Gamma Day - excerpt

So I’ve got published again.

This time I am in John Coon’s RIPPLES IN SPACE anthology.

It was not easy. He’s narrowed down well over 100 submissions into this anthology of 14 Sci-Fi stories.

Each is brand new. Each written for this book.

This success bodes well for a big audition I have coming up.

I am on a winning streak.

My story is called Gamma Day, and is about two sisters exploring a post-post-post-apocalyptic-apocalyptic-apocalyptic London.

You know how apocalypses are. You wait ages for one and then three turn up at once.

No more delay, here’s the excerpt.

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GAMMA DAY

Amber’s thumbs traced cartoon blackberries on the side of the faded jar. She moved to unscrew the lid, hesitated, and put the jar back on the dusty shelf. A single ancient light bulb swung idly in the cold exhalations of the underworld, casting a yellow hue over everything.

“How long do we have to wait?” she asked.

“Until we nearly starve,” Onyx said. Her sister had been named after an unusual jar in the larger storage halls, one containing an old plastic toy. The toy, Onyx, was a Roborider, a hybrid of motorcycle and robot, not unlike the machines now idly roaming the scorched earth above, their hive mind fried by Gamma Day. Amber smiled weakly at her sister, remembering seeing her sweep the surface, riding one of the braindead Searchers like a motorcycle.

“Talk about nominative determinism,” she mumbled now, echoing what she said at the time, watching her sister unload an electron rifle toward one of the invaders.

“What?” Onyx asked, snapping Amber back into the present.

“Nothing. Just miss the surface. You never taught me how to ride the Searchers.”

“In my defense, it started raining acid.”

“There’s always an excuse,” Amber joked.

“Always.”

They left the pantry, exited through an old maintenance door, and hopped down onto the train tracks. Onyx placed their loot gently in the cart. Handprints of biolights shone bluely against the subway walls, replacing long-ago crumbled posters. Pools and ponds of biolights had condensed in between tracks and in ancient toilets and bathroom sinks, each bringing with them the flora and fauna of the new world. The space moss was a favourite for Amber, an ochre-yellow lichen that had become ubiquitous in the living underworld. , its alien spores carried on those rhythmic exhalations that provided clean air to the humans and their pets.

All things considered; the end of the world wasn’t that bad.

Onyx climbed up onto the opposite platform, and together they braved a loftier portion of the underground. They activated their torches and scaled the ancient tubes of the place, unlocked what was once a ticket booth, now a fortified defense structure, and passed through to the unmanaged world. Onyx hit the button operating the lights in this section.

“How close are we?” Amber asked.

“To the surface?”

“Yeah.”

“A few stairways.”

“Can they hear us?”

“If they’re at the entrances, definitely.”

“We should go back.”

“It was your idea, Amber,” Onyx said.

She had left her torch on, just in case the lights failed.

“I won’t be long.”

Amber walked away, looking at the ruins of an old convenience store between the lower levels and the surface.

“What are you doing?”

“I’ve ran out of books to read,” Amber lied.

Her sister illuminated her way with the torch despite the lights, electron rifle by her side. The back of the little store was just dark enough for something small and slim to hide in there. Some surviving invaders could fit there in the shadows, waiting to pounce.

“Anyone in there?” Onyx asked.

“Shopkeeper.”

“Dead?”

“I should hope so, his head is missing,” Amber announced.

She knelt behind a bookshelf, causing Onyx no small anxiety, and started rustling around with her own torch, knocking over ancient books with her pistol, pawing her way around the shelves.

“Anything I might like?” Onyx asked.

“Cookery book.”

“All the world’s food is spoiled.”

Amber laughed.

“A climate change magazine.”

“Too late for that.”..

“Self-help,” Amber said, sliding one of twenty copies out across the floor. Onyx looked down at it, at the smiling pre -apocalyptic woman on the pale green cover.

“Too late for that too,” she said, glancing up again. “Any fiction?”

“Escapism?”

“Yeah. Can’t get enough.”

Amber emerged from behind the shelves.

“There’s this Rod Grasper story.”

“Trash.”

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You can also apply to be an ARC reader by emailing samakpress@gmail.com

Or, if you’re a paid subscriber here at RealPhillipCarter, you can preview a bit more of my story below.