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    Dead Key Publishing Annual Anthology 2
    Dead Key Publishing Annual Anthology 2
    Dead Key Publishing Annual Anthology 2
    Ebook163 pages2 hours

    Dead Key Publishing Annual Anthology 2

    By Dead Key Publishing

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    About this ebook

    From the beginning of time, people have loved stories. And novelists have loved trying their hand at writing them. Short stories are their own art form, and have their own beauty and even their own challenges. It's a rewarding art form for both reader and writer.

    Dead Key Publishing is proud to announce the release of its second annual anthology of short stories by the writers in its catalog. The stories range in length from short-short to almost novella, and range in type from literary to science fiction to men's, women's and mainstream. A collection as diverse as Dead Key's catalog.

    Inside the anthology, meet the last baby born legally in America and the illegals born in defiance of Reproduction Law; fall in love (again) in the car of a Ferris wheel; explore marriage, family life and body image; watch a paid assassin at work; walk the line between guilt and mental illness; discover what it means to be human—and robotic; find a bookkeeper's re-discovered life, a family who takes parenting a little too far, and a man longing to be re-discovered by his amnesia-affected wife.

    What you will also find are stories you won't want to leave, characters you love and maybe some you hate, and we hope that will lead you to read more of our Dead Keyers' works.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDead Key Publishing
    Release dateJan 2, 2017
    ISBN9781370149605
    Dead Key Publishing Annual Anthology 2
    Author

    Dead Key Publishing

    A dead key is the key on a typewriter used so the carriage doesn't advance, creating a unique character that is not visible on a traditional keyboard. When struck alone, it produces nothing. But working in conjunction with another key, it produces a distinctive character.Unpublished works are like dead keys. It is not until we bring the work to publishing in order to be shared that something special is created.At Dead Key Publishing, our passion is to be the next key.

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      Book preview

      Dead Key Publishing Annual Anthology 2 - Dead Key Publishing

      Dead Key Publishing

      Annual Anthology 2

      Copyright 2016

      License Note

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.

      Table of Contents

      Becky Bolinger

      The Reproducers

      About Becky Bolinger

      Charmayne Hafen

      Ferris View

      The Infamy of Image

      About Charmayne Hafen

      J.R. Hamilton

      Downed Gun

      Contracts

      About J.R. Hamilton

      Angela Perea

      Birthmark

      About Angela Perea

      Stephen W. Smith

      Playing God

      About Stephen W. Smith

      Cher Smith

      Rage

      Under the Influence

      For Love of Holly

      About Cher Smith

      About Dead Key Publishing

      The Reproducers

      By Becky Bolinger

      The first time I saw Jordan, I was seven. She was just six months older than me. My parents and I sat in front of a tiny color TV inside our tiny shack of a house. Eight-year-old Jordan Williams stared back at us through the television set. She wore a pink fluffy dress, white lacy socks, and oh-so-adorable Buster Brown shoes, with miniature buckles and little heels. Her silky, brown hair was parted into two perfectly even pigtails with curls, pink ribbons to top it off. She sat on a comfy, oversized sofa (so that her stubby little legs poked out in front, not even near touching the ground), and you could tell she was nervous because her cheeks (still full of baby fat) were a rosy red. It was her first talk show appearance. Her segment only lasted five minutes. The host (I can’t for the life of me remember who) asked her all these cutesy questions, and she gave her cutesy answers. It ended, the audience clapped, and she would continue doing all those talk show interviews for many years to come.

      I hated her. I hated how cute she was, and how rich she looked. I had sat on the floor in my grubby pair of jeans. Hell, they weren’t even my jeans. They had been handed down to me. They had holes in them, and through those holes my dirty, scabby knees could be seen. My skin matched the color of dirt, because I had spent the day plowing the fields with my dad. I hadn’t even brushed my hair that morning.

      So, yeah, I hated her. The thing I hated the most though, was that I had secretly fallen in love with her. And I made sure to watch every single TV appearance after that first one. My buddy Henry and I would make fun of her and plan horrible pranks against her. Henry and I promised that if we ever ran into her on the street (like she’d ever walk on our street), we’d take a bucket of mud and dump it on her. I probably would have, too. But I still loved her.

      Jordan Williams was called the Baby of America. She was the youngest American. Out of 500 million people, she was the baby of the family. The Reproduction Law was passed on February 21st, 2023, and Jordan was born on February 26th. There had been this whole drama at the hospital that morning. Should they let her live? If they let her live, then ten days down the road, somebody else would have a baby and say, It’s only been 15 days! There had to be a cut-off.

      So the president had decided that baby Jordan would be the cutoff. She would be the last legal birth. He had flown in, and a small ceremony had been held in the hospital for the Baby of America. Under no circumstances would any baby born after this be allowed to live.

      I know, it all sounds so confusing. I just said that I was six months younger than Jordan. And Henry, well, he’s a whole year younger than Jordan. There are others, too. We’re known as illegals.

      I had once heard the term illegal immigrant and asked my parents what that meant. My mom told me, There once was a time when people from other countries would try to come into the United States without the government knowing. They were called illegal immigrants. I knew that I wasn’t an illegal immigrant. I was born in the United States. But I wasn’t a citizen. I guess the government would probably call me an illegal human—when babies from inside the womb try to come into the world, specifically the United States, without the government knowing.

      So that was the extent of my seven-year-old life. I was a grubby, scabby, illegal little boy who was in love with the beautiful Baby of America.

      

      2053, New York City

      I found the information you’re looking for.

      I sat in a rundown coffee shop in Queens. Across from me sat Brad. Brad didn’t have a last name. Brad wasn’t an illegal, even though he was younger than me. His parents had left him in the woods when he was a baby. It may sound horrible, but it sounded like a loving act to me. They probably couldn’t stand the thought of aborting him, like all the other pregnant women had done. But they just couldn’t keep him and go into exile, which is understandable. Sometimes I wonder why my parents had done it. It was a hard life to live. Brad liked to tell everyone that he had been raised by wolves. But I knew the truth. A couple who lived nearby took him and raised him. When he was ten, the couple took him to a hospital and told the nurses that he was twelve. Twelve is the age when everyone goes in for the procedure—girls get hysterectomies and boys get vasectomies. The hospital had been very suspicious of this couple—why didn’t Brad have a birth certificate, a social security number? Why wasn’t he in the public school system? The couple convinced them that because of their religion, they preferred to live reclusive lives—and they had had the baby in their own home and then home schooled him. The hospital had fallen for it. They did the procedure on Brad and the paperwork was pushed through to get him a social security number.

      But Brad wasn’t like the rest of the world. He could live in the regular world and hold a regular job—but he liked to help those of us who were illegal; deep down he knew that he was illegal too.

      He cast a suspicious glance around the café and deftly slipped me a piece of paper under the table.

      The department was approved just over a year ago, Brad said, although his lips didn’t move.

      I was always impressed by his talent of talking without his lips. It probably took years of practice to ensure that no lip readers could ever spy on him.

      The department works on something called Project Red Planet.

      I snickered. Well, that’s original.

      They’ve got some super-genius scientist heading the project. Some distant relative of Einstein or something. Anyway, he’s split the department up into two groups. The first group works on the shuttle that will transport people to Mars—they’re saying the trip will take about one month. The other group is working on making Mars inhabitable. I don’t know—something about building a city underground and using solar energy and the polar ice caps. And apparently, Mars has a lot of energy resources.

      Fucking unbelievable.

      You haven’t even heard the best of it.

      I leaned forward.

      Brad smiled. He loved being the first to know everything. There are already miners on Mars. I guess the city is halfway finished.

      You mean there’s people on Mars?

      Brad nodded. And they don’t want anyone to know about it.

      How do you know all this stuff? I asked in awe.

      I didn’t doubt that Brad’s information was true. Brad had never given anyone false information. Anytime you wanted to know anything, he was the man to see. Somehow, he knew everything.

      Well, Eric, I know all—I see all—because I’m God. Does any other explanation make sense?

      I guess not.

      I took the moment to slip the piece of paper into my back pocket.

      Tell everyone at the meeting tonight about this project.

      I nodded.

      Don’t take any of them with you. At least not yet. Brad looked weary, a look I had never seen on him before. The security is very high on this project. They’re keeping an extra eye out for illegals.

      So, where am I going?

      The desert…where else?

      I let out a disgruntled sigh. Why do they always have to do their top secret shit out in the middle of nowhere?

      Of course it was a stupid comment. If I were going to build something the size of a building, I’d do it in the middle of the desert too. Nobody does anything secretive in New York.

      Brad had a sly smile on his face. Don’t worry, buddy. You won’t be lonely.

      I rolled my eyes. Brad, if you ordered me another prostitute, I don’t want to hear about it. I am not taking some hooker to live with me while I’m spying.

      I didn’t get you a hooker. He still grinned, his face turning into the face of a used-car salesman. Don’t you want to know who’s heading the shuttle project?

      Okay…who?

      Jordan Williams.

      

      My espionage training began when I was twelve. Dad had decided to start training me on my twelfth birthday (When all the other boys are losing their manhood, he liked to say).

      The farmwork continued in the summers. In the winter, my father would wake me up at five in the morning so I could jog three miles. Then came an hour of weight training. After that, boxing, karate, and any other sort of fighting I could learn. After lunch, we hit the books. My mom and dad would teach me a little bit of everything—but the main focus stayed on the United States government: the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, amendments, and any other laws and practices they thought it necessary for me to learn. It was all to prepare me for the war that would eventually come.

      All the parents of all the illegal children did it. I was about fourteen when I discovered that my parents were part of a large underground network. They all shared information—information on training and schooling. They trained and schooled, and they hoped that the young generation of illegals would grow up and overturn the government that had made us illegal, that had forced all these parents into hiding.

      When an illegal turned eighteen, he or she could become a member of the secret society. Of course we all joined; we believed in the cause just as strongly as our parents did. And we all planned to marry each other and make little illegals of our own—to carry on the tradition.

      We were known as the Reproducers.

      Nobody could tell us that we didn’t deserve to live because we were born after the law was passed. Nobody could tell us that we couldn’t have kids of our own. We would have them. And we’d make sure that we were the first people off this planet; just like the pilgrims fleeing from England, we’d free ourselves from the terrible grip of the government and start a whole new world.

      

      We held our secret meetings in a derelict parks and recreation center. Children had probably not seen the inside of this place for at least a dozen years. Brad and I had told the owner that we all just wanted to find a quiet, out-of-the-way place to hold our AA meetings. He gave us a sour look, full of pity and disgust, and told us to hold the meetings no earlier than three hours after dark. Fine. That was perfect for us.

      The night before I would leave for Nevada, about thirteen of us gathered around, seating our oversized bodies into grade school chairs. Jorge looked the most ridiculous: at six foot three, his knees nearly came to his chin, and his knuckles scraped against the shabby orange carpet.

      Good God, Jorge, Melanie chided. Put your hands in your lap. You like a damn ape.

      He frowned and curled his lanky arms, crossing them in front of his broad chest.

      You think everybody’s here? I asked no one in particular. Let’s start then. Our first order of business is the Shady Glen Retirement Home. Melanie, can you give us an update?

      She ceremoniously rose from her seat and

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