SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

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This anthology includes 120 authors—who contributed 230 works totaling approximately
words of fiction. These pieces all originally appeared in 2014, 2015, or 2016 from writers who are new professionals to the SFF field, and they represent a breathtaking range of work from the next generation of speculative storytelling.
All of these authors are eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2016. We hope you’ll use this anthology as a guide in nominating for that award as well as a way of exploring many vibrant new voices in the genre.

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Undoing the cloth from his face, he squinted through the whipping dust. The plastic sheet stitched to his hood unraveled, fluttering in the breeze. “Mama?”

She answered his stare with a raised finger. Lifting his sunglasses, he glanced toward the horizon.

Heat rose from the highway, bisecting the blackened Spanish plains. The fires had been bad here. Worst he had seen. Nonstop loess and biting dust. The silt fell in the beginning, Jeanie had told him, when fireballs rained from the skies. Ejecta. By-products of the endgame, when something either struck the earth or woke up after being buried beneath its surface, spreading darkness from the unspeakable ground zero in Brazil.

Four lanes dipped into the mountains of the south. Beyond the peaks, the city of Málaga and the Mediterranean. Waves, she said, as far as one could see. Farther south, they might even spot the tip of Morocco across the strait, if the coastline had not been too ravaged by the tsunamis.

Rennie followed her finger. The feet of the mountains were bright beneath the sunlight, but the hills fell under the shade of an approaching cloud bank. Coming in fast. Dark.

Full of rain.

She squeezed his shoulder and indicated a road parallel to the highway. Past a row of disintegrated stumps—palms trees, once—a burned-out villa sat behind a wire fence. Within the ruins, a storehouse. No windows. Corrugated metal walls. Large sliding doors, wide open.

“What if one of them is inside?” he asked, blinking nervously.

“We risk it,” she replied. The sulfurous, acidic rain would burn their skin and eyes. They had to find shelter. Now. When thunder boomed, a resonant crack rolling across the billows, she pushed him from behind.

Shadows consumed the highway as they hurried over the guardrail, racing against the rains, rushing past two words painted on a concrete wall.

HOSTAL. AUTOSERVICIO.

Halfway to the fence, the rain fell, engulfing them with its stench of sulfur. Rennie sobbed as she wrenched the wire upward. He wiggled beneath, coughing against the biting air, panicking when his backpack snagged.

“Hurry, kiddo.”

As he pulled free, she slipped under and hauled him to his feet. Raindrops blistered their skin as they ran. She pulled her pistol free as they neared the storehouse, alert for movement or the famished plea of a moribund, begging them to enter.

“Go flat,” she commanded.

He swallowed his fears as he hustled behind her, the droplets singeing his arms and necks, scorching his cheeks. Wherever the rain bit him, the top layer of skin would flake off before nightfall. Because of it, they would cough for weeks.

* * *

Daylight faded as night arrived, its incoming mist enough to sting Rennie’s eyes. Inside the warehouse his toys lay at his shoes—limbless action figures, a plastic motorcycle, a deck of playing cards—yet he remained fixated on Jeanie.

She sat near the doorway, staring into the rain, her handgun in her lap. He coughed as he spooned from their last can of food. She insisted he eat the tangy-smelling fruit. Shapes in clear gel. Scent of cinnamon. Old fat.

For two nights the downpour had drummed on the roof, keeping sleep at bay. Grime coated them both, stringing and clumping her hair. She usually brushed his, but their weeks on the highways had left it bunching in places. At least the warehouse sat empty, without attic or basement for the undying to cluster. They were twice lucky. The monsters would not brave the rains.

“They used to ask me how old you were,” she said, smiling as he approached. “People on the roads, so amazed to see a baby. Not the French so much as the Spaniards. Oh, they loved seeing a child. Never another, young as you. Thankfully, most spoke English. My Spanish sucks.” She grimaced and held her side. “Stopped seeing them the year the sun came back.”

She used the barrel of her pistol to move the hair from her cheek. Rennie set the tin on the floor and pulled his knees to his chest. In her lap, the crumpled clown painting. Faceup. Dotted with raindrops.

“You were so sick that winter,” she went on, “colicky and teething at the same time. Jesus, that fever. Scared me so much, how you kept heating up. Sometimes I wonder if we should have stayed in Paris. If we should ever have tried to run.”

She placed her gun into her waistband, set the painting on the damp floor, and stood. “It’s high time I taught you something.”

She pulled out her pocketknife and the cell phone. He had discovered the mobile device in one of the vehicles when the rains stalled briefly yesterday morning. Thankfully these interiors had been free of corpses, although the vehicles held no water and none of the seats were leather. When times got rough, they could strip the leather to eat.

As he watched, she stacked pieces of a broken crate over a pile of dry wood shavings. Removing the back of the phone, she slapped the battery onto her hand.

“After you make the tinder, drive the blade into the teeth of the battery, here. See the metal connections? Drive straight in.” She pressed the blade into the battery and twisted. Sparks flew. Smoke sputtered. “Quickly now, mix the chemicals and create fire. They burn fast, so no wasting time.”

Without pausing she blew, set the sparking battery to the shavings, and leaned close. When the fire took, she sat back. They stared at the flames for a moment, together, until she dropped the spent battery. Her skin looked gray in the light. “Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You’ll find more of these batteries than you’ll ever need. More damn phones around than people.” She reached for the painting. “Carry as many as you can find. And make sure not to breathe the smoke, okay? It’s bad for you.”

He nodded.

“God, where the hell is everyone? Nobody for months . Not one person.” She turned to the ceiling, sighed, and shook her head. “Sorry, kiddo, I’m just tired. Get some sleep. As soon as the rain stops, I’ll wake you. We’ll have to risk a city.”

“But you said Málaga is days away.”

“You’re right, Málaga is too far. But we don’t have enough water. As soon as we can, we change highways, head west to Antequera.” She folded the canvas, slid it into her pocket, and led Ren to his sleeping area. “It’ll take us a day, maybe two. After that, there is another town. That’s our destination. An old town, ancient. Before the Spanish claimed it, Moors lived there. Before the Moors, Visigoths. Before the Visigoths, Romans, and before them, Phoenicians. Can’t get much older than that. If I can find enough food there, we should be able to defend it.”

“Town?”

“Ronda,” she replied, faking a smile as she fluffed his sleeping bag and motioned for him to slide in. “The town sits on a gorge, high above the plains. There is an old town and a new town, separated by a tall Roman bridge. One of the oldest bullrings in Spain is there. In fact”—she rubbed his cheek—“one of my father’s favorite writers loved the town—a man named Hemingway. Maybe we’ll find food. And survivors, if we’re lucky.”

“Who’s Hemingway?” he asked as she pulled the covers to his neck.

“I’ll tell you more after Antequera,” she said. “If moribund are there, they’ll have protected water. Hopefully we won’t have to enter the city. We may have to risk traveling at night, though, depending on the rain.”

“Will you read to me?”

“Tomorrow,” she said, and rose, checking the handgun before moving to the doorway.

Jeanie appeared ghostly as she stood, veiled, staring at the rain. Almost as if he could see through her wisp of a frame and into the downpour.

Something was wrong, he knew.

Inside her.

* * *

On the fourth day of rain he could not get her to stand up. She slumped near the doorway, crying, handgun in her lap. At least the acidic clouds had lessened, the rains no longer stung—almost as if they had purged the poisons they held. For as long as Rennie could remember, she had told him the clouds would clear, one day, and the rain would be normal. Whatever normal meant. Sometimes he found it better not to ask.

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