I nodded. “Looks that way,” I said, unable to resist twisting the knife. “It ain’t your lucky night, Wormwood.”
The look of surprise vanished from his face like someone had thrown a switch.
“Yeah it is,” he said.
He turned his cards over, one by one. The little arsehole had a royal flush and the Devil, the top hand in the game. The unbeatable hand. He looked up, and he met my eyes.
“Gimme,” he said.
I lifted the Burned Man up onto the middle of the card table. My hands were trembling, and for once not with drink.
“You want this, Wormwood?” I asked him. “Have it then!”
I spoke the deep, guttural, pre-Roman druidic words the Burned Man had taught me and snapped the tiny iron chains between my fingers. The fetish on the piece of sacred altar wood crumbled into ashes and collapsed onto the discarded playing cards as though it had never been there.
Wormwood stared at me. “You didn’t,” he whispered. “Tell me you didn’t!”
There was an overpowering stench of sulphur from the piece of ancient oak where the Burned Man had been chained. For a moment, nothing happened. Then Wormwood screamed.
He reared up to his feet, throwing the card table over on its side and scattering the cards and my drink and a confetti of cigarette butts across the floor. Wormwood shrieked. He burst into flames a second later, his filthy hair burning like a torch. He lunged at me, mad hatred flaring in his eyes even as they liquefied and ran down his stubbled cheeks. I stumbled backwards out of the way and he crashed face-down onto the floor, burning and screaming. His minder took a step back, gave me a wary look, and exploded.
I gagged as ragged chunks of meat splattered against me. The ceiling of the club caught fire, and fell in. Everyone was screaming now, running for the stairs in a mad panic. I stood amongst the burning devastation, and slowly shook my head.
“You’ve had me, haven’t you?” I said, but there was no reply. “You little bastard, you’ve had me good and proper.”
I crossed the room, dodging burning rafters as they fell from what was left of the roof, and pulled back the heavy, smouldering velvet curtains that covered one of the windows. I looked out at London, and shuddered. Whole city blocks were burning already, huge flares roaring up into the cloudy sky. I could just make out the gigantic, shadowy figure of the Burned Man, standing as tall as the sky. It strode through the hellish waste, setting fires wherever it passed.
“Burn!” it roared, throwing its mighty arms wide.
The night sky flared crimson, the flames racing towards the horizon in an ever expanding circle of blazing fury.
I could only stare, wide eyed with horror, as I watched the world begin to burn.
STEPHEN “B5” JONES
Fly the Moon to Me
Stephen “B5” Jones takes full responsibility for his short story collections, Elf Tales and Other Psychotic Events, Space: Time: and other Improbabilities, and Just So Odd Stories. He has other projects in the works, including at least two full length novels. He lives in New Mexico with his family, visits old Mexico, and drives a school bus. Other works by Stephen “B5” Jones can be found at his Smashwords page.
Fly the Moon to Me, his story for this anthology, proves some things never change. They are as solid as the ground beneath our feet.
“Timo,” Weist, the mechanic, said. “I put an extra layer of sealant on your ship. You should be completely airtight now.”
Timo Azimuth looked up at his ship, a patchwork special. It wasn’t exactly top of the line, but there was no line, not anymore. For that matter, there was no top, not since the Earth blew apart. The ship was a two-seater, but he never had anyone in the second seat. It had a big cargo bay for whatever salvage Timo could find. He had only actually filled it once.
“More airtight than last time?” Timo had to ask.
From the outside, it looked like an old warehouse with the nose of a small jet sticking out of the front. Actually, that wasn’t far from the truth. Weist always built ships using spare parts, and he continued to fix it the same way.
“Where are you headed?” Weist asked.
“I thought I’d swing by Jupiter,” Timo said. “It’s been a while since I’ve been out that far and I could use time away.”
“A long trip,” Weist agreed. “Come’ere, let me show you something.”
Weist led him up a catwalk, pulling himself hand over hand, until they were near the nose of his ship. There was a chalked-in square a couple of yards above the air lock.
“What’s that for?” Timo asked.
“Emergency exit,” Weist said. “It opens to the air duct. If you need to, you could climb out through there and follow the zip line into the airlock. Without a suit it would hurt, but it’s a short haul and you might come out alive.”
“You think I need it?”
“You know how people are,” Weist said.
“Yeah,” Timo had to agree. “I’ll tell you what; if I get lucky this time out and find something worth anything, I’ll have you put that in. I can’t spend what I don’t have.”
“Okay,” Weist said. “I have the parts. I’ll set them aside and see if you want them when you get back.”
“Fair enough,” Timo said.
He gave Weist most of his money, and was on his way.
Timo checked his heading again. It was off. Even if the instruments didn’t show it, Jupiter was a small sphere up ahead, and he kept watching it as it slowly slid to the right.
He pulled out an old tennis ball, something he had salvaged a year or two ago, and placed it carefully between his face and the control panel. It drifted forward, down and to the left.
There was definitely something out there, something large — or heavy.
It had taken him a month to skate through the asteroid belt. There was lots of gravity pulling from every which direction, and hardly any salvage at all. It made him uneasy to compensate for small sources of gravity. The math made his head hurt, and he could never get the numbers to turn out right.
Computers were in high demand, but they were hard to find intact. Jeenie had found a computer once, actually five, along with a dozen or so cell phones still in their boxes. She’d stumbled on the remaining corner of a computer store. The eggheads wanted to make her a national hero.
Even being her friend hadn’t bought him a chance to buy one. It was business. He understood.
This gravity felt like it was coming from a single direction. He wasn’t close enough to be running across one of Jupiter’s moons, and he’d made sure he wasn’t going to cross the Trojans.
Timo should have adjusted his course and kept going, but he had tried so hard to avoid everything. Something deep in the back of his mind wondered what this was.
Besides, he decided, he could use whatever it was for a free gravity assist. If he could get the math to come out right — or close to right — he could get some extra momentum before he got to Jupiter. It might even take a couple of hours off the trip.
Timo turned into the gravity. Half with an old calculator he’d bought, and half with guesswork, he put himself in a curve to get close enough to the gravity center to swing him around.
At first there wasn’t anything to see. For a brief moment, Timo worried that he might have found the final resting place of the heavy object that had destroyed the Earth. It could have been slowed by the impact with the planet. It would be just his luck, to die in heavy gravity or be swung out of the whole system.