Unsettling Things & Other Stories Read online

  I boldly shake hands with the father, an unfamiliar man sitting at the head of the table.

  “Welcome,” the man says. “Did you just arrive?”

  “Yes,” I say. “This is Bristol, isn’t it?” I ask, starting to wonder about this odd reality.

  The man smiles knowingly. “I can tell you haven’t been to orientation yet.”

  “Orientation?”

  #

  The bus pulls up to the final destination and comes to a stop, its brakes moaning under the strain of another day’s deliveries.

  The driver pulls a lever, evacuating the bus of the poison gas, recycling it into the pump enclosure. He pulls another lever, and the floorboards part, dumping forty seven bodies into a freshly dug pit.

  END

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  BONUS MATERIAL:

  An excerpt from the science fiction novel

  Rufus Quince – Bounty Hunter

  Book One:

  Dreams of a Fool

  by

  Michael D. Britton

  PART ONE: WALKING ON THE MOON

  CHAPTER 1

  It wasn’t much, but it was mine.

  After twenty years of chasing down the roughest, toughest, ugliest scum in the solar system, I was ready to just kick back and relax in peace.

  And this was where I intended to do it: forty-seven hectares of terraform on the westernmost outskirts of the Tranquility Range – right near the edge of the biodome where there’s still a decent view of Earth.

  Mature woods chock full of pine and madrone, rolling fields of wildflowers, even a decent sized stream zig-zagging through the property, ending in a secluded little pond I planned on stocking with trout.

  I’d earned this retirement, and I was ready for it.

  For real this time.

  I can’t count the number of times I got sucked into doing “just one more job” for the Lunar Collective Government.

  My contact at the LCG, Dominicus Black, always managed to convince me to come back – to put off retirement – to track down one more piece of slime the LCG couldn’t manage to keep incarcerated.

  In fact, Black had called me three times on my way here today.

  I ignored all three calls.

  I was not going to let him, the LCG, or anyone else spoil this day – the day I finally set foot on my own quiet little corner of the solar system.

  The idea was to just hike around the property, getting a good feel for the place, find the ideal spot to build my home. The holovisuals at the Mercator Tract Vending Agency gave me a nice preview of the place, but there’s nothing like slipping on a pair of boots and getting the lay of the land – the views, the sounds, the smells.

  I took a deep breath and stepped out of my truck. The air was chilly, and I buttoned up my jacket. I took my earbud out and left it on the seat – I didn’t want to receive another call from Black. Even ignoring the call, it would disturb my perfect moment.

  I stretched my tired limbs and walked up to the plasteel entry gate and punched in my keycode, making a mental note that I wanted to replace this gate with something more rustic.

  I’d also replace this antiquated security system with a biometric scanner.

  Form and function.

  As I pushed the gate open to step in, I spotted a handwritten note on the ground, held in place by a gray baseball-sized rock.

  Rufus Quince – you may have paid for this land, but you will never possess it. Find another place to go and die. Or die here a lot sooner than you’d planned.

  It was unsigned.

  And I was unimpressed.

  I’d made a lot of enemies in my career as a bounty hunter – I’d been shot, threatened, even tortured by a few mean pieces of work. Crap like this was dime-a-dozen fare in my line of work. Always someone trying to get an angle, get my goat, or get even.

  I stepped inside the gate, and an explosion at my feet threw me into the air. I landed roughly on the hood of my truck, my back slamming into the sheet metal with a bone-crunching thud that knocked the wind out of me.

  A shower of dirt clods and pebbles rained down around me, bouncing off the truck.

  My head pounded and my ears rang as I sat up and brushed myself off.

  A lifter mine.

  Designed not to be lethal, but to toss its victim like a ragdoll and send a clear message: keep out.

  Keep out of my own home?

  I think not.

  Whoever these creeps were – they were messing with the wrong man.

  #

  I was born planetside – little town called Plain City, Utah – about the time everyone was rushing to get offworld.

  My folks were no different – before I was two years old they’d sold off the family’s land and hopped a shuttle to the old Cheeseball. (That’s what Dad always called Earth’s moon.) We settled in Buzzville, back when it was a lot smaller than it is now.

  Back then, we still had white powder streets and most of the structures were formed from old cargo freighters.

  A lot’s changed since those days.

  Buzzville went through the standard cycle: it boomed, it decayed, it was purchased by Big Name Money and renewed, and it boomed again.

  At its heart lies the “Old Town” – a few “historic buildings” nestled in a district populated mostly by criminals and scavengers. Around that is the former seat of government for Dome One, now the residence of some low-budget start-up businesses and a couple of private prison firms. Beyond that you’ve got the rows and rows of pack-dwellings.

  Then there’s the New Business District with its three-hundred story dome-scrapers, and then, in the radial arms that reach out into the wilds of the dome, you’ve got the more affluent homes with their views and their private ports.

  Twelve million people staring down at the Earth, living the cliché that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

  Dominicus Black had advised me to invest in property in Dome Two or Dome Three. Dome Two was sixty years old mostly undeveloped. Dome Three was thirty years old and mostly suburban, with a handful of big industries contrasted by some Natural Scenic Designated Areas. But neither dome had as good a view of Earth - and besides, I’d already staked my claim a long time ago.

  This is where I was going to spend my best years – a few hundred kilometers from where I’d spent my worst.

  Not that being a bounty hunter was that bad of a job.

  Although based in Buzzville, I got to see plenty of the System, from Asimoon - the giant space station in orbit of Venus – to all of the Outer Planets. A good chase could take me as far out as Neptune, or as deep in as Mercury’s Spa City.

  Whoever thought of putting a vacation spot right on the terminator of Mercury, between freezing cold and scorching hot – was a genius.

  I was half-tempted to spend my last days and the last of my wealth in that little tribute to decadence, but there were just too many people.

  Nope, for me, it was the wide open spaces and lack of any humans whatsoever that drew me to my pastoral piece of Dome One.

  And nobody was going to drive me from it.

  #

  I staggered back to the gate and picked up the handwritten note.

  My back ached.

  I was getting too old for this crap.

  I looked around in all directions, slowly surveying the sparsely wooded landscape. Usually, the kind of whacko who did this stuff would want to hang out somewhere close to observe their handiwork in action.

  I reached into my pocket and grabbed my sweeper, flipped it on and set it to search to the horizon in all directions.

  Nothing.

  If anyone was watching, they were doing so remotely.

  I decided against taking my stroll for now. Locked the gate, got back in the truck, and popped my earbud back in.

  “Autolink Black,” I said. After a few moments, the comm system connected us. Dominicus answered. “Yeah, Black, I need a
favor. No, I don’t want you to help me dig the foundations. I have a piece of vellym I need analyzed.”

  “What, you can’t answer my three calls, but when you need something from me, you -”

  “Yeah, I come running. Someone hit me with a lifter mine, right inside my own property. And they left a note.”

  “You should’ve listened to me. I told you, there’s a bunch of nice ground in Dome Two and Dome Three. Plenty of rugged property to settle down on for your golden years. But no, you had to -”

  “Thanks. I’ll be there in a couple hours.”

  I terminated the call and veered off the back road that led to my place and got back onto the main highway, setting the autodrive for Buzzville.

  I pulled out the note and read it a couple more times. It was short, but it still contained clues. Whoever wrote it knew that I had bought that land. They knew I planned to retire there. And they knew I’d be there to get the message today. They knew how to get past the security panel at the gate. And they also had some reason for wanting to run me off. On top of all that, they seemed pretty sure of themselves.

  Which meant they really wanted something on my land.

  But they didn’t know who they were dealing with, since a stupid note and a lifter mine were just enough to annoy me, not make me run away scared like some Shepherd City bureaucrat.

  Whatever they wanted had to be worth something, so I’d have to look into that.

  Somehow, I knew this was just the beginning of a bad week.

  #

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