Good Story to Read.com: Short Story Collection #01

was no shelling in the distance. When the shelling stopped, he could trick himself into thinking he was back home.

  His eyes came into focus. How long had he been walking in a daze? He glanced back at his company. Nobody seemed to have noticed. There was a pond ahead on the left side of the road. Past the pond there was a farmhouse with a barn behind it. It looked abandoned, but he could see plenty of places where a sniper might be hiding. One could be watching them from one of the upstairs rooms in the farm house or poking his rifle out of a crack in the side of the barn. One could even be hiding in the haystack next to the barn. That would also give a good shot at anyone moving up the road. Either way if there was a sniper, he knew he was probably a goner.

  He imagined the other guys coming up to find him lying in the road. They would say something like, “There’s ol’ John. He was a swell guy.” Then they would take away his rifle. They would take the grenades off his belt. They would pull off his pack and carry his body to a truck heading back from the front. They would lay him to rest with all the other bodies heading home. Then Sarge would have to write a letter. He thought about his mother getting that letter. He saw the look on her face. He heard his little sisters asking, “Ma, what’s wrong? What does it say?”

  He turned his attention back to the road in front of him. The farmhouse was closer now. He could see the paint peeling off the shutters on the windows. He could see the stone missing in the walkway leading up to the front door. The front gate was open. His eyes scanned the windows. They all seemed shut. For all appearances the house looked abandoned. But somebody would have to go in there. The Sarge would shout out somebody’s name, and they would have to bust that front door down. But not him. Not this time. This time he was walking lead.

  His finger slid up, felt for the safety. It was off. His finger slipped back to the trigger. He noticed it was quiet. Had it been this quiet before? He glanced back at the rest of the company. Some walked with their heads down. Others looked at the house, probably thinking about the beds inside. He turned back. Out of the corner of his eye Private Kaza saw something moving in the farm house yard. He stopped in his tracks. Something white ran across the yard to the gate. He heard its feet on the ground. It was not a man. He could tell by the way its feet padded the ground. It ran out the gate and onto the road. He watched wide-eyed. It started shrieking as it came right at him. He pointed his rifle and squeezed the trigger. POW! It flopped to the ground with a dull thud a few feet in front of him.

  When the other guys ran up, they found him standing over the dead body of a very, large goose.

  “Why’d you shoot it, John?” one of the guys asked.

  “I thought it was going to peck me.”

  “It was probably coming over to give you a peck on the cheek,” one of the guys said.

  “It was big enough to peck you,” the Sergeant said. He bent down and lifted the big bird’s neck. “It’s at least four-feet tall.”

  “Hey, John, did you ask it to surrender?” one of the guys asked.

  “Yeah,” another one ribbed him, “couldn’t you see it was unarmed?”

  The Sargeant was looking at the bullet hole straight through the bird’s breast when a corporal walked up.

  “What do we got here?”

  “Just a big bird,” the Sergeant said. He stood up.

  “Do you think it would be good to eat?” the Corporal asked with a sudden gleam in his eye.

  “Why don’t we find out?” the Sergeant grinned.

  A couple of soldiers bent down and lifted the bird. They carried it off back up the road, trying to keep up with the Corporal. Private Kaza heard the Sergeant order another man up to take lead. The company started moving on, the guys chattering. He clicked on his rifle’s safety and swung it by its strap over his shoulder. He was about to start down the road after his company, when the Sergeant called to him.

  “Hey, Kaza.”

  “Yeah, Sarge.”

  “Nice shot,” he said.

  Private Kaza started down the road after his company. He was just as tired, just as fed up with marching, but he felt some weight had been taken off his shoulders. He shot the goose. He didn’t want to, but it came after him, and he had not hesitated to kill it. He sighed, a long sigh that spoke of concerns that should not be troubling a young man. He knew he could do it again. He didn’t want to, but he knew he could kill again.

  This is one of those stories I mentioned in the introduction where I struggled with the ending, then it just came to me as my deadline approached. It was my third science fiction story, and the theme was again the interaction between human and alien races. The main character in the story moved from Earth to an earth colony in the distant galaxy. His only hope was to live out his days in peace. Instead he must endure a terrible struggle to survive until…..

  The Seventh Night

  Copyright 2010 by S. Thomas Kaza

  He stumbled out of the building, coughing and hacking, trying to suck some air into his lungs. But he found little to breathe outside. The same gas that filled the air inside the building filled the air out in the streets. It was everywhere..... in his mouth, in his nose, in his eyes….. burning. Tears flowed from his eyes. He kept wiping them and squeezing them shut. He kept gagging, coughing. He heard somebody cry for help. He nearly tripped over something in the street. Looking back he saw it was a dog.

  The explosion must have knocked his sense of direction out of whack, He didn’t know where he was or in which direction he was heading. But he kept his head. He kept moving down the street. He knew it would eventually lead him out of town. He passed a man walking in the opposite direction, stumbling along like him. He passed a woman hanging out of a vehicle that had crashed into a light post. She must have noticed him passing by. She made a feeble effort to call him. Her hand reached up for a moment, a gargling sound came from her throat. He ignored her. He didn’t care about anything except getting out and away from the town.

  After stumbling along for several more blocks, he realized he could breathe a little easier. He noticed a building on his right. He thought it might be the little repair shop where he took his generator once. A little further on he felt a light breeze on his face. Now he knew he finally reached the edge of town. He kept walking. The air was definitely cleaner here. He tried to take deeper breaths, but it sent him into a fit of hacking and coughing. He spit up something, some foul substance from his lungs. Then he started down the road again, away from the town, not even pausing to look back.

  His eyes began to clear. The streaks of tears on his face dried up. He saw the mountains ahead, some ten miles in the distance. Without any reason he started for them. After several minutes he thought he saw people standing in the road ahead. He counted one, two, no three people standing in the road. Their outlines appeared to be shimmering, an effect of the afternoon heat rising off the road. He rubbed his eyes. When he looked back, he half expected them to be the same distance from him, like a mirage you can never chase down. But they were closer now. They stood watching him as he approached. He could see they were aliens.

  They wore shiny, silvery clothes, like thin metal that can be folded. They wore masks which covered their faces. The man wondered if he might not be hallucinating, an after effect of the gas. He could not tell what race they came from. He could only see their large heads, their long arms. He felt a brief moment of panic, then told himself none of it mattered. No alien he ever met was as terrifying as what just happened back in town. Aliens or not, he intended to keep walking down the road to the mountains. There would be water there, wood for a fire.

  As he approached, the alien in the middle signaled for him to stop. He realized he was breathing hard, like he just ran a long distance. He wanted to lean against something. He could see the aliens’ eyes now, small and set further apart than a human’s eyes. He breathed a sigh of relief. They were Teladorians, one of the more secretive races that humans encountered in their journeys across the galaxy. But they were not enemies. He tr
ied to remember a Teladorian greeting he learned once. He saw it written on the wall of a spaceport. But before he could recall it, the blood began rushing from his head. He felt his legs giving out.

  When he awoke he was lying on his back. He looked around. He realized he lay on a cot, one in several rows of cots that spread out on both sides of him. The cots were filled with people, sick people. He could hear them coughing, some groaning. Some waved their hands weakly in the air. Others did not move at all. He rolled over onto his side. His head hurt. His stomach hurt. His whole body ached. He felt weak. He knew he could not sit up, even if he wanted to. He shivered and reached down for a blanket to cover himself, but he couldn’t find one.

  Someone approached him. It was one of the Teladorians, a female. She did not wear the shiny, metallic clothing like those he met on the road. She wore white, loose-fitting clothes that crinkled softly when she moved. She wore a mask, like a surgeon’s mask, that covered most of her face and mouth. But he could see her eyes. They were warm and friendly.

  “I’m cold,” he said, “I need water.”

  She took something out of her pocket. It was long and narrow at one end, but round at the other. She spoke into it at the narrow end. She spoke her language. He did not know any of the words, few humans