Phil Elmore's Page

With a jolt and that familiar, sickening tang that feels like chewing aluminum foil, the arm came online. Power flooded the limb and with it came the nausea and light-headedness. I closed my eye, the optics in my left socket whirring away, the bolt gun strapped to my shoulder clacking home on an empty chamber.



“Do you mind?” the indignant tech squalled. You would think they’d get used to it, though I suspect I’d be similarly nervous with the floating red blob of laser light… Continue

The white Mercury Sable rolled to a halt in front of The Galleries of Syracuse, neglected brakes grinding with shrill insistence. Laughlin bumped the curb, cursed, and shifted into park, jabbing the switch to roll down his window automatically. From the next block he could hear a cover band playing loudly and badly. People milled about in Clinton Square and in adjacent streets closed for the annual Flavor of Salt City festival. He saw fat locals carrying plastic cups of beer, slim… Continue

The fighter skipped like a stone across the cracked and arid landscape, wings trailing flame and debris. It left a scar in the baking, barren soil half a kilometer long. Strewn in its wake was detritus that would, if gathered and arranged with care, comprise most of Lieutenant Daniel Keeney.



The nose and cockpit from the pilot’s chair forward were largely intact. They lay canted at thirty degrees as the metal skin and plastic viscera of the once graceful craft cooked in the sun. To… Continue

Come morning, the old cabin was a lumpy pile of ash layered on smoldering coals. A few broken, charred beams poked through the cinders. To Lawrence Keeney they looked like the gnarled hands of a doomed man, a man reaching for what he can’t have.



Keeney scoffed at his own morbid, poetic turn of mind. He turned away from the home in which he’d lived for almost thirty years, the home he’d built with his own two hands, the home he himself had burned deliberately in the night. Then, still… Continue