Short Story: Retrosex (1998)
I'm having intercourse with Sar23. She's been in Kentucky for two weeks attending the annual Nuclear Disarmament Convention, and I couldn't wait any longer. I think she's enjoying herself - I certainly hope she is - but I can't really tell now I've dropped the radar.
I still haven't got used to retro-conduit copulation, you see: it's a strange old concept. I guess the mental buzz is terrific, but you can't help feeling that any physical pleasure gets a bit lost in the transfer. And somehow it doesn't seem worth it. You can only moan and groan for so long, and at the end of the day, what do you have to show for your efforts? A bucket of sweat and leg-ache from the suction pads.
So how did I become involved in this voluntary pastime? Well, I'll tell you.
Short Story: The Dullitch Assassins (1997)
If you could accept that killing people was a necessary part of the job, and that getting your hands dirty generally meant you ended up covered in your own blood as well as other people’s, then you were going places…though - admittedly - via the morgue. The problem with being a standout killer at Crumb Lane was knowing that you were a standout killer among a hundred or so other death-dealers who probably hadn’t had the luck or the opportunity to surpass you… yet.
Victor Franklin was a standout killer for all the wrong reasons. He’d passed his first exam because Beau Bledling had fallen backwards out of a window, he’d aced his second final because Peacock Legrand couldn’t hold his poison, and he’d scraped through the third with a critical victory over Beth Paison, which had more to do with her gammy leg than his ability to spot a lurking patch of quicksand. As far as he was concerned, Victor Franklin had never killed anybody. However, all that was about to change. If Victor didn’t kill someone this evening, there would be no windows, no poisons, and no quicksand. There would just be death, and this time…the icy fingers wouldn’t be touching anyone else.