"Seventy-One and Counting" from Project Mayhem

As those who read this blog may know by now, my first anthology as a solo editor, Mouldwarp Press Presents #1 "Project Mayhem" was released last week.  I mentioned that my own contribution, "Seventy-One and Counting," and I figured I'd share it with you (one out of fifteen micro fiction stories shouldn't spoil too much):

From the files of Nigel Wolfe:

 

The crew of the Laramee had been subsisting on tasteless rations and equally uninspiring fish on the small rocky island off the coast of Maine for weeks.  Some of them were convinced that it had been months.  They’d had no contact with the outside world in that time.  The Calamity was still going on around them, but it no longer felt real.  The only thing that was real to them now was basic survival instinct, a weird perversion of what the rest of humanity was feeling.

     J came to them as if by some miracle.  Her small craft hovered into the same sand that had been cooking the heels of their feet.  Today we know J as the founder of our covert operations, but at that time she was just another member of the resistance against the Danab invasion.

     She took a measured path to the crew’s rescue.  If they were brought back too quickly, it would be a greater shock than anything they had so far endured.  There were six of them, six survivors, and not one of them knew that in the time they had been away, humanity’s fortunes had drastically improved, the intervention of the greater galactic community finally come.

     Yet J’s plan crumbled the moment she could no longer hide her own illness from them.  The crew recognized it and took her into their own.  She thought she’d failed them, but they proved her wrong.

     The crew brought J home.

So, not too long.  It's part of my Space Corps saga, as I said before.  I've been writing a lot of short stories based on it in recent days, most recently a submission to Big Pulp, and for some reason I keep revisiting the same time period, which hasn't until now actually been featured other than in my own personal timelines, the big conflict known as the first Danab War, when humans not only enter the intergalactic community for the first time thanks to an apocalyptic invasion, but meet the foes featured prominently in Seven Thunders (my WIP) and a few other books in the developing saga.

"Seventy-One and Counting," including the title, is exactly 250 words, meaning that you shouldn't expect any story to take longer to read than that in Project Mayhem.  It's a short anthology filled with extremely short stories, but with some really good writing.  Feel free to avail yourself of the pertinent link of your choosing on the right to get yourself a copy.  The paperback's really cheap, because it's such a small book, and the ebook is the minimum that Kindle allowed me to price it.  I'll be having a number of free promotional days in the months to come, but don't wait around for them!