Forgotten Tomorrows

The first volume of short stories by the author of “Residuum” and “Biome”. From thrillers to dark fantasy, from a new creation myth to the disturbing instructions on how to use your new anti-abuse device â€" these are stories designed to amuse, horrify and anger you.



82,000 words. Contains twelve stories:

Another Golden Age

Deduction

Crossing The River

Red Dwarfs Are Aborted Star Children

The Deep Forest

Recharge Station

Local Event

The Amazing Plant

Graphic Redesign

The Image In The Cave

banged up in the black tower

Borova Nightfall



EXCERPT: THE OPENING OF “LOCAL EVENT”



Nina Sullivan, the camp warden, found them shortly after the seven o’clock reveille. There was no response to her summons, so she kicked open the door of the nearest cabin and bellowed in. Sullivan, it seems, believed in tough love, even where the daughters of rich New York stockbrokers were concerned.

Up here in the Adirondacks, with the dawn sun scarcely risen, there was frost on the ground. The nine cabins were unheatedâ€"unlike, incidentally, the staff block just down the hill. Nevertheless, if Sullivan’s report is to be believed, the bodies were still warm.

Our coroner Prentice later confirmed that the girls had all died within half an hour prior to that seven o’clock alarm. All 51 of them.



Naturally, Sullivan was our prime suspect, if only because she was first to have contact with the victims.

Trevino and I discussed it as our squad car labored up the switchback logging track that was the only access to the camp. We’d left the Thruway just after nine, and we’d taken more than an hour to get this high.

The whole way, Trevino played old Grateful Dead songs on the mp3 box he always lugged on these out-of-town trips. I understood why. I didn’t like the stuff myself, even the back porch Americana style, but it calmed the nerves about as much as the whiskey I’d necked in the office john. In our job, like every other job the world over, you excused anything that made it possible to function in your role. Trevino’s vice was marijuana, but if he smoked on duty it was never in my presence, and I never bothered to ask.

We saw nothing the whole journey except, shortly before the turning to the boy’s camp across the valley, a group of paramedics trying to heave their wagon back on the road. They’d overshot the bend. All we knew at this point was that there’d been some kind of massacre on site, and that we shouldn’t bother stopping to help.

Trevino had run off photos of all the staff from the camp website. He showed me Sullivan’s. She was stocky as a bear. There wasn’t a trace of a maternal softball to her delivery. This was a woman who’d grown hard as nails over twenty years boot-camping eighth graders.

“Enough,” he wondered morosely, “to have gone nuclear on the kids?”

We interviewed her the moment we got on site. But the woman we found in her office wasn’t Nina Sullivan. This was a trembling wreck of a college girl from Maryland who still couldn’t stop heaving even though she’d long since emptied her stomach and, by her pallor, most of her blood.

I’d stashed the rest of the whiskey in the car, but she didn’t need it. She had a bottle of her own, what was left of it, cradled to her breast.

“I can’tâ€"” she kept mumbling. “Can’t tell themâ€"”

No, but somebody would have to, and it wasn’t going to be me.