Today is the official launch date of MARTIAN GOODS & OTHER STORIES by Noelle Campbell. MG is the debut full-length book release of my new publishing company, Skyrocket Press. So I am very, very excited!
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Noelle Cambpell
Skyrocket Press
Adult - Sci/Fi
On a barren world where air is priceless and women are bought and sold, one man longs for love, but is she worth the price?
In this collection of short stories by science fiction author Noelle
Campbell, Mars is the new frontier where men stake their claims for a
new life. But some commodities are harder to come by than
others--including women, who are often willing to sacrifice everything
to escape an Earth that is no longer free.
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Excerpt:
VAN
GOGH 2
T
|
he
room was functionally square and sterile. The absence of smell made the
whiteness of the walls, drawers, and tables bearable. The doctor sat alone on his
elevated chair, his back turned toward the screen that flashed the results of
the daily test.
“I
told you not to do it,” his wife’s voice said. He could almost feel her warm
breath on his ear as she spoke in hard, angry tones. His own breath was coming
quicker. He could see his chest rise and fall as he looked down at his hands in
his lap.
He
thought he saw the dark, red fabric of her dress in the corner of his eye and
turned slightly to avoid the sight of it. She had loved red. She always looked
good in red, but it was so distracting, like her breath. “Are you listening to
me?” she asked.
He
shook his head in a tight, shivering motion, careful not to look away from his
hands or shift his head to where he had seen the red of her dress.
“I
told you I didn’t want to be here. You knew that Mars would never really be
home to me. I told you before I got sick that I wanted to go home.”
His
brow furrowed, and he covered his ears.
“That
isn’t going to work.” Her voice pierced through his cupped hands without even a
muffled echo. “You made me promise I would never leave you. So this is your
fault.”
Removing
his hands from his lap had left him nothing on which to focus. The dark shadow
of red in the corner of his eye grew larger and more distracting. His breath
came in gasps, the blood pounding in his ears behind his wife’s voice.
“Do
you know what the worst part of this is,” she started again, “outside of the
fact that you essentially killed your entire family and made yourself mentally
ill?” Her voice bore into his brain. It was never shrill. Still the same
alto-esque woman’s voice that carried emotion in careful, measured tones he
wished weren’t quite so…convincing. “—is that you kept on resurrecting them
only to kill them again. That was all you were doing with the clones: killing
us over and over again.”
He
squeezed his palms over his ears until his fingernails dug into the flesh
behind them.
“What
did you tell them when they asked you where your wife was?”
He
stopped breathing for just a moment, and then renewed it in a gasp. “I said I
killed you.” His voice echoed in his head, and the baritone rumbled through the
room.
“Excuse
me, Doctor?” a voice, not here, asked. It was muffled, but he swiveled toward
it, his eyes falling on his android medical assistant. It had a face, even if
it was generic. It had eyes, a nose, mouth, and ears. Its chin rounded the oval
shape of its head. There was no hair, no further attempts to make it look more
like a human. “I didn’t understand the direction.”
The
doctor looked beyond the android to the table stocked with equipment: laser
scalpel, forceps, tweezers, sample containers, clippers, blades, cloning kits.
Everything he needed and more.
“Scalpel,”
he said and the droid carefully handed it to him.
He turned
it on, adjusting the length and width of the blade.
“Don’t
you dare,” his wife’s voice said. “Thomas Aegis Miller, don’t you dare cut me again!”
The
doctor swiveled in his chair, facing the corpse lying prone on the table. There
was a deep red stain on the fabric beneath it that kept drawing his eyes to the
spot. A thin red line circumscribed her forehead.
“I’m
sorry, Jane,” he whispered, holding up the scalpel.
“No
matter how many times you bring me back here and cut me open, it won’t change
anything.”
He
shook his head, the laser still hovering over her face.
“You
can cut me a million times, but you will never stop my voice!”
He
shook his head harder.
“Do
you need assistance, Dr. Miller?” the android asked, coming closer to help.
Thomas
Miller spun on his chair and struck out at it, letting the laser slice through
its head. Circuits sputtered as part of it fell away. A moment later, the droid
fell to the floor, non-functional.
“That
didn’t solve anything,” his wife’s voice said.
Thomas
shook his head again, sobbing.
“You
make a mess of everything. Who is going to clean this up now? Hmm? I hope you
don’t expect me to do it. This isn’t my home. I told you I want to go home.”
Thomas
grabbed his left ear with one hand, bending it away from his head, and started
to slice it free with the scalpel in his other hand. There was pain, but it was
a relief, a reminder that he was alive, even if he was going insane with the
voice of his dead wife constantly in his ears. Having no ears at all should
solve that problem.
There was no blood left behind as the laser
cauterized the wound.
“What
do you think you are doing?”
He
looked at the severed ear in his hand.
“Who
do you think you are? Pablo Picasso?” his wife asked.
He let
go of the ear, and it fell to the floor with a muffled thud beside the android.
Disappointed he could still hear, but especially that he could still hear his
wife’s voice, he grasped his other ear, ground his teeth, and steeled himself
as he shouted, “It was Vincent Van Gogh!”
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