Grimdark Magazine Issue #8 ePUB Read online

  Contents

  From the Editor

  By Adrian Collins

  Viva Longevicus

  by Brandon Daubs

  Is the Alien Trilogy Grimdark?

  Article by C.T. Phipps

  Series Review: Acts of Caine

  Author: Matthew Stover

  Review by Matthew Cropley

  Burying the Coin

  By Setsu Uzumé

  An Interview with Dennis L. McKiernan

  Tom Smith

  Review: The Wheel of Osheim

  Author: Mark Lawrence

  Review by Matthew Cropley

  A Proper War

  By James A. Moore

  Review: Wolfenstein

  By CT Phipps

  An Interview with Jesse Bullington (Alex Marshall)

  Adrian Collins

  The Price of Honour

  by Matthew Ward

  The cover art for Grimdark Magazine issue #8 was created by Jason Deem.

  Jason Deem is an artist and designer residing in Dallas, Texas. More of his work can be found at: spiralhorizon.deviantart.com, on Twitter (@jason_deem) and on Instagram (spiralhorizonart).

  From the Editor

  Adrian Collins

  The last few months have gone by at whirlwind speed with our Kickstarter project, Evil is a Matter of Perspective: An Anthology of Antagonists, giving $44,000AUD a pretty damned good nudge. So first off the bat, a massive thank you to everybody that backed us to deliver an awesome project. To the 938 people we’ve just delivered this issue to as part of your backer packs, I’m looking forward to putting our anthology in your hands. To those that missed out, it’ll be up for pre-order around the start of 2017.

  Issue #8 has a focus on sci-fi fiction, something I feel has been a bit lacking from GdM over the first two years (can you believe it’s been two years?). I hope you enjoy Matthew Ward and Brandon Daub’s Grimdark sci-fi works as much as I did. For the fantasy lovers, we’ve of course grabbed you a piece from someone you love to read, James A. Moore.

  We’ve also decided for this issue to cut out the excerpts for this issue. We hadn’t had much positive feedback on them. If you miss them and want them back, let us know on one of our social media pages.

  And, as always, a tip of the glass to Kennet, who is undoubtedly watching us from wherever he’s gone (Valhalla gets my vote) with a grimdark grin plastered across his face. We miss you, mate.

  Enjoy GdM#8, the final issue of our second year!

  Adrian Collins

  Founder

  Connect with the Grimdark Magazine team at:

  facebook.com/grimdarkmagazine

  twitter.com/AdrianGdMag

  grimdarkmagazine.com

  plus.google.com/+AdrianCollinsGdM/

  pinterest.com/AdrianGdM/

  Viva Longevicus

  Brandon Daubs

  Parents are supposed to say they love all their kids the same but that’s a fuckin’ lie, isn’t it?

  With my kids, Nat, and Kevin… I told myself that at first, when Kev was born. I’ll love them both the same. They were the same, almost. Looked the same. Shat the same kind of load into their diapers. Nat was a little bit bigger and further along, but otherwise they might as well have been the same kid and I told myself I would love them both equally, whatever that meant. I thought I would.

  ‘We’ve got to hit the jets so our velocity matches up with the rotation of Hawen before we try to land,’ Kev said behind me. I watched the altimeter and glanced at the display that showed the slope of the putrid jungle planet below us.

  I waited until the last possible second to make the adjustment, and watched Kevin sweat in the reflection of the dark radar. His military fatigues never had fit him very well.

  ‘You were a little bitch, growing up,’ I said.

  Kevin didn’t take the bait. He only looked down at his clipboard. ‘Nat’s last transmission came from somewhere near the east edge of the basin,’ he said. ‘That area is heavily infested. I feel like I should debrief you on what we’ll be up against down there. I doubt you’ve been reading my articles on Rodentius Longevicus…’

  ‘Rats.’ I glanced over my shoulder at the rack of assault rifles and stun batons by the exit hatch. ‘Useless little rats bred for super cuteness. How bad could it be?’

  Bad, it turned out.

  But how the fuck was I supposed to know?

  * * *

  By the time Kev and I crashed the dropship through the thick jungle canopy on the east edge of the hollow known locally as The Basin, the suns of Hawen had already slipped below the horizon and left us in ass-crack darkness. Once the whine of the dynamos died down I slammed the door of the dropship open and stumbled out into the black, cursing, slapping the light on my assault rifle so it would stop flickering and I could see where the fuck I was going.

  ‘We should head to the colony,’ Kev told me. He had an assault rifle of his own, but he held it like a limp dick.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  Kev gave me that look again. ‘These people are suffering,’ he said. ‘Even if you don’t pay attention to anything else I say, you’ve heard reports of the famine. We have more rations on board than we’ll ever use. It would take us two hours tops to hike up to the ridge. They might even have information that would help us find Nat…’

  ‘I really don’t give a shit about the settlers.’ I raised a finger to point through a break in the trees toward a red-orange glow and the pillars of smoke rising from deeper in the basin. ‘And I’ve found Nat already. Our mission is get him, and get the fuck out of here. That’s it.’

  I could see it in Kevin’s face. I think he knew.

  If only anything were ever that simple.

  * * *

  Turns out Nat didn’t really want to leave when we finally found him. He and his men squatted for a smoke break in a charred clearing. Lieutenant Nat Vilhaus sat on a stump at the forefront, letting the light from the tip of his Sherman bathe a pissed-off face. The gauge on his flamethrower read pretty damn close to empty. The bags under his eyes, the slack jaw, the stubble on a heavy chin read pretty damn close to empty, too. The other guys looked just as wasted: Higgins, pale and skinny, checked a wound gouged into his arm the size of a roll of nickels; and Mathers, a hulking dolt loaded up with ammunition and a heavy beam-raker, cooked up something foul over a sad smudge of a fire.

  ‘This it?’ I called as I stepped up closer. Kev came after me. ‘I thought there were more of you faggots.’

  Nat barely turned his head.

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ he said.

  Oh, Nat. The little shit. He thought he was too old for me to punch in the face but he was wrong about that. I clocked him a good one, watched the cigarette flip out of his teeth and bounce across the dirt. He got back up, of course. Even made a grab for his K-bar when he lunged at me. I wouldn’t have expected anything less from Nat. He had balls at least. I knocked him down again.

  ‘Is that any way to greet your old man?’ I said, and I had a whole let’s forget about rat-chasing and get out of here right now speech planned, but Kevin interrupted me.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Not those. See the leaves?’

  I glanced over to watch Mathers ready to toss a few branches onto his fire. He glared at Kevin the same way I glared at Kevin, wondering whether to smack him or not.

  ‘That stuff is a powerful hallucinogen,’ Kevin went on. ‘Something in the sap. Five leaves. Blue-violet. Burn it for a good time … not when you’re surrounded by longies in the middle of the jungle. Jesus, am I the only one who knows anything about Hawen?’

  Speaking of rats.
>
  Behind Mathers, sitting up on its haunches with its forepaws dangling over a fat belly, was one of the little shits I’d only seen pictures of before. It had a downy white and dark burgundy coat with a spiral design. It looked like a puppy crossed with a rabbit and some other rodents, but mostly it looked like a regular goddam rat. Same size and everything. There must have been some magical fairy dust sprinkled in there too because the thing was fuckin’ cute.

  Except for the scar, rough against its long muzzle. Except for the jagged edge of a mostly-missing ear, or the look in its eyes—the look of a dog beaten past the breaking point.

  I raised my assault rifle and pulled the trigger.

  The thing exploded into a puff of fur and bones and meat, like a teddy bear stuffed full of fireworks. Only the back paws remained, more or less where they had been a second before, coated in red. The whole goddam thing was so funny I had to laugh. I tilted my head back and laughed, laughed until my sides hurt.

  Somewhere out in the jungle, I was answered by a scream. Long. Tortured.

  I knew there had been more men in Nat’s company.

  * * *

  ‘They would have taken him to a nest,’ Kevin said as we moved through the jungle behind Nat and Higgins. Nat clutched his flamethrower like he might have to use it on a Hydro Leviathan. Close behind him, Higgins had his thermal net-launcher out with safety off. Mathers clutched his beam-raker shaking like he had a bad case of Parkinson’s.

  ‘What’re you pukes all bent out of shape about?’ I asked. ‘They’re just fuckin’ rats.’

  ‘For the last time, they’re not just rats,’ Kevin went off, like anyone cared. ‘Rats are just what they are. Rats. They evolved through natural selection—survival of the fittest just like any other animal on Earth. Rodentius Longevicus weren’t bred. They were engineered. BioGen designed them to be the superior pet. Smart. Social. Healthy. Adaptive to any environment on any planet so they could be sold throughout the galaxy.’

  ‘Too adaptive,’ Nat muttered, more to himself than to anyone else. ‘Crop loss spiked from 20 to 99 percent in the year they wound up on Hawen. The ecosystem...’

  ‘Blah, blah, blah.’ Nat turned to glare at me, and I couldn’t help but ask, ‘Why do you care about this place, anyway? Why not just molecular bomb the whole planet?’

  Nat didn’t answer. I could see it in his eyes, though. Some cunt, probably. Some settler he shacked up with. I was ready to push it when the trees thinned and I stepped out into the weirdest goddam scene I’d ever seen in my life.

  Rats. Fuckin’ rats, everywhere. There was a carpet of them. Among the currents of little bodies moving this way and that, I noticed a stream of them, going back and forth between two grotesque shapes. The first was a marine—what was left of him, anyway—sprawled out on a slab of rock. His ribs glistened white where they poked out of an empty chest cavity. Little hands reached into him, little teeth made precision cuts, and little cubes of meat were carried out and away. Not even eaten.

  Redacre, read the tag on his fatigues.

  The second shape was another rat, but bigger. Fat. Enormously fat. It lounged on a pile of bones. From the way the others piled up meat in front of it, I got the sense that this was the Bitch Rat and the others were all men.

  Weird. Weird fuckin’ behaviour, for an animal.

  ‘Get the hell away from him!’ Nat screamed. The ocean of fur froze. Nat turned his flamethrower toward the rats chewing on Redacre and let it rip. Red-orange flames washed over the little shits and the air was filled with the stench of burning hair and barbecue. Mathers started slapping rats into the air left and right, fried, cut into chunks by the flashing prongs of his beam-raker. Higgins launched net after net of thermal wire that snatched up whole bunches of the little fuckers and crushed them into a sizzling mess.

  Kevin, though… fuckin’ Kevin just stood there, gawking. I shouldered him aside on my way forward and raised my assault rifle at the rat in the middle, too bloated to escape.

  She fixed me with her beady little eyes.

  I pulled the trigger and she exploded into chunks.

  Although… eugh. I can’t even talk about this. Little… fuckin’ pink things came spilling out of her. All over my boots. Wriggling around. Biting, even with their eyes closed. Trying to get inside. There must have been like thirty of these things and I freaked out, I’ll admit, like someone had dropped a can of roaches at my feet. I started to stomp the little shits. And the damnedest thing happened.

  Other fuckin rats started to throw themselves into the way, to get crushed instead.

  I raised my boot up again and again. Crunch. Splat. The soles were stained red. Bits of fur and God knew what kind of guts stuck to the sides. Grown-up rats kept throwing themselves into the fuckin’ way to get crushed instead. More came, and picked up the little pink things, and started to haul them off while their buddies were getting smashed.

  This was my first hint that I wasn’t just dealing with rats.

  Then I noticed some of the little bastards running out of the woods with their jaws clamped on branches of some kind of wood. Branches with five-leaf clusters. Blue and violet five-leaf clusters. They threw themselves along with the branches into the fire from Nat’s flamethrower and within seconds we were all choking, eyes watering, lungs burning, noses oozing snot.

  By the time the smoke cleared the colours of the jungle were starting to blur together and the rats were gone.

  No, not rats. Longevicus.

  And I’m not really sure what the fuck happened next.

  * * *

  I was trying to find Nat.

  The little shit. Didn’t he realize I’d launched myself 10,000 parsecs through space in a tin can to take him home? Nobody thought the Longevicus Corps was a noble calling anymore. As far as anyone knew, there wasn’t any way to stop the longies once they got to a planet and started to multiply. Hunting them down, sure. Wiping out the nests seemed to help, at first. But somehow, somehow they always came back. He was wasting his time. He was an embarrassment.

  Where the fuck had he gone?

  The trees seemed to spiral around me, seemed to bend inward and outward, seemed to breathe as I just tried to keep my feet. My assault rifle was gone. Dropped in the brush, somewhere, probably. Every once in a while, I’d realize I was drooling on myself. I only remembered my sidearm when I lumbered through a copse of trees and into a clearing, where another marine stood tall against a sky of stars, looming at the edge of a deep valley.

  I recognized this marine. Captain Andrew Vilhaus… my Old Man. What was he doing here? There seemed to be a settlement down in the valley below him, a cluster of colony pods sunk into the dirt… pods I hadn’t seen since I was a little kid.

  They glowed with fire.

  ‘You’re right, you know,’ said the captain. He turned toward me and I saw a face like mine, grey stubble, haunted eyes. ‘You don’t love all your kids the same. It’s not that you can’t. It’s just that, after a while, you realize they don’t all deserve it.’

  I watched the flames consume the dwelling pods in the valley down below.

  ‘If I could’ve left you in that fire instead of your sister, I would have,’ the captain went on. Like I didn’t already know. Like I didn’t think of that every goddam day of my life.

  I drew my sidearm. The flash from the muzzle bright against the darkness left a spot in my vision but I still saw the Old Man go down.

  After that, I don’t remember much. More stumbling around. Slapping brush aside. Shouting nonsense. There was some crying, yes, crying too. Shitting my pants, even, maybe. They never tell you how many marines shit their pants in the heat of battle with all the noise and the screaming and the blood and thinking any second they might catch one in the back of the head and all I heard the whole time was gunfire, gunfire all around me.

  Finally the whatever-it-was began to clear from my system and I pushed through a wall of leaves to find another marine, lying d
ead. Shot.

  Between the eyes.

  He wasn’t alone. Nat and Kevin stood beside him. Mathers was there, too, sweating like a rhino in heat. They looked up at me. They looked at my sidearm, still out and clutched tight in one fist. I glanced down at the dead marine again and realized why they looked so pissed.

  It was Higgins.

  ‘He came at me,’ I lied. ‘He’d lost his mind. How long have you fuckers been out here, anyway? You’ve all turned into savages.’

  There was mumbling. A few sideways glances. They weren’t buying it. I know Kev didn’t. He gave me that same cold look he’d been giving me since he was just a little shit.

  He didn’t speak up, though.

  Too fuckin’ scared. As usual.

  * * *

  By the time we finally returned to the dropship, the thing was surrounded by settlers.

  ‘Shit! They’re back!’ one of them called, and another dropped a sad, mostly empty crate of supplies to whip six inches of pipe out of his belt. It certainly wasn’t a gun, whatever the fuck they thought it was. Several crates were loaded into the craft already, and there were more people in there, too. Some woman so thin she didn’t look like she would survive a solid fuck, and some geezer too old to wipe his own ass.

  I raised my sidearm.

  ‘Wait!’ Nat shouted, as he came out of the brush behind me.

  I didn’t wait. I pulled the trigger. You don’t survive 25 years of service by waiting. And Nat, the stupid little fuck, dared to ram me with his shoulder. Bullets ricocheted off the sides of the dropship and more settlers crawled out of the brush like roaches. They raised their own crackhead weapons to return fire, just as Mathers and Kev stumbled out of the jungle behind us.