Voices From The Fringe - Short Stories

By S.M. Mitchell

A repeated day that rarely differs from the last, a duo searching for a library in an unknown apocalypse, a man who may be an automaton, and a shapeshifter that has lost their face. None of these stories have anything in common, but they do share a common source. What that source is and what these stories say to you is up for interpretation.First time author S.M. Mitchell brings you four short stories about the dangers of living in a time loop, the difference between man and machine, and why you should never steal a stranger's wallet. Voices from the Fringe is a collection that is open to interpretation and will make you think about topics you have never thought of before and keep you guessing about what you actually know about the people around you. With a style that draws you in, you will not know how to feel once the stories end.

• Language: English
• Publisher: S.M. Mitchell
• Release date: Dec 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393858331

Book preview

Acknowledgements:

I want to thank several people when it comes to the formation of this book;

I would like to thank my teachers who have taught me everything I know about storytelling, whether or not they are proud of that notion.

I would like to thank everyone I have ever met that has helped with my writing in the past, including old classmates and people I only know online.

And lastly, I would like to thank my mother, who without her help, this book would have never been written. She has supported me since the inception of each story and without her influence, I would have most likely never written a word to ever be published.

I hope I am making you proud mom.

Table Of Contents:

Preservation ................................................... 3

Repeat ........................................................ 98

Automaton ................................................. 149

Losing Shape .............................................. 210

Preservation

The streets were empty this time of night, but that was the norm. Traffic here wasn’t exactly high during the day either, so if it did have some heavy foot traffic, then that would be a sign of bad things to come.  Of course, that’s not always the case.  It would depend on what that foot traffic consisted of, but I’m just getting more off topic.

It really didn’t matter to me either way, really. I was just looting the corpses for now.

I moved another corpse onto its side, rifling through the pockets with practiced ease. This one had decayed enough so the bones were the only things left, making it easier to move and touch without feeling a deep guilt within me. Unfortunately, old corpses are less likely to have anything left on them, especially anything of value.

Of course, I wasn’t exactly looking for money or jewelry, but the point still stood. I was looking for the cellphone.  Cellphones are usually left behind by other scavengers, but sometimes they’ll take them and then sell them in the markets.  I prefer to get to them first. 

So, it was an utter delight to find one of the old iPhones still in an old coat pocket, dead, but intact. Humming in delight, I grabbed one of the portable chargers, sticking it in the port and watching the screen light up with bated breath. An apple logo came and went, instantly going to the screen with all of the apps.

Thank god. I mutter to myself, perusing the symbols carefully. Paying someone to hack into one of these things resulted in some pretty hefty trades, but usually the expense ended up being worth it. MP3’s were big ticket items for anyone, especially for people that worked in the heavy-duty jobs that didn’t require all of your senses to be use all at the same time. Farmers especially.  They could play them while they worked to escape the monotony.

I never really listened to the music all that much, except when I was alone. I always preferred getting to the voicemails.

You know, isn’t there a saying that you should respect the dead or something?

I’m not proud enough to deny that I jumped at the voice’s intrusion. I turned to find a shock of short red hair, tough black eyes, and a crooked smirk on a worn face.

Jesus Christ Jess, I wish I could say I got to my feet gracefully, but I was stumbling since I was in a hurry. Give me some warning next time, you know I keep a gun on me.

I would, but I think I’m pretty okay since you’re a shit shot. Jess shouldered a duffle bag, giving me a raised eyebrow. I cleared out the department store and got some decent tools. Electrical ones too. Not sure how good a trade we can get for them since they’re a niche market.

Probably get something good from someone in the maintenance division. I pocketed the cell phone discreetly. If anything, we should get a decent amount of materials for it, something to craft some good stuff with.

The general rule in our group was that while everyone was allowed food and board mostly free, anything extra would have to be worked for. Farming, building, maintenance, or our work as scavengers did result in some heavy rewards, but you had to work hard to earn them. It could afford you certain luxuries, like an extra pillow on your bed or a dessert from the kitchen staff. A lot of privileges were for them and the farmers, of course, but that’s what you do to make sure there’s enough people actually growing the food.

It’s a good system for the most part, even if some people would complain that the benefits were terrible. How free medical care and free food was terrible is beyond me.

If you’re done looting, maybe we could start heading back? Lot of the hostile groups have been avoiding this place, but pushing our luck would be a bad idea. She grunted, moving the bag to a more comfortable position. It’s not like there’s anything else to do around here anyway.

The frown on my face must’ve been noticeable, because she eventually stopped. We haven’t even started. We can leave it at a drop, but we need to get moving now. I started to walk off, keeping my eyes out for any specific landmarks. It’ll take us a day or two to get there, but we can cut it in half if we’re fast enough.

Another groan came from her direction, but it was followed by some quick footsteps. Jess was beside me in an instant, already leafing through the directions we’d gotten from an older woman in our settlement. She’d been pretty forthcoming with the information and insisted that we try and go for the place.

Said something about GPS dulling people’s sense of direction, though she sounded wistful about it. Hopefully I’d figure out what the hell that meant.

She said that we’d be taking a long walk for this. Maybe we could try out a few of the cars around here? If we got one of those things running, we’d be getting all kinds of perks back home.

I hummed in agreement. If they could find a relatively new vehicle and had some ability to actually fix it up, it would help out on scavenging missions and stuff, but vehicles were noisy. It would catch too many people’s attention. We’ll find some vehicle parts for Shaunda on our next mission. I think she has some stuff on reserve for anyone that can find her some crap for her latest project.

Good, Jess closed up the map, reading the street signs. Maybe she’ll cough up one of those old game systems I’ve heard so much about.

Right. I avoided her curious gaze and fumbled in my pocket for my headphones. She saw it and shrugged, tracing her fingers over her gun as she looked into every alleyway. Look, I’m just going to-

Go for it. She said simply, giving a shrug. I don’t understand why you like doing this and all, but it’s not worse than anything else I’ve seen.

It still felt a bit awkward, but I grabbed the phone I’d scrounged out of the corpse’s pocket, flicking through the familiar looking apps. I was already at the voicemails when I put in an earbud, clicking on the one at the very bottom. The earbud began to crackle as a new voice entered my ears, drowning everything out.

———————————————————————————————

You have one new message.

*BEEP*

*CRACKLE*

He-Hello? Selina, it’s me, Peter. I know I’m not exactly the first person you want to speak with right now, but I wanted to leave a message. I’ve been leaving a couple these the last few days and I figured that I should leave one for you too.

I mean, you’ve probably been receiving some calls the past couple of weeks already, so this might just seem excessive or weird. I know we dated only briefly and all, but you were in my contacts and I felt like talking to you.

Then again, if you’re seeing exactly what I’m seeing on the news, this call might actually be welcome.

———————————————————————————————

It was a fascination that started back when I was a kid growing up in our makeshift town. Our shelters had been upgraded from the simple shacks that most of my family used to live in and were becoming actual houses that could support multiple people. Plumbing and other luxuries came later but weren’t far behind.

The village was still going through some heavy shifts in leadership at the time when I was growing up, with a lot people wanting to become the head of the pack, even if it became a less desirable position as time went on. It was unstable in the fact we had a different leader every few months, but not enough where there were constant uprisings whenever a new one showed up. As long as food was brought to the table, no one honestly complained about the situation.

Except for my parents, though. They weren’t thrilled with the constant shifts in what we called our government, and they were always complaining that every new shift in leadership set back the town enough to prevent it from growing. The problem with them is that they never agreed on who should exactly lead them. There were always complaints about who was corrupt, who started the next conflict in town, and who’d lead them into a new golden age.

Neither of them turned out to be right, but the arguing led to my mom becoming a scavenger. She always wanted to see what was left of the great cities and whether we could learn from their mistakes enough to eventually retake them for humanities sake. A little naïve if you ask me now, but it was a grand plan that nobody else really had, so it kept my attention whenever she told me stories about what her own parents said it was like before the world collapsed.

She never told me what caused the end of the world. I realized later that it never really mattered.  Hopefully we, as a species, wouldn’t make the same mistakes again and end up with the same result.

Whenever she got back from one of her missions, she always brought back whatever weird things she found on the way. Random keys to homes that were probably already broken into, random posters from bands that faded long into obscurity, or the occasional little crosses or other religious paraphernalia. But she always brought cell phones back with her.

Of course, they were all ultimately useless since the cell towers were, and continue to be, useless pieces of crap, no matter how many people attempt to fix them up. No one even knew if the satellites, up in the blackness of space, were even up and running.  There certainly wasn’t a space program anymore. However, as long as you knew what to look for, you could access any of the phone’s files with little to no issues.

Music was a good way to drown out any unwelcome noise, even if the song playing wasn’t exactly up to your taste. It was that or play on the family computer, usually just making do with whatever video games had been downloaded onto it by the original owner, decades ago. It didn’t take me long after getting the first couple of cell phones that I started listening to the voicemails on them.

It wasn’t the most interesting thing at first. The farther you go back on the voicemail list, the more mundane the messages were. People just talking about their day, venting to an empty voice box, or trying to remind the person they were calling to do something.

I still couldn’t help but listen to them, though. There was just something about those messages that grabbed my attention and drew me into their world.  While listening to them, the messages would consume me, leave me in a daze once they were over, often resulting in me having to force myself back to the waking world, feeling groggy and listless.

The first cellphone I got had twenty or so messages, each one coming back from different years. The previous owner didn’t necessarily do a good job in cleaning it up, which wasn’t as much of a problem as you think it would be. It kept up an honest timeline of his life that most people wouldn’t assume exists. Calls from his wife asking about how the new phone works and whether or not he’s getting the voicemails. The occasional one from his grown kids talking about college and asking for some money. There was even one from his parents talking about their next visit to see the children.

The last ones usually focus on whatever took down