Category: Kar'Wick

Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode four hundred and sixty-eight.

Tonight we present The Web

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This week’s episodes are brought to you by The Weekly Podioplex!

Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.

Tonight we visit a series of gamblers and the strands upon which they walk.

The Web

Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May

“It’s a decent gig as long as you’re the spider and not the fly,” said Baldy, his elbow on the bar. He spoke with his head at a tilt, a distantly ringing phone at his ear.

Despite his name, the man with the blue towel over his shoulder still maintained a full head of jet-black hair. The title had stuck after he’d found himself, years earlier, holding a razor after losing a small-time bet. Across the mahogany sat his cousin, ten years his junior. They shared the same round face, though her close-cropped scalp was lined instead with blond stubble.

“I just don’t get it,” she replied, lowering her Yuengling to her cardboard coaster. “Everyone here bets on the Hydras. Doesn’t matter if they’re having a good year or a bad year, every drunk in a red jersey is laying down his money on the home team. Now, that’s fine when Ahmed Ribbons has his ribs shattered in the middle of the summer and you’re rolling in money, but what happens – like three years ago – when they actually have a decent season? Don’t you get cleaned out?”

As she finished her question, however, someone picked up at the far end of Baldy’s call.

He raised a finger to pause the conversation.

* * *

In Boston a man named Zucco, his left arm arm clipped at the elbow and his accent holding a hint of Dublin, was wrangling an ancient phone receiver while watching a pair of teens being idiots around a very expensive pool table – it was but one of the thirty in the two-story hall, but it was the only one currently in danger of having its felt gouged.

Grunting a series of agreements to Baldy’s cross-country questions, Zucco split his attentions in case he should have to cover the microphone and shout at the kids.

For the thirteenth time that day he wished his Uncle would let him switch the phone over to something a little more modern – at least something portable. Yet they’d been using the four-line system for thirty years and the old man claimed he hadn’t made his money by messing with a successful recipe.

Signing off on the call with a final snort, Zucco leaned towards his large black book and recorded the bets Baldy had just placed.

“More juice on the Celtics?” asked Matt the Mick.

Matt the Mick was a rarity in the establishment. Despite years of loyalty as a patron – and despite being fully aware of the backroom dealings that took place there – Mick only came for the snooker. His hustle was all in his stick.

“Yeah,” answered Zucco, his eyes still on the teens. “A fellow turf accountant pushing some of the money he’s collected on the Hydras game tonight onto the green.”

“Huh,” replied the Mick, “but aren’t the Hydras up by a thousand goddamn points?”

“Doesn’t matter. Guy like that doesn’t want the exposure, he just wants his vig – his cut from the loss. When those thousand goddamn points were determined there was a bit of extra stretch put in ‘em so that no matter what the loser pays an extra percentage. Think of it as the bookie’s fee.

“Now, my friend there’s bein’ flooded with bets by the locals, who of course are all laying money on their hopes and dreams, not the actual likely outcome of the goddamn game. My chum calls me up to balance his take against the guys I’ve got locally hoping and dreaming that it’s gonna be the Celtics, and that covers his ass in the long term.

“He doesn’t actually care which team wins – he wants to balance his bets against each other so he can get a reliable paycheck out of his slice.”

Matt shrugged. “Sure, but if you’re taking bets from other fellas in your line of work on top of your own pool, doesn’t that put you in an even bigger shark tank? What if they want to lay bets you can’t match off against locals?”

“Well, actually, that reminds me: I gotta make a call,” replied Zucco.

Before he could pick up the phone, however, the sound of a dragging cue, and the ripping of felt, reached his ears.

* * *

Five minutes later a phone rang in a small stripmall office on the west coast. There was no alternate pretense to this room, no legitimate business it paraded as. The windows that fronted onto the pavement were frosted, and no signage had been hung beyond its perennially locked door.

This backroom was better equipped than Zucco’s poolhall – a single long desk carried a bank of four lines, each connected to a wireless headset and labelled with a colour sticker so that the identical units could be told apart for charging. Ahead of each phone sat a quick-handed operator, their fingers hovering over their laptops’ keyboards and touchpads. They said little as they responded to the incoming calls, their attentions instead focused on accurately capturing the numbers they were punching into spreadsheets.

What little response they did make was almost always in the form of numbers.

“Four-to-one.”

“Seven points over.”

“That’s three million total.”

Though the group had been working together for months, it was rare that all four found themselves in a moment all were simultaneously unoccupied, and what little conversation they exchanged usually happened before or after shift.

For the first time that night, however, a pause came.

Michigan, who refused to use his real name, Byron, had anticipated this moment for weeks. There were no assigned stations – time of arrival generally dictated the order of their seating.

This was why it had taken so long to finally be able to pose his pressing question: Rosario simply hadn’t been sitting alongside him.

Leaning into the silence, he put a hand on her elbow.

“Steaks and a movie after the night’s done? I know a great chophouse.”

“Well,” answered Rosario, her L dragging in hopes that it might be interrupted by an incoming call. She’d suspected something like this might be coming, after Byron had delivered a few unwanted compliments regarding the tightness of her jeans, and so she’d been avoiding him for weeks.

Rosario thought of herself as a serious person. The people they worked for, she knew, were also very serious, and she hoped one day to do something with them more lucrative than juggling numbers in a strip mall.

There was nothing wrong with Michigan, exactly – he simply wasn’t serious.

She had a career to consider, and being a woman only doubled her need to stay focused. It might be organized crime, but it wasn’t so organized that it felt any need to pay attention to equal hiring practices.

Before the next bet might be laid, or she might arrive at a deflection, the cheap green carpet beneath their feet began to fold. It was as if an illusion at first, the far end of the room rising while Michigan and Rosario watched, but then the wheels on their surprised coworkers’ chairs were overtaken by gravity, and they rolled towards the open-mouthed observers.

Though the bookies had long considered their phone lines the humming silk of their web, they had not known that in the end – in all ends – there was always a greater spider.

As an uncountable mass of refracting eyes burst from its ancient egg sack all debts were cancelled, and yet all was still lost at the rising of Kar’Wick the Spider-God.

Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Intro and outro work provided by Jay Langejans of The New Fiction Writers podcast.

Freesound.org credits:

Text and audio commentaries can be sent to comments@flashpulp.com – but be aware that it may appear in the FlashCast.

– and thanks to you, for reading. If you enjoyed the story, tell your friends.

Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode four hundred and fifty.

Tonight we present Behind the Lines

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This week’s episodes are brought to you by It Gets Weird!

Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.

Tonight we witness that time and distance do not liberate from death or fear.

Behind the Lines

Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May

Two thousand unwashed men had collected about the grassy meadow with rough-hewn swords, pikes, and hatchets in hand. For some coming to this moment had required the sacrifice of budding relationships, the severing of contracts, and the soothing of anxious parents.

All such stood in muddy boots, their feet firmly on the ground, their hands steady but slick with the nerves of coming battle. Some tugged at leathers or patches of chainmail, but many could not shake the doubt that their best defense would have been avoiding this place entirely.

It was only their leaders, clad in thick armour and riding chargers worth more than could be earned in a lifetime’s collection of crops, who moved with surety.

When the time came these officers would head-up the assault, and the lesser ranks destined to fall at their sides would at least do so with the knowledge that they who caused this war also lofted their weapons among the melee.

Still, beneath the reassuring weight of impenetrable iron, the masterminds felt concern but for the risk to their reputation and landholdings.

* * *

Two hundred years later came a moment of change. Upon a grassy plain not so different than those across which his bloodline had been marshalling troops for generations, a singular commander sat atop his mount, his steed – itself the apex of centuries of breeding – striding upon stout legs.

The beast was urged to walk the line of the general’s followers, and from his position of height it was easy to spot his opponent doing the same before his own forces.

“Today we beat back those brutes who raided our lands and slew our fathers -” he said, despite knowing his father was safely behind fortress walls many miles from the fighting. While the coaxing speech had remained the same for decades, however, the brutes of which he spoke had developed a new technique in the ancient scramble for dominance.

Beyond the grasses the brush parted, and a trio of wheeled monstrosities took the field. Curiosity brought a pause to the rallying recitation, and it was this brief halt which saved the noble’s life.

Fire touched the bases of the long bronze tubes, and the cannons fired.

Though the horseman would survive, he still bore witness to his stallion’s neck suddenly devoid of head, and to the splintering shot that shattered a swath of farmhands who had not had chance to ready their blades and bludgeons.

Crawling from beneath the dying mountain of meat and blood, it came into his mind – as it would for many more of his breed in the coming years – that he should perhaps lead from the rear, where he might better organize the complex formations necessary to face such a foe.

* * *

It was exactly that field, though centuries after the knightly age, that his people again realized the advantage of a more distant view.

Even as artillery fell upon the French front, their voices became nothing more than a remote crackle emanating from a rain-damaged radio. The theater of operation was large, they claimed, and there were so many crop tenders and factory workers, spread across thousands of miles of trenches, that it was impossible to coordinate such a puzzle from beneath the pressing demands and threatening clatter of tumbling shells.

Those same rattling explosions left little clarity in the fighters’ minds regarding why, beyond the dignity of their homes, they were conducting themselves through this mad venture – but it seemed just as suicidal to stay in place when the word “Advance!” came as a snarl along the wires.

Yet, even as the battle line marched forward, somehow its command crept backward, as it had done, in slow inches, since those early days on horseback.

* * *

A quiet man, with a round face and no knowledge of his family’s history as conquerors and commandants, would eventually sit in a small trailer-turned-office at the edge of a secluded airfield, his seat thickly pillowed and his fingers knowing only the trials of a slow day riding a keyboard.

No longer did his men wield pitchforks and crude steel. They too had come to understand the safety of distance, of having no foot upon the dirt when the fighting grew fierce, and, as such, they had taken to piloting death-dealers so removed that their narrow view seemed to show nothing more than the barren surface of an alien world.

Beneath their pinning gaze, however, still stood those with mud on their boots; beneath their flying weapons still stood the children of those who had always been summoned to action for reasons not entirely clear to their understanding.

For the commander there was no call to worry about such considerations. There was, in fact, little of anything to worry about here, thousands of miles from the sudden heat and sundered flesh of combat.

Yet, even as the soothing chime of another missive landing in his inbox shivered across his desk, the cushions upon which he sat began to tremble as if they knew sudden fear – as if, perhaps, the missiles he unleashed a half-globe away had finally returned to roost.

The dust upon his windowsill began to shift and take flight, and beyond the glass the rows of beige shacks, not so different than his own, began to heave. Though he’d hoped to keep mortality beyond the horizon, Kar’Wick the Spider-God recognized no nation’s borders as he split wide the earth and exposed a thousand fractal eyes.

Though the watcher had planned to live so far from death that he had only to fear a slow collapse into his own bed, that day all – be they upon the field of battle or at its most lonely edges – would know the terror that was the rise of the Arachnid Lord.

Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Intro and outro work provided by Jay Langejans of The New Fiction Writers podcast.

Freesound.org credits:

Text and audio commentaries can be sent to comments@flashpulp.com – but be aware that it may appear in the FlashCast.

– and thanks to you, for reading. If you enjoyed the story, tell your friends.

Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode three hundred and eighty-one.

Tonight we present Of Two Minds
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This week’s episodes are brought to you by The Way of the Buffalo Podcast

Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.

Tonight we enter a terrifying future with a full head of steam.

Of Two Minds

Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May

Despite his two-month stay being the longest they’d been separated, Leanne Frost had refused to enter the hospital to visit her only son, Andrew.

Until that spring she’d never felt regrets about not birthing another. Now, while waiting for the slam of a car door in the silence of the kitchen with a mug of coffee in her hand and her eyes on the oven’s clock, she wondered briefly if she should have ever had any at all.

The fight had begun with Andrew’s announcement. Leanne had always considered herself an open minded woman, and as such she’d refused to acknowledge what made her uncomfortable about his news.

Court cases and news network coverage had often repeated that speaking ill of the displaced was an act of intolerance, but Leanne had long had suspicions that it was those same people who could afford to pay lawyers and anchors that were most likely to undertake the procedure.

Instead, she’d latched onto the fact that it would mean taking a year or two before continuing his education. High school had been an easy affair for Andrew, but that had had more to do with his football skills than his academics. Leanne knew her son’s distaste for the written word, and she worried that the loss of focus would make it difficult for him to move on to college.

They’d been sitting in the living room watching ancient mystery movies that Sunday morning, as had been their tradition since Leanne had divorced Andrew’s father, when, during a McCloud horse chase, he’d dropped his bomb

She almost said, “I won’t allow any monsters in my home,” but fumbled to the more politically correct, “you are going to university! No son of mine is going to laze around leeching off some rusting embezzler!”

“It’s murder not to!” he’d answered.

Leanne had heard the idea argued before on hospital dramas, and she’d never thought herself a bigot, but in that moment she shook with a revulsion she hadn’t suspected of herself.

She’d listened to the line echoed a hundred times since – if lives can be saved, shouldn’t they? Even if it was only those lives that could afford it?

“How could anyone afford not to?” she asked her empty coffee mug.

Two minutes later the screen door gave out its usual warning complaint, followed by the familiar closet shuffle and shoe kicking that marked Andrew’s entrance.

The sound of his socked feet on the hardwood was enough to wring her stomach twice. She missed her baby.

“Mom?” he asked.

“In here,” she replied, but she could not bring herself to move away from the support of the kitchen counter.

Leanne had known Andrew would not be alone when he entered, but the change in her child left her thankful for the strength of her perch.

Jules Wilson had a vulture’s eyes, and the angle of his insertion had left the transplanted head with a constant look of hard scrutiny. The old man’s balding pate and wrinkled jowls did nothing to dispel the carrion eater association.

“Not in my house,” thought Leanne, but her mouth said nothing.

Still, her face was readable even by the stranger.

“I told you there’d be issues, Andy,” said the croaking attachment. “I understand what the contract says, but I still think everyone would be happier if we just went back to my place. There’s plenty of scotch handy and I’m sure we can find you some cute friends to invite over for the weekend.”

Before Andrew’s mother could find her tongue to respond, however, the drawers flew wide and the cupboards took to flapping like shattered bird wings.

Leanne would no longer have cause to worry about the path of her son’s life, and Wilson would be denied his immortality, for it was then, through the window above the sink, that the trio witnessed the rise of the black and gnarled carapace of Kar’Wick the Spider-God.

Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Intro and outro work provided by Jay Langejans of The New Fiction Writers podcast.

Freesound.org credits:

Text and audio commentaries can be sent to comments@flashpulp.com – but be aware that it may appear in the FlashCast.

– and thanks to you, for reading. If you enjoyed the story, tell your friends.

Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode three hundred and sixty-four.

Tonight we present Beating, Part 1 of 1
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This week’s episodes are brought to you by Talk Nerdy 2 Me

Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.

Tonight, we take you to war through the ears of three men.

Beating

Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May

Annan missed the fire back at the camp.

Things hadn’t seemed so bad when he’d been able to close his eyes and pretend its warmth was that of his own home’s hearth. He could almost convince himself that Newlyn’s lippy snoring, across the timbers, was actually his father’s familiar burr.

Now, at the edge of this soon to be bloody field, there was no room for illusion. There was only dew-damp feet and fear.

Newlyn elbowed him with a grin. The idiot had heard the same rumours about the Romans’ supposed new suits of iron, yet he’d slept like it were a feast night.

“It’s like my mother always said, if you’ve got to die it’s best you do it for reasons you but vaguely understand and on ground you’ve never seen before. No one builds a legend around your name for defending your sister’s honour outside your front door.”

With a sigh, Annan simply raised his instrument to his lips.

He really hadn’t even wanted to join the army, he’d only done it for the music.

From the treeline across the grassy plain, a high and sweet blast of brass carried to his ears.

Annan frowned.

This was not proper accompaniment for battle – this was the shrill shrieking of children.

The response was obvious.

He raised his long stemmed wolf headed horn, and its bleating was low and mournful and filled with death.

* * *

“Tell a man to march twenty miles and he’ll groan. Make him do it with a pipe and drum at their back and they’ll arrive with their toes tapping,” Abner was saying.

It was meant as a compliment, but it was too close to what Theodore had been thinking on even as his arms had kept at their motions.

Raising his water skin to his mouth, he cast a look towards how much attention Rorke, the man nearest their chosen resting spot, was paying to their discussion.

Deciding the private was far more interested in a brief nap, Theodore leaned close to Abner’s ear and said, “when I first arrived here, before the call to arms, I took some whiskey and followed a local bush clearer to the plot of swamp he’d briefly rented to Cherokee – quite possibly the very same we now hunt.

“I’ve heard their drumming. I’ve seen their dancing. I am not sure there is as much separating us as we tell ourselves to justify this march.”

The conversation ended there. If music had been their ally, then silence had been their enemy’s, and a sentry’s dying screams marked the point at which the two met.

Despite the surprise attack the line formed with the practiced speed of men long far from home, and Abner was soon carrying a staccato across his hide.

His tempo, though ever maddening, was paced by the crack and roll of firing muskets.

* * *

It was the sort of day that left Everett glad he worked in an air conditioned box.

He was sure no one was meant to live in Nevada in July, but the pay was good.

“They’re in the next room,” he was murmuring into his headset. He couldn’t help but whisper as if the turbaned men on the far side of his computer monitor might hear. “We could hit the building with a couple hundred pound chunk of sky, but they’ve built a daycare two floors down that’ll wipe out any happy headlines we get from killing so many at once.”

“Yeah, yeah,” came the reply, “I hear you. You’re due for a break in twenty, you sure you’re not tired? I could take over.”

Everett chuckled. “Uh huh. I’ll have this cleared in ten, but I’d do this on unpaid overtime if I had to – I ain’t letting you run off with my points on the big board. This month’s Starbucks gift certificate is all mine.”

“Fine, go hot with just the onboard pop guns, but remember that this isn’t a Call of Duty level, and don’t forget to log your brief before you wander off to the break room to bump your score and brag.”

Hearing the line go dead, the technician smiled to himself and pulled up the operating system window that contained his audioplayer.

He wished he could tap it into the remote speakers, but he knew that to foolishly risk the weapons platform was also to foolishly risk his venti mochas.

As he sent the command to disengage safeties, Bangarang, a classic Skrillex tune, hit his ears.

Fire through the wall or slide over to the open door?

Everett was considering simply doing both when his view began to shake. His first thought was that someone had grabbed ahold of the quadrotor platform, but he soon realized that the drone was maintaining its position – it was everything else that was moving around it.

“Earthquake?” he asked his empty cubicle.

Though he couldn’t hear it over the bass, the air conditioner answered with its same old tune, at least until the quaking truly began.

Though, in a panic, he repeatedly posed the question to his empty headphones, Everett could not rectify how the disturbance on his viewscreen, thousands of miles away, related to the slamming and bucking of his cargo-container office – and, afterwards, he would not care, for the beat and thrum that had prepared his blood for battle was not unlike the rise and falls of a thrashing victim upon a spider’s web.

Within moments all was made clear, as the Arachnid Lord’s appetite was without end, and Kar’Wick’s hunger, announced by a new rhythm driven into the very earth, would not be denied.

Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Intro and outro work provided by Jay Langejans of The New Fiction Writers podcast.

Freesound.org credits:

Text and audio commentaries can be sent to comments@flashpulp.com – but be aware that it may appear in the FlashCast.

– and thanks to you, for reading. If you enjoyed the story, tell your friends.