppled over, falling to the ground in an explosion of mud and stone. "He has gotten away with it. My once-impressive tower is now falling apart like a poorly constructed game of Jenga. My snozwangling laboratory is destroyed without repair. Shouting about it won't help the situation."

"Yeah, but it might make you feel better. You could at least vow to seek revenge."

The snozwangler looked at Brent, somewhat bemused. "And what would revenge get me? A lot of wasted time and a dead body to dispose of at the end. He was only doing his job."

"So what are you going to do, Mr. Snoz? You can't give up! That last batch was getting really close, I'm sure of it. Sure, they weren't exactly sane, but other than that…" he trailed off, as a stone slab the size of his head embedded itself in the ground, just metres away.

"Give up? Oh no, certainly not. But I feel a change of focus might be in order. In retrospect, I might have been slightly arrogant in this enterprise." He smiled inwardly. The major world leaders had attended an emergency meeting earlier that day, to discuss the problem they saw him as. They would probably have felt that slightly arrogant was an understatement.

"No more kidnapping the children of key governmental figures," he mused out loud. "I learn my lessons. Definitely no public broadcasts announcing what I've done and why, with a challenge to the world to stop me."

"What, then?" Brent questioned. "If you're not going to cause mass hysteria, why even bother?"

"Oh, I can still cause mass hysteria. One of the things holding me back here was sample size. Even with larger laboratories, there's still a limit to the number of subjects I can test. What I need is an adaptive virus. I can let it loose in one of the slums in China; let it spread a while.

"Eventually, a mutated strain will find a way to break down the immune system and work full time. Who knows, after long enough, there might even appear a variant that doesn't turn the host totally insane. The possibilities are endless, Brent, and we're just starting to explore them."

—

Three days later, and Brent was dead.

Two months later, a disease started spreading across China.

A week after that, a man was found talking to himself in a dumpster in Ohio. He was quickly declared as mentally retarded, and sent to an isolated asylum to be cared for.

Within a month, the disease was common across America and Europe.

Within three, humanity had been culled to a global population of under one million. The snozwangler died in the asylum, chuckling in his sleep. Nobody had understood the genius of snozwangling. Nobody ever would.

: 01 Dec 2005 00:13 |  Tags: Fiction Hennell Nanowrimo Writing |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem