Sammy Slow Knife And Other Strange Tales

By James Fisher

A collection of 5 original science fiction short stories.

-Sammy Slow Knife is a cartel kingpin who enforces obedience throughout his lucrative galactic empire with duct tape and a slow knife. He rules his world. Until he winds up stranded on a desolate planet with an unlikely friend and protector. Priest is a Hwarthian mystic determined to keep Sammy alive. Despite Sammy's plans to kill him.

-George Bullard is a famous political dissident of a near future Earth, committed to equal rights for AI and jailed for life on the surface of the moon because of it. Bullard is given only a computer to keep him company. He finds that cybernetics can make for strange bedfellows.

-Manly Savage lives in the posthumous shadow of his older brother, a war hero killed in combat. So Manly joins the Army too. He serves as a mess cook and his world stays pretty mundane. Until a kitchen accident disfigures his body and agents of his government step in to help.

-Five year old Donnie Franklin has a story the humans of earth would like to hear. And non-human friends to keep him from telling it.

-Thomas Castoldi is an entomologist who prefers the company of insects over his fellow humans. But Castoldi and the population of Earth have a shared problem: a slowly progressing but always fatal disease for which there is no cure. He and his expedition travel halfway across the galaxy in search of a cure and they find it. But it comes at a very strange cost.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Fisher
• Release date: Jun 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9780578530369

James Fisher

James Fisher is an incurable science fiction addict who lives near Austin, Texas. When not writing, he spends his time opening doors for his dog and two very spoiled cats.

Book preview

SAMMY SLOW KNIFE

At night was the dreams . A strong man’s plead for mercy answered by the pop-pop-pop of gunfire. Or wailing and begging, and screeching and babbling bargains, over and over and maybe for hours. It was cheap entertainment piped into my silky red bedroom. Cheaters, hustlers, half-baked wannabees. The Small Ones who don’t know they are small until my creets have them down and taped. I usually switched off once the poor sucker’s head games stopped and things got real. But sometimes I listened through to the end. Just to comfort my nerves while the zuum wore off. When the wailing faded to little frog croaks followed by sounds of ripping tape, I knew my creets had done their jobs and I was whole again. There was always much to be done.

For everything a price Samuel Quinn Slow knife.

The voice jerked me awake panting and I groped my jacket pocket for the plazzgun and it was there, and where else would it be. I ran my fingers over its glassy surface and the feel of it was good.

Wet wind tongued the moaning marsh with a soft Ooh ahh, followed by a drum roll of thunder hammering tombstone mountains.

Damn you Priest! I yelled loud.

Curse your knowing when to speak so nicey-nicey and when to let me think so quiet. Curse your words  that come creeping into my head to screw up my dreams, like pious little preachers on crab’s legs. I stared into black tar darkness and it stared back into me. My eyes closed and I drifted like paper trash on water. I never knew how long. Time doesn’t play fair in the dark.

"What goes around comes around Sammy."

I woke again with hands pressed hard to my ears, even though I knew the voices were buzzing from inside my head. Bad enough for sure, but now came the gurgling cough. Walking pneumonia, Priest had said it was.

Fuck it all, I growled.

I am Sammy Slow Knife. It thunders when I say so, and fuck pneumonia too. If a bug bites me, it’s the bug that dies.

Light from Yellow Sol came through morning mist.  There was no getting back to sleep now. I rubbed at sore eyes and looked out. It was the usual Yellow Sol morning show, day in and day out and long since not worth watching. Breaks in ground fog gave glimpses of darting browns and grays. Sludge rats fleeing daylight for their dens. I pictured them licking the blood of slow idiots from their razor little rat thing teeth. And this I understood. Only an idiot would sleep on the ground at night here.

I dropped from my hammock to the ground beneath Priest, hugged what was left of my jacket to my chest and backed a few steps off. All the while making like a crazy man hallucinating roaches, trying to stomp some feeling back into my legs.

Yellow day was clearing now. Pink granite sand sloped downward for a half klick or so to where it met a shallow stream. The stream meandered on and over polished rocks and boulders like a rich kid dancing. Like it never had a care and never would. You couldn’t quite call it a river, but it was decently wide and clear. Another klick beyond was a tarry black marsh plastered over with tangles of greasy arthritic brush. A cheap toupee on the head of a sweaty loser. And then was a broad lagoon where wet things slinked and slithered, and we never went there. Stretching far beyond the land rose up, and up again to furry blue foothills guarding mountains capped with snow. Fifty meters at my back rose the cliff face of the mesa, weather aged and wrinkled with striated veins of sandy red erosion that ran unbroken to the mesa’s distant top.

Chose this spot for protection as we are nestled here.

Priest said that when we first arrived. You had to be careful with words like nestled where I come from. They can mark you for a geek. They made me study Cervantes and Shakespeare in juvee rehab. So I know some big words. They looked me in the eye and said I was a gifted kid. You are gifted. You have potential but are in the formative process of making bad choices, the teachers kept harping.

Dumb fucks. The not yet crucified messiahs in neat pressed slacks and sweaters. I knew them better than they knew themselves. I nodded fake repentance and stared at the floor while fantasizing ways to break their necks with my bare hands.

I stepped further back to take in the hulking form of Priest entire.

How could a normal human describe such a thing? A gray concrete blimp? An egg shaped boxcar set on legs like bridge pilings and draped with metal scales as big as dinner plates? At one end a smaller bump, likewise egg shaped, grew like a tumor from a hump on his back. I called it his head. Embedded there, like fist sized rubies in the chewing gum of his hide were unblinking crystals. I called them his eyes.

His scales, once a burnished gold, had faded to baby crap yellow. His active time was shorter and shorter lately. His meditations were longer and longer. His elephant walk had slowed to a shuffle, and then a wobbling creep. Those sappy Bach cantatas he hummed out from his upturned horn of a snoot while he meditated were lately sounding thin and tinny.

Asking him how he was and how it was he never ate, well that was a waste of time. The body of a Hwarthian priest is some kind of sacred fucking temple. Its innards are strictly off limits to the uninitiated like me.  For a month or so after the crash, I would ask what made him tick and he would rumble a farting belly laugh through his snoot and start with the questions. I learned early on the questions were a clever a way of steering the conversation from his problems back to mine. And before I knew it he had opened me up like a red ripe melon again, rapping on the Sammy Slow Knife I had been before the crash. The kid who learned to keep his heartbeat steady and his breathing steady with a blade to his throat while quick talking a deal. To return the favor of a threatened blade with a real blade in his own sweet time. A slow one.

Double curse Priest. Running from the hounding doogoods was hassle enough and on top of that his mind games were clouding my thinking. Over the months, I had told him way too much about myself, to the point I was sure my mind was affected. Enough time in solitary and a man will spill his guts to a cockroach. And Priest was smoother than any skull-poking rehab geek I had ever known. My skull was splitting open and my manhood was spilling out.

Why do I keep telling you all this stuff about myself, Priest? It’s like you push those red and blue and green buttons inside my head, or something. And I sing like a servitor bot. This mental masturbation is making me schizo. I am fucking sick of it and I am fucking sick of you. I slammed his scaly flank with my best rat stick, but the stick just shattered.

A sound like swarming bees from his tuba snoot then: Words are fingers of healing hands. I place them on tender carbuncle of your lonely human soul and draw poison out. Hwarthian way is gentle but travels far, like Earth dandelions before the wind.

Psychobabble bullshit. I hacked a piece of phlegm between my lips and spat. Cold drizzle came and I returned to stand beneath him.

Somebody’s gonna’ pay for this and they are not going to like it.

Have told me. Two hundred forty two times counting now. Hungry?

Months of eating radish roots and worms has left my bellybutton fused to my backbone. Yeah, you could say I’m hungry. We need to find another bush of what we ran across two months back. Those nut things that taste like almonds.

Have been looking. Apparently not widespread in this region and only fruit once in planet cycle. Hold for minute. He was swinging slowly back and forth, like the needle of a compass.

What are you doing now?

Stretch you appendages, Sammy. Weather will soon clear and we shall go procuring for food.

The sky was hammered lead and weeping.

Your forecasting is as screwed up as your syntax. All I see is rain.

Have ever been wrong?

Lots of times, asshole. I shrugged and sighed. But not about the weather.

A shiver passed through Priest, making his scales rub together and rustle, followed by the sound of a shaken leather bag of bells.

The rain stopped. Gray peeled back from the horizon, unmasking Yellow Sol and making the clouds pink fire. Stop creeping me out, man. You always know what the weather is going to do. Exact.

Brrrat. The belly laugh that meant not to ask. He did that hinge down thing with his scales to make stairs. I climbed and settled my aching tail bone in a small notch behind his head where shoulders should have been. Six