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Wednesday, February 17, 2010

How Not to Have a Good Morning

An Excerpt! I do almost apologize for not updating. New music creeping from my scattered mind, although slowly, and I still await several agents' replies. I have scrapped one of my short stories, and I am waiting for the days to become willing and mold to my desires. That means I wish I had more time to do what I want to do.

Without further ado, double-spaced for the protection of your tender eyes, here is my example of someone who knows how NOT to have a good morning.

Lem woke up early as the sky was reborn from aged navy to youthful baby blue and the sun peeked up far behind the trees and beyond the horizon. It was chilly with the lovely dampness that heralds the dawn of a warm, sunny day.

“What woke me up?” Lem wondered, groaning with stiffness.

As she leaned forward to get up, yawning, Lem's chest came into contact with something hard and pointed. Rubbing her sleepy eyes and clearing her head with a shake, she wondered if a dream still gripped her mind-—she thought she saw a blitzer holding a flayer rifle just above her stomach.

“I said, ‘let’s get going!’” the blitzer growled, jabbing Lem hard with his rifle. She sucked in her breath suddenly, for this was no dream.

Glancing quickly to the sides, Lem saw Roz and Cinta still sleeping.

“Yes, sir,” Lem answered the blitzer, standing up slowly, hands up and elbows slightly bent in the air, in the “hands up” position. She could feel his smile behind that helmet, behind her…he seemed strangely alone…

Suddenly, the SMA Junior whirled swiftly, instantaneously knocking the gun aside with her elbow and grabbing the blitzer’s arm to give it a wrenching twist. She kicked him where it hurt and began twisting his arm behind his back to take his firearm away, when he yelled out in pain and about fifteen or twenty blitzers emerged like shadow-wraiths from the brush.

Lem threw the man over onto one of his own blitzers, flinching as a buzzing shot rang out, for the blitzer's flayer had gone off into his companion's back. Protect friends first, heal enemies later. She rose her hands to the sky as they approached her, feeling the emptiness of the positive charges rushing forward to positron shove one of the nearest men into a tree. She ducked a burning flayer cartridge from the side and gave the blitzer sneaking up behind her an electron choke-hold until he fainted onto the forest floor, temporarily in lala land. Someone grabbed her leg, knocking her to her knees—-she twisted around and knocked the blitzer off his feet with a side swing from her other foot.

Not bad, she smirked proudly as she gave another shove to the left and a double kick between two blitzers to the right. Now let's get this over with. She rolled, smashing into someone's legs, straying from besides her friends in the adrenaline of sending her enemies sprawling. She couldn't remember the last time she'd fought this well...

A weapon--she needed a weapon. Before they got tired of her and decided to use theirs. Ah—-the troop’s leader had an AKL-47, a large rapid-fire flayer rifle, and it lay useless next to his hand, on the ground. Lem merely had to roll under that blitzer, around this one — she had it! Raising the AK and jerking it into electric disable mode, her finger poised to pull the trigger on the nearest target, ready to knock him out cold.

The finger never, ever, pulled.

“Hey, girl,” a harsh voice caught her attention and some movement to her left snagged the corner of her eye in its snare. The blitzers had reached Roz and Cinta while she had run around to dive for the flayer. Two blitzers held their flayer pistols pointed firmly at the still sleeping teenagers, at point blank range. “They’re set for kill,” the blitzer informed her, his hard, metal-sounding voice sending the elements of a mocking grin through his round grey helmet. “Shoot one of us and the other will shoot one of them. Fair trade, huh?”

Lem dropped the flayer immediately, the fear of the moment driving her fingers-—and suddenly fell smashed to the ground, her face in the dirt, amid hoots of laughter from the blitzers. The blitzer who’d tackled her heaved her back to her feet, her arms tightly twisted behind her back, his body close and warm through his streamlined armor.

“Let GO!!!” Lem shouted, his grip summoning a sense of desperation within her. “Or at least take a step back!”

The blitzers laughed, and Lem snarled something inappropriate. She would gladly have said more if the extra pain in her arms had not advised her to take a wiser path.

They wouldn’t be stupid enough to fire, Lem told herself, desperately searching for some encouraging idea. Stygge Diebol wants Roz and me alive…I just hope Cinta…

The blitzer by the tripod laughed in his harsh voice. “Actually, I had it set for stun the whole time. And look! I have all their weapons—-oh, and the wristband too-—right here.” He held up a two laserstaffs and a bow, and a few other items that had been in Cinta’s belt-pouch, and Lem’s pack. “We're very lucky you left the tripod to go for the gun.”

Lem sucked in her breath. She had no especially intelligent insults to hurl—-her normally full quiver of flaming darts had been crushed to her side under the distracting pressure of the blitzer holding her so close, so firmly immobile while another tied a metal cord around her wrists. Her current lack of inspiration did not stop her, however, from shooting out standard swear words both in Biouk and Grenblenian as the blitzers tightened the cord and prepared to bind Roz and Cinta. The still waters in her heart bubbled and frothed at the idea that they had been captured by a mere forty blitzers and the waters boiled over and burned her inside when she thought how gullibly stupid she had been, and how perhaps if she had awakened Roz all this would not be. If she had been a different person, the feeling inside her would have caused her to burst into frustrated tears-—but she wasn’t that kind of person. Her mouth boiled over with the unspeakable fury burning under her skin, and she stomped her foot, semi-accidentally on a blitzer’s shoe. He smacked her in the side of the head and cursed irritably.

“Let’s wake them up,” laughed the blitzer nearest Roz. “And @$*%, will you just shut up?”

“You’re ten times more of THAT than I am,” Lem shouted back. “Fight me one on one like a man, cheater, and THEN you can call me names!”

Another blitzer raised his fist to smash Cinta’s somehow still sleeping face.

“PANTOTA MIKA SIFTA!” Lem called quickly to wake Cinta and protect his cutely handsome little visage. Sometimes, that was the only thing that would get his attention.

Cinta jerked upright and instantly began speaking in jarbled Biouk indicative of his total lack of early-bird tendencies. “Jaika, where was the snake?”

“Cinta?” Jaika asked in Biouk. “Where was what snake???”

Cinta looked at her with a confused, dazed glance over the arm of the blitzer clutching him tightly around the arms and middle. “I was dreaming!” he protested.

Lem closed her eyes and struggled to find the charges in her scrambled neurons again. Reaching, reaching, controlling, wiping her mind, focusing…and an image of the AKL-47 that had gotten her into this mess. Aw, Zools, do I really need to worry about that right now?

“Let us go.” She finally ordered, channeling a wind of static charges out her mouth and towards the lead blitzer as she struggled to force her electric thoughts into his neurosystem.

If she had succeeded, this would have been the only time either SMA ever accomplished realignment under someone else’s myelin sheath. The nearly impossible electron stunt may have worked, for all she knew, for the blitzer opened his mouth instantly and spoke the beginning letters of a Grenblenian “yes”.

A strong, deep “NO!” from somewhere behind her put all hopes of escape to rest.


So lesson learned--do not sleep unprotected outside, and do not try to fight thirty men by yourself. Ask for help.

And ask me for my book!

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