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EP226: Pirate Solutions

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by Katherine Sparrow.
Narrated by Sarah Tolbert, Kate Baker, Nate Periat, and Steve Eley
The story first appeared in Fast Ships, Black Sails edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.
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All stories by Katherine Sparrow
All stories read by Sarah Tolbert, Kate Baker, Nate Periat, and Steve Eley.

You could feel their heat. Not a metaphor, I don’t mean that, I mean literally the room grew warmer when they were in it. They were both so powerful. Whenever Anne and Jack (they weren’t named that then, but that’s who they were) strolled into the room you got contact highs from their lust. People who would never make out would find excuses to go to the bathroom together and come back with monster hickies. Everyone always wanted to sit near them because of their heat, and because they always said the thing you wish you’d said but only thought to say a billion blinks later.

When I first joined the Freebooter tech collective Anne and Jack were happy to have another girl in the group, but otherwise they ignored me. I could stare and stare at them all day long, hiding behind my black-rimmed glasses. But then one day Anne looked at me, and then Jack looked too, and we all just sort of fell toward each other. Like gravity. Like magic. Like there was a God.

Rated ARRRRR.

Nov 26, 2009 | 0 comments View Post
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EP225: A Hard Rain at the Fortean Café

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by Lavie Tidhar
narrated by Sarah Tolbert

This story originally appeared in Aeon #14.

The diner stood off the highway outside a small town optimistically called Hope. Hope was being stuck in the middle of the Northwest and wishing you were someplace, anyplace else. And Hope was also the name on the tag pinned to the dead woman in waitress uniforms that was currently lying against the wall inside the _Barbie-Q Roadhouse_. I had to stop myself from worrying at the connection: looking for patterns when sometimes there are none at all.

I wasn’t worried about Hope (the waitress, not the town). I didn’t get called down here for a murder: shit, murder is an honest-to-God American pastime. Just look at the statistics. No, I got called in because of the Marilyn.

The Marilyn was also dead. All in all, there were five dead people in the Barbie-Q: two waitresses; a balding man who – from his bag full of cheaply-printed catalogues – was some sort of a general salesman; the diner’s manageress; and Marilyn. They had been shot by a machine gun, probably an Uzi. Marilyn’s head left a red smear against the glass of the booth she sat in. She was there alone.

What the hell was a Marilyn doing out here?

Rated R for violence and language.

Nov 19, 2009 | 0 comments View Post
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EP224: The Ghost in the Death Trap

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By Marjorie James
Read by Stephen Eley.
All stories by Marjorie James.
All stories read by Stephen Eley.

Editor’s note:  this is a sequel to EP007.  Listen to it here.

Flies buzzed around the edges of the huge stone block, gathering at the rivulets of blood that ran down to the floor. A bit of what looked like it might be intestine hung off one corner, drawing special attention. It was a testament to the force of the collision that fragments of bone and tissue were scattered all the way down the passage, some even wedged in the carvings in the stone walls. Two men surveyed the scene with dismay.

“See? And this just keeps happening. It’s getting so we can’t get anything done around here,” said the taller of the two, a grey-haired man with red eyes and a patchy beard.

The other man, younger but not precisely young, hauled himself up on top of the block and examined the mechanism. “This bar’s been sliced right through.” He looked back down at his client. “You say this was a poltergeist?”

Rated PG for some violence and language.

Nov 12, 2009 | 0 comments View Post
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EP223: The Uncanny Valley

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by Nick Mamatas
read by Kathryn Baker

The trouble with knowing everything there is to know, Stephanie Dowling decided instantly, because that’s how clever she was, was that when there was something unknown out there, she had nobody to consult.

And there was something unknown out there, nibbling away at the edge of the economy, and screwing with the Cottrell-Cockshot tatonnements sufficiently that there’d be problems. Shortages of essentials: power cells and answer boxes. Ridiculous surpluses of nonsense like chrome and diamonds. She could tell because the bride was coughing between her lines and the donkey she rode on suddenly looked ill. It would be just like … wossname … that old thing. Capitalism. Till she fixed it anyway.

Wossname?

Rated R.

Nov 05, 2009 | 0 comments View Post
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EP222: Infestation

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by Garth Nix
read by Geoff Michelli

They were the usual motley collection of freelance vampire hunters. Two men, wearing combinations of jungle camouflage and leather. Two women, one almost indistinguishable from the men though with a little more style in her leather armour accessories, and the other looking like she was about to assault the south face of a serious mountain. Only her mouth was visible, a small oval of flesh not covered by balaclava, mirror shades, climbing helmet and hood.

They had the usual weapons: four or five short wooden stakes in belt loops; snap-holstered handguns of various calibers, all doubtless chambered with Wood-N-Death® low-velocity timber-tipped rounds; big silver-edged bowie or other hunting knife, worn on the hip or strapped to a boot; and crystal vials of
holy water hung like small grenades on pocket loops.

Protection, likewise, tick the usual boxes. Leather neck and wrist guards; leather and woven-wire reinforced chaps and shoulder pauldrons over the camo; leather gloves with metal knuckle plates; Army or climbing helmets.

Recently appeared in By Blood We Live.

Rated R for violence and very different vampires.

Oct 29, 2009 | 0 comments View Post
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EP221: Little Ambushes

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By Joanne Merriam.
Read by Rachel Swirsky.
All stories by Joanne Merriam
All stories read by Rachel Swirsky

Practically the first thing she did when she took in the alien was to give him a new name. He looked at her outstretched hand long enough to annoy her, and then grasped it with his four opposable fingers and hung on limply until she wrenched her hand out of his moist and over-jointed grip.

She said, “I’m Sarah,” and he said his name, or what she assumed was his name, in return, rolling the syllables around in his mouth like so many rough pebbles. His name was too long, something like Shperidth with extra grunting noises in the middle, like a car backfiring very far away. She tried to repeat it and couldn’t, while he stood on her doorstep sweating and folding his fingers around each other. She frowned at him.

“I can’t say that,” she said.

Rated PG-13 for some adult situations and coarse language.

Oct 22, 2009 | 0 comments View Post
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EP220: Come All Ye Faithful

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by Robert J. Sawyer

Read by Mike Boris

“Damned social engineers,” said Boothby, frowning his freckled face. He looked at me, as if expecting an objection to the profanity, and seemed disappointed that I didn’t rise to the bait.

“As you said earlier,” I replied calmly, “it doesn’t make any practical difference.”

He tried to get me again: “Damn straight. Whether Jody and I just live together or are legally married shouldn’t matter one whit to anyone but us.”

I wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of telling him it mattered to God; I just let him go on. “Anyway,” he said, spreading hands that were also freckled, “since we have to be married before the Company will give us a license to have a baby, Jody’s decided she wants the whole shebang: the cake, the fancy reception, the big service.”

Rated PG.

Oct 15, 2009 | 0 comments View Post
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EP219: Sleepy Joe

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by Marc Laidlaw
narrated by Ben Phillips

originally appeared in The Infinite Matrix

The plan must have come to Rog fully formed that first morning, as he stepped off the elevator into the lobby of Szilliken Sharpenwright and saw the old soldier newly stationed there in his omnichair between the potted silk ferns and the coffee tables.

“Oh. My. God. I am in love.”

Megan, her arms loaded with Rog-House props and paraphernalia she hadn’t had time to ditch yet, said, “You say that an awful lot for someone who styles himself completely asexual. Not to mention atheistic.”

Rated R for adult situations, a smattering of violence, and overly friendly chairs.

Oct 08, 2009 | 0 comments View Post
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EP218: Ode To Katan Amano

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by Caitlin R. Kiernan
narrated by Kim the Comic Book Goddess

No one hears when I ease the heavy steel door shut behind me. All the ears in the darkened workshop, all those hundreds and hundreds of ears, but still no one hears a thing. And I stand there for a while, as unmoving as they, not exactly frightened and not exactly uncertain if I should see this through — I think I stand there in reverence. I be-lieve that’s the word that people use for what I feel in that moment, standing there alone, alone with that assembled crowd.

Rated X for violence and strong sexual situations.  As Steve says in the intro, this one isn’t for the kids.

Oct 01, 2009 | 0 comments View Post
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EP217: The Kindness of Strangers

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by Nancy Kress.
narrated by Kate Baker.
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All stories by Nancy Kress
All stories read by Kate Baker.

When morning finally dawns, Rochester isn’t there anymore.

Jenny stands beside Eric, gazing south from the rising ground that yesterday was a fallow field. Maybe the whole city hasn’t vanished. Certainly the tall buildings are gone, Xerox Square and Lincoln Tower and the few others that just last night poked above the horizon, touched by the red fire of the setting September sun. But, unlike Denver or Tokyo or Seattle, Rochester, New York sits – sat – on flat ground and there’s no point from which the whole city could be seen at once. And it was such a small city.

“Maybe they only took downtown,” Jenny says to Eric, “and Penfield is still there or Gates or Brighton…”

Rated R for sexual situations and alien-caused genocide.

Sep 24, 2009 | 0 comments View Post
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