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 236, of 240 so far.

The Last Place

Rayner and Vilakazi walked slowly and carefully down the hill, bickering as usual.

“You could have worn something a little more conservative,” Rayner said, putting emphasis on the last word because he knew it would annoy her. True to form and slightly ahead of him, Vilakazi gave him the middle finger without looking around.

She was paying more attention to the tufts of long grass and the occasional thorny bush than to her footing, and she stumbled before regaining her balance. Rayner could sense that she was daring him to make some kind of remark, but his sense of self-preservation kept him diplomatically silent.

Instead, he glanced at the device in his hand, frowning at the blank portion of the display. “Nothing yet,” he said, but he didn’t feel the implicit optimism of the final word. To call it a needle in a haystack was an understatement.

“I know I was around here somewhere,” Vilakazi said, speaking as much to herself as to him, as she squinted at a tree further down the slope. Her face had the characteristic expression of someone who was unsure whether or not they recognised something, and Rayner debated with himself for a few seconds before deciding to speak.

“Could it have been earlier on?” he asked, and Vilakazi shook her head decisively, still without looking around at him.

“No,” she replied. “I was here yesterday. I’m about ninety percent sure this was the way I came down from the top of the hill. It was almost dark, but I could still see well enough. This must have been where I dropped it.”

Rayner nodded in apparent acceptance, but inwardly he had his doubts. His device showed no refined metal readings nearby, and nor did he expect it to.

Beyond the tree-line they could see below, plumes of smoke curled into the air, marking the small settlement that Vilakazi had mentioned to him. It was safe enough for them to continue onwards for another few hundred metres, and they were dressed plainly, so even if they encountered someone the situation would be salvageable.

“It’s a little irregular to be doing this, you know,” Rayner said, holding up his free hand placatingly when she threw a glare in his direction. “I’m just saying. Not without risk. I know it’s important to you. Maybe it would be better to come back in the middle of the night, when they’re all asleep.”

“It’d take longer,” Vilakazi replied, the impatience very clear in her tone. “We can have a quick search right now and then be gone.”

“Suit yourself,” Rayner replied. The unspoken thought hung in the warm air: maybe if you’d been more careful, we wouldn’t need to be here at all.

They trudged on for a few minutes, zig-zagging as some feature or other of the landscape would catch her attention, but to no avail.

“You said you’d taken water samples,” Rayner said. “There was clearly a major river running through here once.”

“That was two centuries ago at least,” Vilakazi replied. “I took the samples from a spring that’s about five hundred metres back up the hill, around to the east side. I’m not lost. And you’ve never been here before today.”

Rayner shrugged, but his silence seemed to wear upon her, and Vilakazi came to a stop. “Maybe I’m misremembering,” she said, and Rayner gave her a sympathetic smile. He was about to say something conciliatory when the device silently sent a pulse through his forearm. His gaze snapped to its screen, and he frowned.

“Four people, coming uphill, eighty metres and closing,” he said. He had a bad feeling, and he’d learned to trust his instincts. A moment later, the device’s automatic scan revealed that all four of the approaching locals were armed.

“Spear, bladed weapon, and wooden bows,” he said. “This is dicey.”

Vilakazi shook her head. “Not worth it. We’d probably be fine, but too many questions. Let’s try again another time.”

My sentiments exactly, Rayner thought, already keying-in the activation parameters. A moment later, there was the brief feeling of nausea, the whole-body static electricity, and the bone-deep thump of being pulled from the frame by the strange gravity of the rip that the device made in the air.

When the four villagers came upon the scene less than a minute later, they found the grassy slope empty, and nothing amiss.

In the same spot she’d occupied a moment before, but fourteen centuries later, Vilakazi sighed and scratched her temple. The hillside, reconstructed by an urban reclamation project, was far more beautiful than it had ever been in nature. Busy little machines zipped by, far overhead and going in all directions, and both pedestrians and passengers on antigrav personal vehicles nodded respectfully at the two of them.

“Log says you were here too, a couple of days back,” Rayner said. “I had to pick somewhere quickly.”

“Some when,” she replied. “I like to read here sometimes. It’s one of my favourite times for this place.”

The device pulsed again, and Rayner glanced at it and smirked, before walking slowly over to an elegant metamaterial bench with a wonderful view of the glittering inland sea below. He reached down behind it and retrieved a small object, holding it up to the light.

“My bloody earring,” Vilakazi said, closing the distance between them and snatching it from him.

“Your bloody earring,” Rayner replied. “So now we can get back to our actual work.”

She had the good grace to look sheepish for a moment, and then her usual fierceness returned. “No mention of this to anyone,” she warned, and Rayner mimed zipping his lips shut. She nodded, then they both turned and started walking back up the hill towards the nearest local transit point.

Rayner felt the need to say something else, which was a weakness of his, but he couldn’t help it. He managed to suppress the impulse for almost thirty seconds before it got the better of him.

“It’s always the last place you look,” he said.

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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