Shoggoths in Traffic and Other Stories, page 1
Contents
A DIFFERENT KIND OF PLACE
SPURN BABYLON
SHOGGOTHS IN TRAFFIC
DEATH'S DREADLOCKS
BRICKOMANCER
FOUR EYES
TRINKETS
THE PLACEMENT AGENCY
SUNDOWN
THE SCAR THAT STAINS RED THE GULCH
TIDES
THE WIDOW'S CUT
ON THE EVE OF THE FALL OF HABESH
THE SEAFARER
THE BONEYARD
WHEN ALL WAS BRILLIG
THE EMPEROR AND HIS TOTALLY AMAZING, AWESOME CLOTHES
MR. SKIN'S HEART
THAT FARAWAY KINGDOM
THE ALIEN FROM VERAPAZ
THE SUGGESTION
THE ATHEIST AND THE ANGEL
ZOMBIE CAPITALISM
STORY NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PUBLICATION HISTORY
SHOGGOTHS
IN TRAFFIC
AND OTHER STORIES
TOBIAS S.
BUCKELL
FAIRWOOD PRESS
Bonney Lake, WA
Praise for Tobias S. Buckell and for
SHOGGOTHS IN TRAFFIC
“Tobias Buckell’s speculative fiction is a revelation: honest and wry, characters and situations fresh and unexpected, all the action my ADHD soul craves, proudly Caribbean to the core, and every so often, moments of sheer human vulnerability so poignantly expressed it brings tears to my eyes. Enjoy.”
Nalo Hopkinson, SFWA Grand Master
author of Midnight Robber and Sister Mine
“Incisive, thought-provoking, and profound, Shoggoths in Traffic is an astounding collection of wonders by one of the finest practitioners of short form science fiction and fantasy working today.”
John Joseph Adams, series editor of
The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy
“World Fantasy Award winner Buckell delivers a collection of speculative shorts that are both timely and timeless. These 24 subversive, bite-sized pieces explore an array of settings and tones and excel in convincing readers to look at the world from new perspectives . . . Most captivating are the stories that offer unique spins on current events: the pandemic response is turned on its head in “A Different Kind of Place” when a zombie outbreak forces the residents of a small town to debate whether or not to put up a wall or get a vaccine to protect themselves. And in “The Alien from Verapaz,” ICE raids a day care to take in the children of an alien superhero, El Fantastico. Buckell shows his chops in a range of subgenres with a keen focus on diversity and humor. Even the busiest readers will find it easy and worthwhile to take a few minutes out of their day to dip into this collection.”
Publishers Weekly
“An enigmatic cover heralds the best start ever to riveting storytelling. Opening with ‘A Different Kind of Place,’ a zombified San Fontaine and fuckwit antivaxxers, you quickly get Tobias S. Buckell’s distinct voice in subversive text that’s also a curiosity. Shoggoths in Traffic and Other Stories is the darkest, the most fun Black writing you’ll ever read. Buckell draws from his Caribbean roots in ‘Spurn Babylon’ and steps the reader into a strong sense of place inside an ancient slave ship with its black characters questing for a new future.
“The theme story ‘Shoggoths in Traffic’ stuns a pair of car thieves and the reader with a time-travelling wizard rocking a bikie vibe in a carnage of traffic, unrouteable in his quest to save a patterned universe. The deeply unsettling ‘Death’s Dreadlocks’ and its Old Ma unveils the eeriness of friendship and the power of story. Meet a demon-possessed Karen in a novel story ‘Brickomancer,’ where policing takes its own turn, and find how running over a white girl in ‘Four Eyes’ opens up a taxi driver to a whole lot of weird.
A third into the collection, you know how much you love this shit. This book is ace. It’s ribboned with Patreon deliciousness and titillating stories from an award-winning author who dexterously borrows from the everyday to slip the reader into other worlds and the occult. Buckell is knowledgeable in a nerdy sort of way as he tackles racism, vaccination, otherness, togetherness, even deadness . . . with a diverse cast of orphans, single mothers, communities, immigrants, taxi drivers, shamans, entities in the city grid, and more.”
Eugen Bacon
Aurealis Magazine
ALSO BY TOBIAS S. BUCKELL
Novels
Crystal Rain
Ragamuffin
Sly Mongoose
Arctic Rising
Hurricane Fever
Halo: The Cole Protocol
Halo: Envoy
The Trove
The Tangled Lands (with Paolo Bacigalupi)
A Stranger in the Citadel
Collections
Tides From the New Worlds
Nascence
Mitigated Futures
Xenowealth: A Collection
It’s All Just a Draft
SHOGGOTHS IN TRAFFIC AND OTHER STORIES
A Fairwood Press Book
November 2021
Copyright © 2021 Tobias S. Buckell
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
First Edition
Fairwood Press
21528 104th Street Court East
Bonney Lake, WA 98391
www.fairwoodpress.com
Cover image © Dabeen Lee (A. Shipwright)
Cover and book design by Patrick Swenson
ISBN: 978-1-933846-18-7
First Fairwood Press Edition: November 2021
Printed in the United States of America
For Emily
A DIFFERENT KIND OF PLACE
AFTER THE ZOMBIE outbreak in San Fontaine was put down, Zadie treated herself to a new hair color as a way to get away from constantly watching the news. At the Clip-n-Curl, a modest house turned into a salon tucked away behind the gray and green brick building of Zippy’s Pizza, the conversation took a turn for the oh-shit-really? when Carla loudly announced she would not allow anyone in her family to get the vaccine.
“It’s full of mercury,” she said. “And all sorts of other chemicals.”
It was like someone tossed a stink bomb into the middle of the salon.
Not that the ladies, and occasionally Phillip, were averse to talking politics. The Clip-n-Curl might not be an overly functional barbershop with clipper buzz and Fox News blaring away on the flat screen, but the Clip-n-Curl hosted some of the more intense round tables in the town regarding the topics of the day.
But San Fontaine was just a few hundred miles down the interstate from Chester. Zadie wasn’t in the mood. She wanted to get away.
Abigail Jones, eighty years young and getting purple highlights in her ghost-white hair, looked up. Her eyes glinted with—Zadie wasn’t sure—anger, or possibly disgust. Abby was eighty, she didn’t pull punches. She had a tattoo on her right bicep, a shield and something in Latin. Someone told Zadie it said “don’t let the bastards grind you down.” Abigail Jones said what she thought and if you were on the other end of it . . .
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Abby said.
Carla, forty years old, frequent volunteer at the annual fish fry for the town beautification committee, member of the garden club, and mother of three, returned the dagger stare. Zadie and the two stylists, Eva and Whitney, were just bystanders.
“The government’s in bed with those pharmaceutical companies. I mean, this company that makes the vaccine, did you ever hear of it before all this?”
Zadie knew the conversation that was incoming with all the certainty of an infantryman hearing the whistle of an incoming shell. Abby, a retired professor who had traveled the world, would explain there wasn’t any goddamn mercury in the vaccine. Carla would counter by talking about the model Onisha, whose kid had some sort of palsy that appeared right after the vaccine was administered and now campaigned against it. Abby would ask if Carla wanted someone in her family to turn into a zombie. Carla would talk about that one kid who had been Turned after he’d been bitten just the day after getting the vaccine. Abby would talk about herd immunity.
So Zadie, tired, nerves slightly ragged from a lack of sleep from staying up all night to watch CNN, politely interrupted. “It’s a public-private partnership.”
The two women turned to face her. “What?”
“The company, it was created by the government to pass the vaccine around, but the CDC found the vaccine.” She’d seen a report on MSNBC. Apparently the company had then tripled the price of the vaccine. The CEO was living in a floating offshore cruise ship with a private security force.
No worries about a zombie wandering into his living room.
Carla didn’t take too kindly to the interruption or the correction. She doubled down. And suddenly Zadie was in the middle of an exhausting verbal fight about whether the vaccine caused palsy. How was it, she wondered, that Carla was the one getting more and more upset at Zadie when it was Carla that just announced out of the blue her strong opinion?
Some folk didn’t see their opinion as opinion, but after they surrounded themselves with their beliefs mistook them for common sense. And most folk didn’t want to argue like this, so they just quietly suffered through a tirade, like the two stylists were.
But speak up and suddenly you were such a bitch.
Zadie ended it by laughing, crossing her arms, and saying “Well, when you’re trying to chow down on Rick like he’s a half-off steak from Gina’s Deli, I won’t give a shit because I got the jab.”
And that finally cut Carla down because she mumbled something about agreeing to disagree, paid up, and left.
Everyone pretended nothing had happened and moved conversation on to the new development on the edge of town. It was double gated, and rumor was that someone on the village council was going to move in.
The houses were gaudy monstrosities and way overpriced.
On Friday, Zadie got an email to go see the superintendent over in the high school building. Shit. Someone had noticed her hair color and complained, she figured. So she packed up at lunch and crossed the road to walk the four blocks to her destination, past the post office and dry cleaners, waving to a few folk who passed in minivans or pickups.
Zadie loved Chester. She hadn’t when she was in school there. Her mother, an immigrant from Trinidad, had met her father a few towns over. He’d left one night to go pick up a six pack of Coors and just keep riding on past the Spin Thru with the beer cave until he ended up somewhere in Montana a week later, leaving them all alone in a leaky trailer on the edge of town. One of their neighbors blew his convertible van up because he was cooking meth. The other raised chickens and rabbits.
Zadie’s mom worked like someone possessed. Zadie had wondered if it was some first-generation immigrant hoodoo. Everyone she’d ever met who had an immigrant parent said they were like that. She’d never appreciated it as a child, but as an adult now Zadie wouldn’t have worked three jobs and every weekend. Couldn’t hardly imagine it. Let alone the sort of back-breaking cleaning that her mom did day in and day out. Izelda had been a force of nature.
By middle school, they’d moved to Chester. Izelda had saved enough to change location. Better school. Walkability. “Everyone there smiles,” she’d said. And all her cleaning clients spoke so highly of Chester.
And everyone did smile. But there was a certain distance, and Zadie had never been sure if it was the fact that she was brown-skinned, a child of a single parent who cleaned people’s toilets, or if it was just simply that she wasn’t someone who had been born in the town from day one.
But Zadie had missed Chester. Missed walking down to the grocery store with its limited selection and walking back with her grocery bags on each arm. Missed filling up a prescription on her way to the post office. Missed the half mile of antique stores along Main Street and the weary tourists driving out from the big city on the weekends to go hunting for something “real” and “authentic” to clutter-charm their million-dollar apartment’s entry way with.
So she was back to teach third graders math—before their elders taught them that football was the way out of the small town, instead of an accounting degree—and reading before it became labeled “uncool.”
Standing outside what used to be the principal’s office made her feel just as intimidated as back when she was a half foot shorter and much younger. When she nervously stepped inside, preparing for a chewing out about the change in her appearance, the superintendent didn’t even look at her hair but passed her a printed out email.
“There was a complaint about the content of your lesson yesterday.” Holt was an older gentleman, silver in his hair, proud grandparent, and a patriarch of the community. He stood every day out amongst the high school parking lot, watching kids drive out and cautioning them to watch out for the little kids biking and walking home. He’d been pleasantly surprised when Zadie had applied to come teach, something about needing a diversity hire. Zadie, knowing full well that Chester had once been a sundown town not that many generations ago where brown or black-skinned folk were not welcomed, had just nodded.
“A complaint?”
“About the, uh, not-dead awareness.”
Oh. Zadie stiffened. She should have seen this coming. “The children are asking a lot of questions, Mr. Holt.”
“I’m sure they are,” he said patiently. Then he leaned forward, as if sharing a secret. “But, if they start asking you how babies are made, you’re not going to start telling them about the birds and the bees, are you? There are waivers, and appropriate times. And this community prefers to teach . . . sensitive things . . . in their own home.”
“Well, sure,” Zadie said carefully, realizing her job could be on the line. “But I was sent this by the CDC. The US government is recommending that all children understand what happens if a zombie attacks. That they shouldn’t try to save their friend, but get to a safe place. To help cut down on reinfection and spread—”
Holt leaned back, his smile strained. “Look, this won’t fly with the folk in Chester. I talked to the parents for you. But it needs to not happen again. Folk around here, they want to decide for themselves how to educate their children. And they have a right to do it in their own way without interference. You see what I’m saying?”
Zadie did, but still had one more play. “They’re terrified about San Fontaine.”
Holt nodded. “Well, that’s understandable. Kids shouldn’t even be allowed to see such things on TV. But San Fontaine, it’s not Chester. This is a different kind of place.”
A different kind of place.
That was echoed at the Wednesday night town hall, which was more packed than usual. The San Fontaine effect. Only a single video clip had come out of the town before quarantine by what looked like thousands of National Guard: it was video of an old man, face buried deep in some teenager’s chest while the kid writhed and screamed.
“We are not going to have an infestation,” the mayor said. “This is a different kind of place.”
Councilwoman Maggie Dobresh had been talking about a new grant from both the Department of Defense and the Department of Transportation to help smaller towns build walls and fund an increase in police and volunteer armed patrols.
“This kind of money,” the mayor explained, “comes with strings attached. Remember when the state helped build the new road through Pine Street? After that we had to change all the sidewalks to match federal regulations.”
That created a murmur of discontent. A lot of people in town hated the fucking sidewalks, with bump outs that had damaged at least ten different vehicles when turning too tightly onto Elm. Zadie occasionally drove over them in her little Chevy sedan, swearing when the unexpected bump rattled the whole car.
“With a wall we can check who comes into town,” Maggie said.
“More likely shut us in if there’s an infection,” someone from the rows of citizenry muttered.
Someone stood up, hands in their blue jeans. “Look, San Fontaine is the kind of place where people from all over pass through. It’s not a surprise they had some kind of outbreak, of some kind. We are not San Fontaine.”
Everyone agreed, Chester wasn’t San Fontaine.
But Zadie saw a few sidewise glances. Well, shit, she thought. That’s how people were thinking infection spread. An odd, chilly feeling prickled her back, and she really wanted to not be here.
“If we create walls, it’s gonna kill the antiques shops up and down Main Street,” one of the store owners said. “No tourist wants a stop and frisk on the edge of town before coming in for an ice cream and a browse. And the edge of town is all gas stations and fast food from truckers.”
Zadie decided to bounce out of the town hall while everyone was thinking about the loss of jobs, and Iggy was standing up and saying that building walls around a town was something the damn Europeans did and that walls were a UN plot to make the heartland more like Sweden. Something to do with Agenda 21.
“I love this town,” she confessed to Wendy the next night over a bottle of cheap red from the local Spin Thru. Not the one her father had driven past but the Chester one. “But Jesus Christ: they voted down the wall. Carla was telling me she won’t vaccinate her kids against zombiesm, and principal Jenners told me the vaccine rate was likely barely half.”
