On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 175, of 240 so far.

Advantageous

The little blue tracking dot was his anchor point; the one thing that was constant. Its position moved as he did, but its nature remained unchanged.

Raine knew that his quarry was only a short distance ahead, but the straight-line measurement was the least relevant factor. He watched the display of the device mounted to his wrist, his sleeve pulled down over most of it so that a passing glance would judge it to just be a smart watch or a fitness device. In reality, it was infinitely more complex.

And reality isn’t what it used to be, he thought, with grim amusement.

His connection to central was as solid as ever. In years of chasing people down, he’d only ever had a handful of signal drop-outs, and they were tense times. It was too easy to get used to the technology and its conveniences, and forget that the fundamentals of the job were about thinking on your feet while you were out there on someone’s tail. Experience and observation were the non-negotiable requirements, and everything else was just an added bonus to be capitalised on, but never counted on.

The device chimed again, and Raine also felt the vibration in the nerves of his forearm. There was no actual haptic driver, with the nerve impulses instead being directly stimulated. More noticeable, more private, and without any sound or more than a fraction of EM spillage.

He read the notification. 80m on left, shopping centre, from open to closed, it said.

Raine directed his gaze and located the entrance to the place, seeing the people going in and out. He braced himself, and then felt the thump that was as familiar as his own heartbeat. A moment of blurred vision, an instant of vertigo, then everything was back to normal. The shopping centre was closed now, large notices on all the doors, and far fewer people on the pavement outside. Raine smiled. His quarry was much more visible, and had lost a pretty good opportunity to try and evade him.

The man ahead looked back over his shoulder, and Raine knew the moment that his quarry spotted him. The telltale expression of tentative recognition was the same on any face. Raine didn’t even know why the man was wanted; only that the method of hunting him down, and Raine’s own services in particular, were so prohibitively expensive and complicated that they were reserved solely for the most dangerous and sought-after criminals. He quickened his pace.

Less than a minute later, the situation took a turn for the worse. The man ahead abruptly ran down a side street, and Raine pursued, checking the navigation display when he could. The blue tracker dot was moving more rapidly, and he saw that the street led to a dead end with a single large building: a residential school for the blind.

Not good, he thought. Children meant hostages, or worse. He spoke, knowing the words would go to central via an acoustic coupler implant that sat behind his ear.

“Need a new track for this,” he said.

Checking, the device on his wrist said, and then a few seconds later, he again felt the thump, and his vision blurred for a moment. Ahead of him, the man he was chasing had stopped just inside the perimeter wall of the school premises.

The building was no longer there, or rather about 99% of it was gone. The fire must have been biblical. Only a few charred remains, and the whole of the block was blackened. It had happened in an instant, right in front of Raine’s eyes, and he swore he could still detect the faint afterimage of the grand old edifice that had doubtless echoed to footsteps and laughter and all the rest of it. Now, though, it was all gone.

Raine unholstered his concealed weapon and pointed it at the man, who now had nowhere to go. The condemned lot was a true dead end, with high fencing and large concrete blocks surrounding the other three sides. Belatedly, Raine realised that they were firebreaks, left in place after they presumably fulfilled their intended purpose.

The man raised his hands, but Raine shot him anyway, the tracer round striking his chest and latching into fabric and skin, and when the embedded tag activated a few hundred milliseconds later, the man was pulled right out of the air and vanished with a noise like a bursting paper bag. Like in the board game, he went directly to jail.

Raine tapped the coupler implant, even though he didn’t to. “How many kids died in this fire?”

The wrist device pulsed. Seventy-six children, twenty-four adults. Two years ago.

He felt sick to his stomach, and then he felt angry. There must have been other options. All it would have needed was a secure entry gate to the school, and armed guards. His quarry would have turned back. That was all. But the device pulsed again, and Raine waited several seconds before looking at it.

Apologies, sergeant, it said, but this was the nearest advantageous universe.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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