Shortcuts Read online

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction: Why Shortcuts?

  Landfall | Tim Jones

  Bree’s Dinosaur | A.C. Buchanan

  The Last | Grant Stone

  Mika | Lee Murray & Piper Mejia

  Pocket Wife | I.K. Paterson-Harkness

  The Ghost of Matter | Octavia Cade

  About the authors | AC Buchanan

  Grant Stone

  IK Paterson-Harkness

  Lee Murray

  Octavia Cade

  Piper Mejia

  Tim Jones

  Imprint

  Foreword

  AS A LITERARY FORM, the novella has several distinct advantages: in being longer than a short story, it can spin its yarn with greater complexity; but, being shorter than a novel, it can readily occupy those quieter times when we are waiting for a bus, or a friend for coffee, or simply enjoying the peaceful hour before sleep.

  So, lucky reader, you are in for a treat. The six novellas in this volume are all very different. Here you will visit an enchanted forest, be shocked by living dolls, and caught up in the bleak world of asylum-seekers. You will also be introduced to the triumph and sadness of Ernest Rutherford’s life, captivated by the dinosaur being constructed next door, and follow the intricate, tattooed path of medical discovery.

  Enjoy it, as Paper Road Press gives you ‘six of the best’.

  Phillip Mann

  Introduction: Why Shortcuts?

  WELL, SINCE YOU ASKED ...

  Basically it’s all about puns. Terrible, terrible puns. Possibly not the best basis for a business decision but what the hell, it’s done.

  Get it? Paper Road Press? Shortcuts? Track 1?

  Aha, ha, ha.

  I founded Paper Road Press in 2013 and named it after one of my two favourite cartographic phenomena (the other being those troll contour lines cartographers use to ‘watermark’ their work by adding hills shaped like elephants and suchlike). A ‘paper road’ is a road that exists only on paper, not in real life. Maybe they were meant to be built but somehow the idea died out between crisp papery plans and the muddy reality; maybe they really did exist, once, not that you would know it if you tried to walk down one. In Dunedin, where I grew up, and Wellington, where I live now, there are many roads that surreptitiously fade out or dwindle into cliff-side steps, much to the chagrin of anyone trying to use a map app to drive around. Paper roads – intriguing, occasionally frustrating, uncompromisingly dubiously real – seemed the perfect metaphor for the speculative fiction I planned to publish.

  So when I started bandying around the idea of publishing a series of shorter works, calling them ‘shortcuts’ seemed the obvious choice. Shorter than novels, longer than short stories, these shortcuts would be the sort of story you could read on your commute, your lunch-break, or any other odd time when you just want to slip away for a bit. After the usual mind-gnashing submissions and selections process I published six stories ranging between 10,000 and 20,000 words in 2015 as standalone ebooks, which are now collected together for the first time in this volume.

  The seven authors whose work is featured in this collection took my rather waffly brief to ‘be inspired by the extra-ordinary possibilities of our land, history and cultures’ and ran with it in a glorious confusion of directions.

  In Mika, Lee Murray and Piper Mejia introduce us to a woman on an odyssey to find a cure for the disease that ravages her people. As she ventures into America, cultures clash, but it’s only through connecting with others in this strange land that she will find what it is she seeks.

  Grant Stone takes an outside perspective in The Last, as music journalist Rachel flies in to Auckland to interview musician Katherine St John, a fellow English expat who disappeared from the limelight after her last record. She’s brought her music to the other side of the world – but what else did she bring with her?

  Bree’s Dinosaur, by AC Buchanan, is a story of displacement – of place, family, and self, and trying to make sense not only of the world’s mysteries, but the solutions it offers.

  ‘Tech horror’ is a well established trope, but it’s not necessarily the machines you should be worrying about. IK Paterson-Harkness’ Pocket Wife shows us what can happen when long-distance relationships get too close for comfort.

  One night. One life. One decision. Tim Jones’ Landfall explores the desperation of climate refugees in a not-too-distant New Zealand.

  Lives, families and the atom are broken down in the final story in this collection; Octavia Cade’s The Ghost of Matter, takes a new look at Ernest Rutherford’s life and career.

  I couldn’t be happier with these stories. I hope that you enjoy them, too – and that they lead you down new paths, following bibliographies and tables of contents into other new worlds. Try not to get too lost.

  As for ‘Track 1’? Suggests a certain continuity, doesn’t it – a whisper, if not a promise, of numbers yet to come.

  We’ll see.

  Marie Hodgkinson

  Publisher

  Paper Road Press

  Landfall

  Tim Jones

  THE TWIN TORPEDOES that ended the long journey of the Jamalpur-2 from Bangladesh to the Tasman Sea were scarcely necessary. The old river ferry had been held together by little more than wire and faith ever since they were chased out of Australian territorial waters. Strong winds and heavy waves had put paid to their backup plan of landing the vessel in some isolated cove in southern New Zealand; looking at those forbidding mountains half-choked by clouds, Nasimul Rahman had been relieved.

  So they had run north, north before the wind, the ship juddering and groaning with every new onslaught from the sea. Each day there were a few more deaths – not many, for those most vulnerable had died long before. Fewer than half of those who had been aboard the vessel when it made the imperceptible transition from the Mouths of the Ganges into the Bay of Bengal were alive to greet the Fiordland coast, but that had still left over 150 souls aboard.

  Nasimul’s wife Hasina was no longer among them. She had lasted through the tropics, kept alive by her hope that she would see land again, even if it was the unmitigated harshness of the Australian continent, where it was said whole groups of people could disappear into the interior without ever being noticed or pursued, if only they could find a way ashore through the frigates and the proximity mines and the thickets of razor wire. When Nasimul had slipped into desperation within a fortnight of the journey beginning, it had been Hasina’s belief that kept him going. But, already weakened by dysentery, the plunge into colder climates had been too much for her. She had died somewhere in the long, hopeless reaches of the southern Indian Ocean.

  Wife gone, son lost to cholera back in the camps before he had lived out his first year, Nasimul shivered and heaved up his food and crawled into a nest of damp clothing night after night, and somehow survived. The ship drove forward. The temperature warmed fractionally. The sky flamed red at dawn and dusk: ash and smoke from Australia, someone said. Perhaps the whole continent was burning.

  And then, on another night of storm and cloud, the New Zealand Navy came, destroyers surging over the eastern horizon. There was no point in running, and nowhere to run. The Jamalpur-2 wallowed in the waves and waited for the end, while the people aboard made for the last slender hope, the lifeboats.

  No self-respecting Bangladeshi river ferry sailed without at least twice the number of passengers it was rated for. But death, nipping at their heels the whole way, had achieved what no government functionary had ever been able to and reduced the number of passengers on
the ferry to almost exactly the number it was allowed to carry. So there were almost enough lifeboat places for them all: if they had been fit, if they had been healthy, if the ferry had run into trouble on the flat reaches of the Lakhya or the Meghna or the Ganges. Now, it was the sick carrying the sicker, the injured carrying the half-dead, and the grey wolves of the sea bearing down on their prey.

  The davits won’t work, thought Nasimul, eyeing up the rusted metal winches and the rusted chains that held the lifeboats high above the water. Yet all but one worked, each casting its freight of lives upon the waters. It was Nasimul’s good fortune that he was in the lifeboat that failed to deploy. He was working to free it, precariously perched on the lifeboat davit itself, when he glanced downwards and saw the straight track through the curving waters. Before he could nerve himself to jump, the Jamalpur-2 took matters out of his hands, throwing him into the water as it shuddered and began to break up from the force of the first and then the second explosion as the New Zealand Navy’s torpedoes did their deadly work.

  Nasimul was a strong swimmer. He was born over water in his family’s tiny hut, perched on stilts above the banks of the mighty Lakhya, and he had been around and in water all his life. But this was like nothing he had ever experienced, and the first shock of cold and salt as he went under was almost too much for him. He struggled his way back to the surface and found himself clutching at something: a body. It was missing a leg. Floating beside the body was a curving length of wood from a lifeboat – perhaps the lifeboat he had been trying to launch. It was about two metres long and a little less than half as wide.

  Nasimul managed to turn it over so that the concave side was upwards. It floated like the world’s smallest and least safe canoe. He clambered aboard his impromptu vessel and, despite how cold and damp he was, despite his left hand and right leg trailing in the water, despite the cries that drifted across the water from the boats and the machine-gun fire that silenced them, boat after boat after boat, he fell asleep. The cries grew fewer and the bursts of machine-gun fire less frequent, until both stopped altogether. The Navy returned to base. Night fell. Wind and tide and current took Nasimul Rahman and swept him towards shore.

  KIMMY POTIKI WAS A lazy bitch, thought Donna, chewing her gum and looking at the mess the lazy bitch had made of the stockroom. Kimmy was supposed to clean up before she knocked off at four, but when Donna went back there just before six, there were boxes and shit scattered around all over the place. Some of them had been pulled open and the clothes taken out. It wasn’t good stuff, but it was warm stuff, and Donna thought maybe Kimmy and that dipshit boyfriend of hers were stealing stuff and selling it cheap at the market on Saturdays. Or maybe she had just pulled it out to make a nest: at the far end of the room, under a rack of coats, was what would pass pretty well for a bed if you’d been cold and wet and running from the cops and sleeping rough. Kimmy hadn’t, but her boyfriend had. There were tinnies and knives and empty bottles, too.

  Well, fuck Kimmy Potiki. There was no way Donna was going to make herself late by cleaning up after Kimmy, who’d have to take her chances that Mrs Alberts didn’t come into the stockroom before Monday. Though it was Kimmy who had got her this job in the first place...

  Fuck Kimmy Potiki. Donna worked as fast as she could, shoving clothes back into boxes without paying attention to what went where, kicking tinnies and bottles back under cover, straightening the place up to the point that anyone who just popped into the room for a moment might think nothing was wrong.

  ‘You took your time,’ said Mrs Alberts when Donna returned to the shop. Donna just shrugged. It looked like Mrs Alberts was going to go off on her, but then she said, ‘You’d better get going. You don’t want to be late for your first patrol.’

  ‘OK,’ said Donna, and added, ‘thanks’. Mrs Alberts could be an old cow sometimes, but she was OK mostly. The shop would do for Donna till she found something better.

  Mere was supposed to be waiting for her outside so they could go for smokes before Shore Patrol started, but Mere wasn’t there. Maybe she had got bored of waiting. Maybe she forgot. Donna wished she still had her phone. She thought all that cancer stuff was bullshit.

  Still, that was one of the cool things about Shore Patrol: they got radios, these little walkie-talkie things that were pretty much like phones except you couldn’t text. The KFC on the corner was still open. She went there and ate and sat by herself until it was time to catch the bus. The bus driver was that one who had kicked them all off that time Kane chundered on the back seat. Donna kept her head down.

  It was a dark walk down deserted streets from the last bus stop to the Shore Patrol building and its reassuring blaze of lights. Where the hell was Mere? Safety in numbers, that’s what they were always told, safety in numbers. Why couldn’t they at least light this part of the bloody street? Why couldn’t the moon be shining?

  But she got there OK. To be honest, she was early: she should have stayed later at KFC. She hung around until Mere arrived, then gave her a hard time about not waiting. Mere said she forgot. Donna said yeah right, it was a girl, wasn’t it, Mere? It was always some girl with Mere. Donna had quite liked a couple of them, but most of them were stuck up bitches from the North Shore.

  Mere wasn’t telling. So they presented their passes, got their pistols from the Serjeant at Arms (and why the fuck was it spelled like that?) and headed down to the firing range for fifteen minutes’ practice. Donna was better at the static targets, and Mere was better at the moving ones. Two along from Mere there was this boy, David. He was really cute. Donna had given him the eye a couple of times, but whenever he looked at anyone straight on, it was Mere. And Mere was cute too, with her button nose and her big dark eyes, but she had never given a boy the come-on in her life. David was an idiot.

  Donna took a critical look at David’s shot pattern. It wasn’t bad, but not as good as hers. Provided her targets stayed stock still, she was deadly. When they moved, she had trouble figuring out which way they were going.

  Big Bob called them all together. His name was Robert Wilson, or Sergeant Wilson to his face. He had a fancy uniform he was always threatening to burst out of. In real life he was a clerk at the ration house. It wasn’t hard to see how he disposed of the rations that went uncollected.

  ‘We’re a military auxiliary, but we’re also a team. We help to defend our country, but we also take in young people and give them a sense of purpose. We train them in weapons and tactics, but we also train them in life. And when training is done, it’s time to take the step up into active service, knowing that everything you give will be returned to you by a grateful nation.’

  I bloody well hope so, thought Donna.

  The Sergeant made his face adopt its most serious expression. ‘We must never forget that the threat we face is very real: millions upon millions of poor and desperate people, displaced from their teeming homelands by the rising seas, who look south hungrily at our green and fertile lands. They’d overrun us in months if we let them, and the Shore Patrol is a vital second line of defence that frees our nation’s Navy and Army to do what they each do best.

  ‘So tonight I’d like to call forward six of our new recruits who have shown they have the right stuff to answer their nation’s call. Step forward, David McDonald...’

  Donna waited for her name to be called with a mixture of excitement and dread. It was pretty crisp to be presented with the cap, the jacket and the badge, though she was glad the ceremony was happening in public: she’d felt Robert Wilson’s fingers curl around her left buttock when he though no one was looking. Still, she stepped forward, and shook the wanker’s hand, and took the cap (too small), the jacket (too big) and the badge (just right). Robert Wilson she could handle, or at least avoid. It was the patrolling she was scared about. It was all becoming real now.

  But at least she’d have Mere with her, and for that matter David. Somebody had obviously noticed that they hung together at training, because the three of them had been put in th
e same patrol. The woman who ran this one was new to her – Staff Sergeant Anderson, a thin-faced, serious woman who looked them and the rest of the patrol up and down for a bit before giving them their orders for the night. After the induction ceremony, Robert Wilson had droned on for another five minutes about family and country and duty, but there was no bullshit from this lady.

  ‘Tonight you will patrol the foreshore between Gloucester Park Island and the intersection of Beachcroft Ave and Arthur St. We’re advised that the Navy sank a ship full of infiltrators yesterday, and that some of them may have escaped on small boats, so you are advised to be especially vigilant. We’ve also heard that the so-called Shepherds may be attempting to aid the survivors from the sunken ship. As I’m sure you know, this is illegal and punishable by a lengthy spell of mandatory detention. Anyone found aiding an infiltrator is to be apprehended and arrested.

  ‘Apart from that, you’re to perform your usual role of stopping and questioning anyone who isn’t where they should be. Don’t shoot unless you have to, and don’t shoot any citizens. Questions?’

  ‘What about a citizen who is helping or hiding an infiltrator?’ asked David.

  ‘Good question. The first rule is, don’t shoot a citizen. The second rule is, don’t allow an infiltrator to escape. Sometimes those two rules conflict, and you have to use your judgement. Do your best, and follow Corporal Reweti’s lead.’

  The Corporal inclined his narrow head.

  ‘That’s not very helpful,’ whispered Mere.

  What the fuck have I got myself into, Donna wanted to whisper back, but now the thin-faced woman was speaking again, asking ‘Does anyone here have experience with dogs?’

  ‘I do,’ said Donna, thinking of the Staffie cross that protected her fearful mother from the world outside.

  ‘Good,’ said the woman. She left the room and returned a few moments later with a shaggy, red-brown dog that whined and panted on its lead.