Thursday, May 17, 2012

Molly Strega Versus the Harmonic Oubliette - Flash Fiction


by Lawrence Kapture (some naughty language included)

Molly Strega thumbed the trigger button on her Polychro Pistol. The rainbow beam of solid light struck the Man in Black on the minuscule patch of his chest unarmored by a black suit jacket. The beam touched every chakra in his numic-field at once. With a reluctantly ecstatic moan, he slumped to his knees, then face down on his chest, drowning in the bliss that comes from having a high energy field unify your chakras.
She stepped up and kicked him hard in the chest, rolling him over. She heard ribs crack. She was a small woman, but her bush was shaved in the symbol of iron, evoking an alchemical resonance through her serpent chakra and lending her mass. "Where's my boyfriend, pig? You can't have gotten him to Area 51 already. Tell me where he is, and I'll leave you breathing."
The agent moaned and spasmed, an oily sheen of sweat breaking out around his smoked glass shades. Molly stepped up on his chest. She probably weighed as much as a pony right now. She heard his ribs creak, and breath wooshed out of him.
She pulled his shades off, and held the adamant crystal barrel of the pistol up to his blue, blue eye. "Tell me now, or I'll blow what's left of your sanity out through the back of your skull." The eyes were the window to the soul, and they let solid light rays chew up your numic-field like an antacid. Ecstasy, like oxygen, is necessary to human life, but in large quantities, either one can deep fry you. And sending someone to Nirvana  early wasn't a sin that would pollute her karma. Much.
"They're at the airport by now," the MIB said. "A glass zepplin will have them in Utah by morning. Then it's into the Harmonic Oubliette with the rest of the trash." There was a metric ton of malice embodied in the tiny grin that he allowed to curl his lip. He was taunting her. He wanted to die. Suicide by free radical. And she was the free-est, baby.
She wanted to oblige the bastard, but couldn't afford the time that it would take to clean that bad karma out of her own numic-field.
What to do with a spare Man in Black, if you couldn't make sausage? She looked around the parking garage. There was no dearth of places to hide a body, live or dead.
She took off her tesseract pack. "Not if I intercept them," she muttered to the man she stood on.
"Yeah," he laughed, a little drool escaping as he spasmed again." His kundalini wasn't doing anything for the Black Matriarchy any time soon.
She stepped off him. It would be a few minutes before he could move again. She patted him down, grabbing his wallet and pulling out his aether card and torc. She fried them both with a blast from her pistol. She tucked his Entro Pistol into her pack for disposal later.
Then she put on her own aether torc. She contacted her secondary boyfriend. "Bro, they've got Sissy. I need you to hack the net and open one of the autoperambulator trunks around me. Find the one that's been in this garage the least time. Then I need you to find me the flight path of a federal glass zepplin headed from WFC airport to Groom Lake."
"What good will that do you?" Bro asked. Over the aether-waves, Molly heard him crunching on pocky.
"I'm going to use the Icarus glider to intercept him."
"That's a lot of work for a newish tertiary. Can't we just recruit another one?"
There was a little jealousy between her long-time secondary and the new tertiary. But it wasn't that simple. She generally picked her boyfriends for their likability. Hazard of being a revolutionary. You had to enjoy your co-workers.
"Just get me the data."
She got out a set of cuffs, and cuffed the agent's hands behind his back. She brought the Icarus out of the tesseract pack. She slid the frame of aurichalcum wires and adamant glass feather panels over her arms and shoulders so that it hung like Indian fringe.
Then she took a straight razor and a little can of aloe shaving cream out of her pack. She squatted right in front of the agent, and flicked off the remains of her pubic hair, effectively dismissing the symbol of iron from her serpent chakra. She replaced the toiletries in her pack, and removed a homunculus skin patch with a symbol for aluminum. She pressed it against her chest, over the heart chakra. She waited for the homunculus skin to warm up and bind with hers. As she did, she felt the alchemical rune take hold. She felt light, but tough. Excellent rune for flight.
Behind her, she heard the latch of a trunk lid pop. And because she wanted the Black Matriarchy to know just how she was fist-fucking them, she said "Everything your Matrihoes can do with with their money and research banks, I can do with my ingenuity. They may own everybody else, but they don't own Molly's Polychromes." She dragged him over to the trunk and wrestled him in. It would have been easier with the mass of iron on her side.
She slammed the trunk lid on him.
She wasn't letting Sissy be eaten by the oubliette. He wasn't a bruiser, like Adam. He wasn't a hacker, like Bro. But he fed her tantric battery better than any of her other boyfriends ever had.
She flicked on the phlogistine battery of the Icarus. It started to glow in all the colors of the rainbow, as energy infused the glass feathers.
Then she headed for the stairs to the roof of the garage. She had a zepplin to catch.

(c) 2010

Notes: I am publishing this here because I am submitting this to a flash fiction contest on Chuck Wendig's page. It's just sitting on my hard drive, and is the wildest pulp style flash I've done. It should also appear in the forthcoming Kazoo Books Writer's Group collection.
Rock of Aeons will be free May 17th until May 19th. My first indie publication, published back in December of 2011 without the benefit of the KDP select free pricing, here is the blurbing:

When Ozzie follows Hank into a junkyard, she doesn't expect to find him being held up by angels. Nor does she expect him to turn into a dog to escape from them. Ozma Jones (Ozzie to her friends) is plunged into the middle of the war between shape shifting Djinn and angels who have infiltrated the world's governments. The Djinn want to use her as a mule to carry the missing piece of Solomon's ring. The angels just want her out of the way, and will stop at nothing to nullify her. If the missing piece of the ring is replaced, it will stop the angels from interfering in human affairs, and keep Ozzie and her family from being punished for what Ozzie knows. But to do so, she has to avoid falling for Hank, and maybe even summon a more ancient threat than either angels or Djinn.

This one is shorter but racier than Vignetta: Contains violence and sexual content. 200 pp novel.There is also a print edition

I have received a lot of kind words from the free promotions, which, if you're not in it for the money, is pretty much the best thing you can get.

Wednesday, May 02, 2012

Vignetta in the Red House goes live today!

May 2nd! I’m releasing Vignetta in the Red House today. This is a novel about a girl who likes to make homuculi and her tyrannical grandmother.

Here’s the cover copy:

When Vinni was five, her mother was institutionalized for madness. Vinni’s family, the women of the Red House, have built their wealth and standing by using alchemy to make homunculi: Artificial creatures that act as companions and helpmates. Vinni's mother made the best.

Since her mother was sent away, Vinni has longed to make homunculi as brilliant as her mother's. Though none of her Aunts will undertake to teach Vinni anything serious of the craft until she's had her first blood, Vinni is learning in secret, hampered by the strict rules of her Grandmother, who leads the Red House.

Vinni's quest to make a homunculus early puts her on a collision course with Grandmother's plans for the Red House, which are in turn putting the Red House on a collision course with the rest of Sangrila, the most powerful city state on the Red Coast.

When Vinni discovers that her Grandmother’s plotting is responsible for her mother's insanity, she flees to the streets of the city. On the streets, hunted by the other forces of Sangrila, Vinni collects a group of her sorceress cousins and street urchins to become the opposition to her Grandmother's monstrous plans. Can they save the only home Vinni has ever known?

432 pp, some scary situations for children.

It will sell as an ebook for $4.99, BUT for the first three days, May 2nd - 4th, it will be FREE!

I am only releasing this on Amazon, for the Kindle. However, you can read Kindle titles on other devices: laptops, blackberries, smart phones, android tablets, iPhones, or iPads, with Kindle reader Aps. So go over and download a copy to save for when you have a tablet: it will be in your Amazon account forever. Also, if you are part of the Amazon Prime program, you can borrow it for free.

It will sell in dead tree format as well, for $12.99.

Oh, and also: I have a Facebook author page, so if you don’t already think I’m enough of a troll, go on over there and like me. Please? Really, really like me? :) http://www.facebook.com/LawrenceKapture

And here are my Acknowledgements: This is my book, and self published or not, I need to thank a bunch of people for its being here. I want to thank Ruby Kapture, always my first reader. I want to thank Cathy Srygly, who took the time to read the full manuscript and offer excellent suggestions. I want to thank Kat Slater, another reader who schooled me on writing about young ladies. Lastly, I want to thank Excelsior!, the crit group who critted sections of Red House: especially Merrie Haskell, Sarah Zettel, and Christine Pellar-Kosbar (who should write more). The cover is by Kevin Amiel Bagabaldo Ismael (Vin.Ismael), contracted through 99designs.com.