Reay Jespersen

As night fell, he stood on the edge of the building, watching. Some of the local capes had already paid him a visit, telling him to toe the proverbial company line with either veiled or blunt threats; some even questioning which side of the law he stood on. Which should have been obvious: he only pursued those wrongly escaping the loose-knit net of the law. Criminals, rapists and killers walked free routinely. Their victims deserved justice, and if the law failed to deliver it, he was certainly going to.

Time to get to work.
He leaped from the building.

There was a shy knock on the door. Judy answered it, finding Satan standing on the doorstep.
“Morning, Stan,” she said cheerfully, always having been more comfortable with the truncation.
“Morning, Judy,” Satan said warmly. “Listen, my, uh… lawnmower’s acting up again, and I’m sure you’ve noticed my front lawn…” He smiled sheepishly as she nodded. The neighbourhood committee would have a fit.
“Ours is in the garage,” she said. “Help yourself.” He thanked her and left.
She closed the door, shaking her head. Always loaning to him. Such was life in street number 668, the neighbour of the Beast.

Jed stood on the dropfloor in rank with the other soldiers, all standing in armoured exoatmospheric suits. The computerized voice in their helmets let them know it was fifteen seconds to drop. Those who didn’t already have their visors down and locked did so, and got into drop formation.

Jed and the others would drop through the hatch doors and fall from ultra-low orbit to strike the target far below with extreme prejudice.

Five seconds.

Jed always hated this part. It wasn’t the flight or hitting the ground, but the initial, lurching drop that always got him.

He fell.

He balled up the note paper and threw it into the round waste bin. That wasn’t right. What was he trying to say? Something about cycles… repetition. The former professor left his desk and began a casual pace, letting his mind wander, which always cleared it.
He sauntered past his bed, and past the doctors studying him through the round portal-like window in his padded door.
Ah-ha! He ran to the note pad and wrote down his thoughts.
He studied them.

He balled up the note paper and threw it into the round waste bin. That wasn’t right…

“I had noticed that not all cockroaches die, even when sprayed with the most toxic materials. This led to the discovery that some cockroaches which are dead come back to life. Not just a fact to creep out entomophobics or the squeamish, but a significant medical discovery.
These ‘zombie cockroaches’ are relatively stupid, and ignore other food in favour of eating living flesh, preferably cannibalizing each other.
Years later, I have successfully identified and duplicated the virus behind this biological anomaly. I’ve stored it in a secure place in my lab, where I’m certain nothing bad can happen with it…”

There are things that demand certain replies. Which isn’t to say that other responses are inherently wrong so much as they somehow… don’t suffice. Carson pored over his workbench, examining each tool closely; each one considered carefully. Dozens of possibilities.
There was a murmur behind him. Carson glared over his shoulder at the naked, gagged man strapped to the table; the man who had killed Carson’s only child and had gotten off on a legal technicality.
Carson turned back to his workbench, and his eyes fell immediately onto the right implement, glinting coldly.
There are things that demand certain replies.

Johann was the go-to man for anything that had to be transported. He took on the neutral stance of his motherland in his work, keeping him in business and, indeed, alive.
He had seen and shipped many things in his day: a shot man with one briefcase handcuffed to himself and another full of money offered for immediate transportation, crates with faded swastikas on them, and a book that faintly glowed.
He’d seen and shipped many things, but when the men in black wheeled aboard a cryogenic chamber with a frozen alien inside, he knew he’d never see everything.

Nothing he had ever seen or heard of could have prepared him for this. Waking up this morning, Jamie found he was alone. Not only his wife not lying beside him, nor their daughter gone, but as horrifying as those discoveries were, realizing it went so much further. His apartment building and the streets were empty, the highway strewn with crashed, empty cars. And it went beyond just the city. Friends in other countries weren’t answering their phones. It seemed there was no one else anywhere.
Six billion people gone in the blink of an eye.
Only one left behind.

Asger trudged forward, now more from habit than strength or willpower. His wrapped layers of furs couldn’t withstand the onslaught of the blizzard, and the ever-deepening snow was proving to be more than his match, champion warrior or no.
He stumbled and fell again, ice-crusted scabbard slashing at his booted leg, the pain crippling.
He pushed himself upright and moved on until he fell again. And again. Until he could finally push himself upright no more. Yet he was strangely comforted by that. Finally, a chance to rest and catch his breath. Perhaps sleep. Just briefly.
Just briefly…

Years back, I heard about a writing format that was an entire story contained within 100 words or less. The format began, the bit of research I did told me, when writer Neil Gaiman (whose work I’m enjoying more and more - check out his site, he has a link to a free version of his novel American Gods) had written a story on a Christmas card, which happened to be in the range of 100 words in length.

Always interested in trying out a new writing format (which was, along with the encouragement of Alex, what got me into writing screenplays), I started to play around with the sub-100 word style, which I found quite interesting. It tended to require overshooting the needed word total and then cutting back some here and using a different word to encapsulate a phrase there. I also found that while the pieces I was writing could technically be called stories, they more often tended to be pieces of stories, which in order to have their full impact, required the reader to extrapolate the before and after of the events within the story. All in all, a very interesting discipline.

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