Challenge: The Rewrite

I hate immediately rewriting.  Well, perhaps not hate, but just… can’t do it.  When I write something, especially something that I like, it’s a huge release of energy when it’s finished.  I know there’ll be things wrong with it, but I just won’t be able to go back and change them straight away.  Sometimes I can’t even read what I’ve written for a few days because it’s still so fresh in my mind, and my brain takes over and dictates over the top of what my eyes are reading.

When I come back after a while though, well, I almost seem to enjoy it.  Tweaking and tightening up loose ends and sloppy sentences.  Making it even better than I remembered.  It feels good to have that distance from the piece and look at it with a view of “This is what will make it good”.  Objectiveness, I guess.

The following is one of the first short stories I wrote after deciding I’d like to try creative writing as more than an outlet for games.  It was after a dangerous drive home, it was just before midnight and I was extremely tired, and I didn’t finish until 2am and promptly fell unconscious in my chair.  It’s flagrantly different to my usual style of writing, but it’s the grand-daddy of a setting that to this day I am still excited to think about writing when I get the narrative chops to do so.  I actually only had hard copies of this piece left, and spent a few nights last week transcribing it to my laptop.  I’m sure we still have the computer I originally wrote this on, but I’ve no idea where it is at this current moment.

There’s a lot that needs adjusting and rewriting in this piece, and I’m not quite sure where to start.  But in a few weeks, I’m going to have it shipper and shaper than it’s ever been.

-Anthony

Idenbra (original draft 2006)

Now see, this is why I don’t do bloody scav runs.

Tide sires wailed out ten minutes past, and my employer, quotation parenthetical and derision implied, is still sifting through a pile of rubble, once a library or archive or somesuch, nigh on gibberish in his frenzied scrabbling.  I would have left the snout-faced junkhead in my tracks five clicks past, but the bastard strictly promised Pee Oh Dee, and the only thing worse than dieing out here is not getting paid.

Plus he’s still a mate, which apparently counts for something.

“Gimme two more!” he yells from within the man-unmade crater.  “This could be genuine!”  Jen-you-whine with his Yankton drawl.

“What’s going to be genuine are our impending demises if you don’t hurry yourself along.”

There’s snoutrise over the rubble.  He pulls his damn stupid hat off his brow, giving me a trusting look that places responsibility solely on me and mine alone.  “Nothing fearing!  Sirens called only two-“

“Ten.”

“-minutes ago, and I have the rabbithole’s best getaway chauffeuring me home.”

He winks, a private joke with himself, and ducks back down out of sight.  Shake my head, pump the clutch twice to keep her warm.  That’s me alright – the only, and consequently best, working driver for this rabbithole.  Too many yahoos burned themselves out over the years, the profession slammed down on by magistrate jacks.  If there’s to be couriering of any kind, they said, caterpillar moustaches wiggling with indignation, it can be seen to by the sufficiently equipped and capable federal trains.  Ticked off a lot of the pilots, put a few families on welfare, or what passes for it out here.  There were pickets, protests, but there ain’t no use of a strike for folk who don’t work anymore  Truth is, most of them were a danger unto themselves – only reason I’m still alive when most of them ain’t is I didn’t take their unnecessary risks.

That’s the secret to success around here.  Let every other hoon call the percentages and take their chances.  You just take the safe way home and learn to make the unnecessary easier on your time out.

“Jaxon!  My lead’s pushing the pedal by the count of twenty, regardless of the number of passengers it’s accommodating.”

“Two more!  I’ve… just… about..”

Thump.

“Got it!”

“Great.  Now move.”

He ambulates up the rocks.  I’d berate him for taking his sweet time, but the strain is evident from the perspiration on his face, and the curio in his hands looks like no lightweight.

“What in sweet glory is that?” I ask as he dents my passenger cabin with his generous rear end.  There’s a faint whine, then the smell of ethanol, and the wasted decay of a civilisation past is left behind in the vast sinkhole of red sand.

“Genuine artefact, Id!  Weighs a ton, could be solid iron by the looks.  That’s some shitsweet rarity of a-“

“Worth something to a smelter, then.”

The look he gives me should be withering, but borders more on the petulant.  “This could date back as far as 20Cad, which would make it-“

“Worth more intact.  Looks a little fragile, with all those moving bits.”

“All the more reason for you not to knock on it like that.  Look, on the side.”

“What the hell’s a tie-pee-righ-ter?” I ask, glancing at the engraving on the side.  Old letters, almost didn’t recognise them.  Eyes back on the sand.

“Honestly?  I’ve no idea.”

“Hope it’s worth it to you then.”

It’s quiet for a while.   I figure of the tides didn’t come through every sunround, I’d spend my every moment out here, absorbing the silence.  It’s the kind of nothingness that fills a man.  Lets him look in himself without the clutter of anything else.

“How long ago did you say-“

“Fifteen minutes.”

“So we’re still at least five clicks afore the tide.”

“Yeah.”  I don’t bother him with the details plastered on the broadcast boards every man, woman and child has beared witness to.  The appraisal and subsequent inquests into the Forecase Agency.  Inaccuracies of up to a hundredclick for tidal predictions.  Agent Jon Fwissam, the latest federal  casualty lost to the storm, an entire township’s worth of ethanol lost, left to stew in the sand.

For all I know, we could find our-

There’s a tingle through the steering column, a precautionary alert that casus a catch in the throat.  I’m already looking at the LED atop my boat’s mast before the squealing starts.  The signal turns red.  I flick a switch just as quickly as the alarms started, the siren strangled midcry.

“What?  No, no, I just said we’ve got at last five more-“

“Seems the world don’t want to wait for you Jaxon.”

I can already see the storm brewing along the rear-view bar.  It’s only a shadow on the horizon now, but soon enough it’ll be rolling rght over us.  Jaxon’s contorted in a half-spiral, lap pinned to the chair by his leadweight antiquity, eyes nailed to the line of turgid black.  It’s not so quiet anymore.

The prow of the boat slices through red, the sand throwing up a cloud out back, black particles floating where the burners skim too close to the surface.  I release he catch-alls, the half-circle shells unfurling along the mast.  We may look as unwieldy as the SydOp House, but the wind now serves more use than just a whistle – not much of a boost compared to the eth-burners that run this skiff, but more of an edge than without.

“Sweet Alice look how fast it moves.”

“Make yourself useful.”  I toss the comm.-unit at him.  “We’ll need the rabbithole’s shield doors down if we want to get inside.”

“But they wouldn’t be up, they know we’re out here-“

“And they know that’s coming.”

“Shit shit shit,” he fumbles.  “Forecast this is Jaxon Ridley, Forecast this is-“

“Station Sparewood, we receive you Ridley.”

“We’re coming in with the tide on our arses, and hope you’re keeping the welcome mat out for us.”

“Ridley, we advise you make Shelter West One.  The shield are powering up within your estimated arrival.”

“We can’t make Shelter West, it’s on the other bloody side of the city!”

“The shields are coming up in four clicks, and your nav-cord puts you out beyond that time frame.  The Agency cannot risk waiting any longer.”

“Tell them to give us one click longer,” I say, watching the tide race behind us.  The black swirls, turgid and chaotic, spilling over itself to claim whatever lies in its path.  The keening wail of the wind shearing through the black waves is already audible.

“You won’t make the gates in time,” I hear crackle through the speaker in Jaxon’s hand.

“We’ll make it, if those doors are open for one minute longer.”

“Sweet sweet damnation, Forecast, you can’t leave us out here!” Jaxon paraphrases.

There’s onlt the hiss of intereference for a moment, and then, “Affirmative.”  The line cuts out.

“Does that… do they… are they going to…”

“We’re about to find out.”

I wing us right and up the slope towards Sparewood.  The skiff’s already running a mite slower with Jaxon’s clunked-up piece of shite weighting us down.  Behind, the screech of the tide hurtling over desert sands steadily gets louder.  By now we can see the dark bulges, a landbound storm that eats both the sand and sky.  Already the day grows dark, a premature nightfall that will only last a few clicks at most.  Rarely do we see a cloud in the sky that blots the sun as effectively as the tide.

Up the hilltop, the walls of home.  Sparewood.  The metal is scratched black, day after day of the tidal winds hurtling past.  Already the translucent blue of the shield doors are starting to creep up, a spherical growth, sterile and indomitable.  Only the technology of these domed shields makes settlements like Sparewood possible, a haven safe from the daily storms.

Also making my job that little bit tougher.

“They’re already going up!  Id!, the doors!”

We’re angling up the slope now.  Sand is kicking over our heads, a red cascade creating our own dome, parted only by the carch-aled mast and Jaxon’s ridiculous hat.  It’s a spectacular feat of millinery function that the piece has remained atop his head the whole time.

The keening wind is now accompanied by the cried and howls of the inhuman, caught in the rip and pull of the tide.  Not all living can remove themselves from the rolling storm’s path, and few enough of those that don’t are left to live the torment of being pulled through its current, unable to walk their own path anymore.  Some say it’s not so much the wind that will kill you, but what it carries upon it.

“Now promise me you won’t panic when I tell you this,” I say to Jaxon, even as I begin to steer the column right and back down the slope.

“What, where, where are we going?”

“We’re on the east slope, Jaxon.  We have to take the switchback.”  I can feel his eyes widen as he looks at me, and then looks down the slope.

“No no no no Id no take the ravine you can make it Id-“

“No jump, Jaxon.  In this wind we take the switchback.”

“You’re crazy!  Id, we’re gonna drive right back into the tide!  Take the ravine, for sweet sake!”

“That as may be, we won’t make the jump.”  To further dissuade argument, I pull the column right, perhaps more violently as needed, and jerk the pined Jaxon into his cabin side.

We’re now angled back down the slope, the switchback only a short respite before the climb back up to Sparewood.  The ravine, unseen but only metres away, was the bright idea of some jack official generations ago, acting as a catchment for the unwanted terminals caught in the tides wake, so as to minimise casualties of both civilian and federal conscience.  Having to peel the burnt flesh of lost souls caught against the shield walls after tide would have no doubt been a revealing and mortifying job.  To risk sickness of the flesh is one thing, but of conscience, to know that what you’re chopping and scraping was once a living, breathing beat, even man, is one most could live without.

“Id.  Id.  We’re going- Id!”

“I know,” I mutter, though I doubt he hears me.  The storm has rolled forward, devouring the vast expanses of blue and red.  It’s night that we look into now, not broad daylight as it should be.  The shriek of the black wind is symphonised to the cracking of stone, the squawking of beasts.  It is mostly black cloud we watch, jumping erratically forward, pulsating to almost be breathing, but amongst there is the limb of a man, the gnashing of a snout.  The wind is stringing across our faces and arms, and where sand scratches at our skin a strange tingle surfaces that, from experience, I know will burn unholt for days, if they are to come for us at all.

A creature unknown to me bursts out of the rolling black, close enough now to see its eyes rolled back into its skull, flapping madly through the air.  It dives right for our skiff, propelled either by the burning gushes behind, or its  own crazed bid for freedom, I don’t know.

“Id, dude, dude, dude dude dude,” is all Jaxon can say, forever watching the black eternal coming for us, his measure getting faster and more frantic.  He points to the incoming projectile, and it’s all I can do to swerve the column left, veering from the switchback path.  The crazed creature, leathery wings spiralling uncontrolled, erupts into raucous screeching as it plunges into the middle catch-all sail, and filters out and back into the approaching tide.

“Dude, dude, dude,” continues Jaxon of his mantra, though I can only keep my eyes on the sand in front.  Any second now we’ll have the corner to his the path back up the slope and towards the homestretch.  The shield doors of Sparewood are almost halfway up now, and if ever I cut it closer I feel I would have bled.  I chance one look into the swirl of the maelstrom, only hundreds of metres away now and approaching faster than any other means of dieing I have known, and know now that there is another nothingness that can fill a man, and it is not a quiet one.

“Get ready to ditch it,” I yell above the thunderous wails.  I can feel the relief in Jaxon as I hit the steering column hard further left, back up the slope and past the switchback, as much as I sense the reluctance in his look.

“What?” he yells above the roar.

“That,” I indicate to his archeological find.  Even if I could wish this boat to go faster it wouldn’t be enough to quell the sick feeling inmy stomach.  The waterfall of red sand is once again scooping over our heads, falling from the catch-alls and swirling into the black devil chasing at our heels.  “I say when, it goes overboard!”

The blue of the shield doors is all but full now, the dome around the cityscape complete.  Only the barest of mouths at the station door remains, inevitably closing tight.  Barely a handful lengths away.  Stomach tightens up again.  “But-“

“Now!”

With an effort born of, well, I don’t know what, Jaxon pushes his arms and legs up, hauling his solid iron find up and overboard, as at the same moment I snap back the catch-alls, the sails snapping full in the wind.  Without the weight of the contraption in Jaxon’s lap, the boat’s burners leap forward, and as if the atmosphere had just turned to liquid, the boat bouyants up and into the air, soaring without any semblance of ease or grace.

This is the first time, and I pray last, any of my rides ever become airborne.

The barest of gaps to fit half the skiff through, I hear metal rip and supports shatter along the hull as they tear along the uncompromising shield doors.  A thunderous snap as the mast breaks in half and tears out the decking and half of my cabin.  Still we’re airborne, one burner crunching and blasting, cut as the last of the shield door seals up against the rest of the translucent dome.  All around now is the steel runway of the Sparewood Forecast docking station, and I can hear the wail of the tide banging and scraping along the city protected.  We’re no longer outside, but still we hurtle forward, uncontrollable.

These few moments borne on broken wings of metal and timber are horrifying, and I have all too much time to look at the solid ground below and think,

‘I bet this is going to hurt.’

Filed under: challenge