Fiction River Presents: Racing the Clock: Fiction River Presents

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith

The latest volume of Fiction River Presents makes the heart race. From one woman’s desperate attempts to escape her kidnappers to another woman’s attempts to escape a doomed space station, this volume takes off at a pulse-pounding pace and refuses to let go until the very end. Including a short story from Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s bestselling Retrieval Artist sf thriller series, this volume proves why Adventures Fantastic says the Fiction River series “is one of the best and most exciting publications in the field today.”

Table of Contents

“The Chair by” JC Andrijeski

“Tower One” by Thomas K. Carpenter

“The Good Brother” by Brendan DuBois

“The Elevator in the Cornfield” by Scott William Carter

“The Red-Stained Wishing Tree” by Eric Stocklassa

“The Scent of Amber and Vanilla” by Dayle A. Dermatis

“Play the Man” by Dan C. Duval

“Eyes on My Cards” by Dean Wesley Smith

“H-Hour” by Steven Mohan, Jr.

“Sole Survivor” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Dec 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781386250722

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award. Publications from The Chicago Tribune to Booklist have included her Kris Nelscott mystery novels in their top-ten-best mystery novels of the year. The Nelscott books have received nominations for almost every award in the mystery field, including the best novel Edgar Award, and the Shamus Award. She writes goofy romance novels as award-winner Kristine Grayson, romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter, and futuristic sf as Kris DeLake.  She also edits. Beginning with work at the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse, followed by her award-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she took fifteen years off before returning to editing with the original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, and edits at least two anthologies in the series per year on her own. To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com and sign up for her newsletter. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, krisdelake.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.

Book preview

Fiction River Presents

Fiction River Presents

Racing the Clock

Edited by

Allyson Longueira

WMG Publishing

Contents

Introduction

Introduction to The Chair

The Chair

Introduction to Tower One

Tower One

Introduction to The Good Brother

The Good Brother

Introduction to The Elevator in the Cornfield

The Elevator in the Cornfield

Introduction to The Red-Stained Wishing Tree

The Red-Stained Wishing Tree

Introduction to The Scent of Amber and Vanilla

The Scent of Amber and Vanilla

Introduction to Play the Man

Play the Man

Introduction to Eyes on My Cards

Eyes on My Cards

Introduction to H-Hour

H-Hour

Introduction to Sole Survivor

Sole Survivor

About The Editor

Fiction River: Year Four

Fiction River Presents

Copyright Information

Introduction

The Suspense is Killing Me

Allyson Longueira

---

Thriller. The word alone evokes strong emotion: excitement, anticipation, suspense… And in the short form, thrillers can grab you from the start and leave you breathless.

Each of the stories I’ve chosen for this volume kept me at the edge of my seat wondering what would happen next. Starting with The Chair by JC Andrijeski.

The moment I started reading The Chair, I knew I was in trouble. It’s dangerous, you see, working with great fiction. I have to get that fiction out the door to you, the readers. And if I keep getting sucked into a story, well, let’s just say that my busy schedule doesn’t allow for such distractions.

But sometimes, I must accept the inevitable. Every time I come across certain stories, I have to read them. The Chair is such a story.

Now that I’ve built up the suspense, let’s talk about some of the other thrilling offerings contained within this fourth volume of Fiction River Presents.

As I assembled this volume, I realized that certain elements of suspense draw me more strongly than others. Loss is chief among the criteria. The possibility of losing one’s own life, or worse, the concept of losing someone you love.

This volume is deliberately bookended by stories about women fighting to escape with their lives. Both stories—The Chair and a pulse-pounding standalone from Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s bestselling Retrieval Artist Anniversary Day Saga—speak to that most basic instinct for survival. Even more so, they feature strong women determined to save themselves.

Many of the other stories center on the concept of family—specifically, family members in trouble and in need of rescue. But who really needs rescuing and how that rescue will play out often proves far from predictable, as you’ll soon find out.

The remaining stories involve countdowns, one literal, one figurative. But that’s all I can say without giving too much away.

So, let’s get going. The suspense is killing me.

—Allyson Longueira

Lincoln City, Oregon

June 13, 2016

Introduction to The Chair

JC Andrijeski writes new adult urban fantasy (Allie’s War), dystopian fiction (Alien Apocalypse), paranormal romance, and crime fiction. She has appeared in six volumes of Fiction River: Crime (Special Edition), Moonscapes, Fantasy Adrift, Past Crime, Pulse Pounders (where this story was originally published), and Valor. In addition to fiction, she writes nonfiction essays and articles and children's fiction.

As I mentioned in my introduction, The Chair grabbed me from the first words and wouldn’t let me go. Even the pacing of the opening section is breathless. It is fear realized.

As JC says of the conception for this story: I’ve had this image in my head for a while, of a woman alone in a room, bleeding to death, and no one to help her.

And that’s where we begin.

The Chair

JC Andrijeski

---

Devon fights...

She fights at first just to be there. Just to...

Keep her eyes open.

If she closes them...

Well, if she closes them for too long, she’ll die.

That should motivate you, Devon...

One of them doesn’t really open, though. Not anymore.

She can hear it.

A steady drip, drip, drip under the bolted-down chair where she sits.

She’s...tied. Tied up...

Ankles handcuffed to the front legs. Wrists handcuffed behind her, the chain wrapped through the metal back support of a heavy chair with no padding. She hears the sound, like a light, tapping hammer against her skull.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Each drop hits more liquid.

More liquid every minute.

...a growing pool. It lays below her, mostly under her seat where it drips down from her sliced thigh and the larger gash in her abdomen. It’s already soaked through her black pants. She doesn’t look at the pool...

She doesn’t look at it.

Her elbows touch behind her, trembling.

Well, shaking maybe.

Shock. She must be in shock. The body kind of shock. Some part of her wants to fight or flight...at least until she collapses in front of the sliding glass doors of an emergency room.

They left her here.

Bastards just left. Didn’t even bother to finish her off.

Devon’s eyes drift up, to a metal shop light hanging on a long, half-chewed wire from the ceiling. The ceiling lays high above. Cross-beams with rivets, a broken catwalk. Corrugated tin roof with holes and sheet-metal walls. Cement floor. The expanse and size of it are clear to her suddenly, even in the dark...even with only one eye. It’s a modern-day cavern. An empty, rusted-out ruin.

Warehouse.

Jeez...cliché, much?

The smile doesn’t linger on her swollen lips.

Where, though? Where is she? Should she try yelling? Is it worth it, spending time and energy trying to get the gag off to yell?

She doesn’t have a lot of time. Has to choose wisely.

The warehouse is empty...vast.

She hears doves somewhere. Pigeons? They fuss and coo and rustle feathers against metal and more feathers. The sound comes from up high, echoing down to her. She imagines she sees them, huddled next to framed, dirty, dust-covered windows. Shafts of broken sunlight slant down, illuminating dancing dust motes. None of that light touches her.

It’s quiet. Really damned quiet.

No cars. No voices. No footsteps to echo.

Would anyone hear her, if she yelled?

Probably not, she decides.

Why would they have left her here, alive? She tries to think about this, to make sense of it, then realizes the answer is simple. She doesn’t matter. She is nothing to them. It amused him to leave her alive, so he did.

She’s probably not in the city at all, not anymore.

Her mind finds and scuttles other possibilities. She wastes more time, trying to remember the ride out here, in case she gets a chance to report in. How many of them took her. What they looked like. She didn’t see shit on the drive here, or as they dragged her inside. She tripped a few times. On metal edges, steps, maybe. She didn’t see anything that could help her now.

She’d been terrified.

They whipped the bag off her face...

Nothing but the hanging light, those tools, rough hands...

Screaming.

It went on for a long time.

Questions. She won’t remember those, either.

...she tried to listen. Before that. She tried to...

She hadn’t been trained for this. No one told her this might happen.

First job. Big deal first job, working for the president.

Just a noob. A rook.

A red shirt.

She tries to make a report. To herself. A report on what happened...

...three men forced a black bag over my head at approximately 7:15 am. I’d just reached the edge of the perimeter on our secondary check, at the southeast corner of the UN building on East 42nd and 1st. I was overpowered, drugged, then blindfolded with a bag before being marched down the emergency stairwell I’d been patrolling. They took me outside the building through a lower access door, where I was almost immediately shoved in the back of an unmarked van...

Well. Her mind said unmarked van.

She remembers a sliding door, the grating sound before it slammed shut with a muffled bang and the snick of a lock. In the movies it’s always an unmarked van...but it could have been some suburban minivan, for all Devon knew.

Maybe with a My Kid is an Honor Roll Student bumper sticker...

Distraction. She doesn’t have time for distraction.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

She doesn’t know much about the human body, but she knows it needs blood.

Hers is running out. Too fast.

No one is coming.

They’d cut her...

Christ. How did this happen?

Wrong place, wrong time.

...but she can’t think about that anymore, either.

Her one good eye scours the space again.

Heavy wooden table. Dirty, covered in tools.

Devon doesn’t want to look at those tools, given that most are covered in her blood. She makes herself stare at them anyway. Some are sharp, sure...most are sharp, rusted, like a horror movie or something from the Tower of London. A few blunter things. She can’t say for sure, but doesn’t think any of them would help her get out of the chair. Not with no hands. Not fast enough.

A spark ignites somewhere in her mind.

Keys.

He’d snorted, staring at her with those hard, slate-like eyes.

He’d been finished. Worked up a sweat. Probably a calorie deficit day for him. Like going to the gym.

Orange-tinged blond hair sweated to his forehead and neck. Face, neck, and upper body speckled with small and large red dots, larger patches of the same fluid on the sleeves of his blue T-shirt and his hands. He made a show of wiping those thick, hairy hands on a dirty rag before he left.

She’d already been counting down the minutes.

Maybe he had been, too.

Or maybe the clock had already stopped, from his perspective.

He’d left the keys.

Well...sort of. He’d thrown them across the empty warehouse.

He did that casually, too, tossing them in a high arc, like tossing a bottle opener to a friend at a party.

They went far, though.

Devon heard them land. She hears it again now, a distant thunk in her head as she fights to remember. She hears them skitter across the cement a few feet...or maybe a few yards...like a distant replay.

That bastard grinned at her after he did it. Teeth yellow from smoking. Face broken with a darker scruff than that pale blond hair. Between that and his darker roots, he must have bleached his hair, come to think of it.

Distraction.

He threw the keys...that was right before he left.

She thinks she remembers the direction. She thinks...

Devon bites down on her lip. Hard.

The pain forces her eyes (eye?) open once more.

It brings her mind briefly, sharply, back into focus.

You’re not going to just sit here and die, Devon.

You’re not going to play some stupid wait-and-see denial game...like some fatalistic ass, waiting for angelic intervention...

That time, she doesn’t think.

She starts to rock the chair.

She starts to rock it for all she’s worth.

It’s difficult at first.

Side to side. Baby steps.

Then wider swings.

The legs teeter a few times, chunk down. Make her flinch.

It takes a few, good seconds to get her rhythm down...

Then it’s a little scary. The chair starts to sway for real. Those legs chunk down harder. Land less steadily.

Some part of her still winces back.

Some part of her doesn’t want more pain.

Death, Devon.

Death is worse than a little pain, damn it...

...she makes herself do it, anyway.

When that final rock tips her over the edge, she’s startled. Like some part of her still doesn’t see it coming.

Her body tries to catch it in reflex…

It can’t.

She lands, hard, exhales in a pain-filled grunt.

Moaning, she gasps. Winded. She lays on her side, panting, wasting oxygen, moaning, feeling like she just wants to die. She’s sure she’s broken her arm. It feels like she just hit it with a hammer.

She did, more or less. On purpose.

It feels like an eternity of time she’s wasted.

She can see it now, though. She’s half-laying in it.

That pool of blood. It’s big.

Scary big.

It motivates her.

She starts to writhe inside the bindings of the chair. She tried to pull the chair with her, across the cement floor.

On her side, she can move her body, like a snake. It hurts her abdomen. It hurts enough to distract her from her throbbing leg, from her arm. She can even move the arm under her, but it hurts like hell.

All of it hurts like...well, it hurts a heck of a lot.

More than anything she cares to remember.

She does it anyway.

She’s going to get across the floor. No matter what.

If they find her dead, she won’t just be sitting in a chair.

She won’t just be sitting over a pool of her own blood.

At first, she thinks she’s not getting anywhere.

It’s slow. Really slow.

She looks back though, when she has to rest. She sees a smear of blood, coming mostly off of that cut he made in her leg. A lot probably off that hole in her abdomen, too.

She looks forward again, moving.

Writhing. Gasping.

Nothing ever hurt so much.

She’s tired.

She doesn’t want to think about being tired.

She doesn’t want to think about what it might mean.

She’s really damned tired, though.

She fights to see through the one eye. It’s fogged a bit now, not really working right. She blinks, fighting to clear it. It works, but not really.

She can’t get tired.

She can’t...

The first time she snaps out, she realizes she’s been lying there. She doesn’t know how long. Dozing…

Time for a nap, Devon? Really?

...but it scares the shit out of her.

She’s fading. She has to hurry.

She writhes faster across the cement floor, groaning a little from the wounds that have stiffened just enough to remind her she’s been lying there.

She makes it a few more feet.

A few more.

She’ll stop, just for a second.

Needs to rest.

Needs to...

Hey! Hey, lady!

Devon’s head lolls on her neck.

The ground hurts. Something sharp there. Glass?

A nail.

Light in her face.

Really bright.

It’s dark in here. Really dark.

She’s still tied to the chair.

Whatcha doin’ down there, lady?

The voice slurs, then laughs. The laugh echoes, a hollow pinging against the metal insides of the cavernous space.

Devon blinks up, unable to shield her eyes from that light. Her wrists are still cuffed to the back of the chair.

She’s still tied to the chair.

Panic fills her.

A memory of that drip, drip, drip...

She fights to speak. Help, she whispers.

Lady, you’re bleeding a lot. Damn. A lot...that’s really fucked up...

Help me... she whispers. Please...help me...

She fights to move. Maybe to plead with him.

Maybe just to show him she can’t.

Hey, he says. What you doing in here, lady? What happened to you?

She has the absurd desire to laugh.

Then to scream at him.

He laughs again, maybe at the look on her face.

Devon feels sick, dizzy. Is this real? Is someone really here? Is she dead? Dreaming on a gurney in some emergency room?

But no. The chair. The chair is still there.

She wouldn’t dream the chair.

He doesn’t seem right, either. High, maybe? Maybe he has a phone.

Then she sees it.

He’s using the phone to look at her. Using the light on the phone...

Hope turns into anxiety, clutching at her chest.

Please, she whispers. She fights to make more noise, to speak. She clears her throat, swears she tastes more blood, then fights away the image. Please, she says, a little louder. Please...call someone...please...

Call someone? That off-key laugh. Who you want me to call? Who done this to you, lady?

She fights to see him through the bright light. She stares at the phone...

It is maddeningly out of reach.

Please, she whispers. Please...call someone. Please...

Another voice startles her.

It is louder, deeper.

What the hell? it says. Who are you talking to...? A longer pause. Then the new voice gets close enough to see past the light.