Robbery

(Flash fiction challenge)
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Frank sat in the car in a parking lot that was on the opposite side of the street and a hundred feet or so down the street from the target. The car was a nondescript silver Chevy sedan. Frank would have preferred a darker colored car, but even he had to admit that with every third car on the street being painted silver, the reasoning behind choosing this car was sound.

“Why we hitting this place?” The question came from Evan, the wheelman.

Blood On the Snow, Chapter 5

Lena thought that, snow be damned, it would have been nice to have gassed up her Cessna after the flight to Grover City. If there was one thing that she had learned from flying, though, it was that regrets fixed nothing. She went out to the airport and pulled the Cessna from its hangar. She borrowed her hangar neighbor’s tow tractor to tow the Cessna to the gas pumps. She filled the tanks, towed it back, pulled it into the T-hangar, plugged in the pre-heater and set the timer, then went home.

She had e-mailed the airport operator in Jonesboro to reserve a rental car. Not too many small airports did it that way, but she had been there before and knew that the airport operator was trying to drag his operation into the 1990s. That wasn’t her major concern, though. The weather was.

Dusting

Crack.

Katie woke up when she heard that sound. She knew, without leaving her bedroom, what it was. Someone had forced open the sliding glass door to her balcony.

Her apartment was on the fifth floor. The balcony was not connected to any others. She wasn't wealthy, she could make ends meet is all. Her television was a twelve-year old tube model. The furniture came from discount places that sold overstocks and end-of-run clearance stuff. There was nothing in her apartment worth the effort to climb up four stories of the exterior of a building faced with rain-slicked smooth concrete.

This Ain't No Disco

Another flash fiction challenge. For this one, a word generator coughed up five random words, which had to be incorporated into the story.
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My cell phone buzzed with a text from one of the spotters: “TG N ANDR-53 E-S SOLO”.    Pretty simple: Our target was heading north on Anderson Avenue, at 53rd Street.  Target was on the east side and alone.

The sun had set ten minutes ago.  It was still fairly light, but dusk would soon be here.  The target never came out before sundown and she was back in her apartment before sunrise.

She had to be, she was a vampire.  She worked at night.  So did we.  I sang softly: “Heard of a van, loaded with weapons, packed up and ready to go.”  My spotter looked at me askance.  Oh, well, back to work.

W00T!!

I'm not a writer. Oh, I've written stuff, mostly for my own amusement. Wrote a mystery novel, once. I even had an agent for that one, but no dice, chum. So awhile back, I just threw it up on Amazon Kindle's list just for shits and grins.

I'm horrible at selling myself. It just doesn't feel right to me. I can go argue a client's position and I'm pretty good at that. But when it comes to bragging on myself, I suck. Not like "Dirt Devil" suck, or even "Dyson" suck, but in "open up the air lock on Galactica" suck. During job interviews, when I'm asked "why should I hire you", I have to really restrain myself from shrugging and saying "you could do worse."

Did I tell you that I suck at selling myself?

So anyway, I was doing my bank statement when I saw that Amazon sent me just a skosh over ten bucks. Royalty payments. For that book. Which works out to a wage of, what, two cents an hour for writing it? (300 years ago, that'd be good money, I bet.)

But still, I'm a little bit tickled about it.

Zombie

A flash fiction challenge, based on the name of a cocktail.
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Sarah broke down her favorite rifle and began cleaning it.  It was a 5.45mm with a built-in suppressor. The bullets had steel penetrators inside.

She didn’t know what started the Zombie Apocalypse four months ago.  It didn’t matter.  What she did know was that the legends were right, the only way to stop those fuckers was to bust open the braincase.  The penetrators worked.  She also knew that the zombies came to the sound of guns.  If you didn’t want to fight a horde, you kept it quiet.  Zombies made a sound that was not a scream, not a moan, but if one made it, the others came.

Blood On the Snow, Chapter 4

The sun had gone down by the time Lena touched down at Petersburg Field.  She was hungry, a little bit tired and it was getting cold, too cold and too late to be mucking around at the self-service fuel pumps.  She put the Cessna back into the hangar and went home.  There was some hot chocolate mix at home calling her name.  That would go nice with a bit of vodka.

The next morning was spent writing up her notes and observations from the day before.  she used Acme Mapper to determine the distance from where Jasper had been shot to the tree line of the next set of hills.  It was 1,200 yards.  Hell of a shot from a bench rest, let alone in the field.  

She noted the name of the pathologist who had done the autopsy. Lena’s law school had offered a course to acquaint lawyers in the reality of autopsies and scientific protocols.  She had taken the course, it had been taught by the same medical examiner who did Jasper’s autopsy.  So Lena called the doc, who remembered Lena and who was also free for a late lunch, say two-ish.  Lena said that was fine.

Import-Export

(Flash-fiction challenge)

Our ship winked out into normal space.  I didn’t barf this time around.  Sometimes I do.  My partner wasn’t so lucky.

I raised Port Control at Garmain Central.  They had no record of a flight plan for us and would have scrambled what passes for their defensive systems if I hadn’t sent them the verification codes.  The alarms were probably going out everywhere, not that it would do any good.  The techs on the Intel Deck had tapped into their comm grids well before they knew we were there.  Port Control said that it would be two hours before they were ready to receive us and they added some choice words about showing up in the middle of the night, local time.

I didn’t acknowledge any of that.  What I did do was tell the duty pilot to start down right the fuck now and to put the defensive systems on quick-react.

Blood on the Snow, Chapter 3

    Lena told the boys that it was all right to go there, but they had to be back in a couple of hours.  Jason and Kyle went to put their snowmobile suits on and get the machines ready. 

    She then went into the kitchen and asked if she could take the reports with her for copying.  Mrs. Johnson smiled.  “I thought you might want a set.,” she said as she opened up a cupboard and pulled out a large manila envelope and handed it to Lena.  “You can just leave the other copies on the table.”

    Lena thanked her.  She gathered up her stuff, went to the mudroom and put on her outer clothes. The boys were pushing the snowmobiles out of a barn as she walked to her airplane.  She put her stuff back into the airplane, but she kept her camera.  After a few seconds thought, she took the GPS from the docking station in the panel.  Both the camera and the GPS went into inner pockets to keep them warm, As she closed the door, she heard one, then the second snowmobile start.

The Project

(Another flash fiction challenge from Chuck Wendig)

The Project

    The hotel was an old brick building, nine stories tall.  It looked like something that could have been built in Stalingrad in the 1930s. It took up a quarter of a block of prime real estate on Lakeside Avenue.  The last guest had checked out during the Kucinich Administration.   To my knowledge, nobody went near the hotel building.  The building was untouched by graffiti artists and taggers. Not even a window had been broken.