John Wilkinson watched the young couple make love through a telescope from his home on the other side of the lake. He wasn’t so much interested in the act of lovemaking as the sheer vitality of the youngsters. What life force they possessed! In his youth, Wilkinson himself had been known for his virility. That was before he chose a vampire with a grudge as his lover. Evidently Wilkinson had had a relationship with the woman in years past, and it had not ended well. Wilkinson couldn’t even remember her. But she remembered Wilkinson. She screwed him, and then screwed him up. She snapped Wilkinson’s spine and turned him into a vampire, sentencing him to eternal life in a wheelchair.

Wilkinson’s chosen career before his unfortunate tryst with the angry vampire was in the field of nanotechnology. He developed tiny, nearly microscopic robots that the government put to a variety of uses. He had hoped to keep his job after becoming a vampire, but his boss wouldn’t accommodate his request to work only nights. He had been let go, and now lived on his government pension. Of course the government couldn’t help him with his thirst for blood. Wilkinson found it next to impossible to hunt in a wheelchair, so he had put his experience in nanotechnology to work for him.

Wilkinson used his skills to develop hundreds of thousands of flying nanobots; tiny winged robots equipped with needles and bladders, which he programmed to use heat-sensing technology to fly to a target, attack it, drain it of blood and return home. Once the nanobots returned, Wilkinson would empty the tiny bladders and collect enough blood for a decent meal.

The boy across the lake drove off in his pickup truck and Wilkinson pressed the button that opened a small portal leading from his basement lab to the outdoors. A dark stream of nanobots poured through the portal and out over the water toward the girl on the other side of the lake.

Mary heard a buzzing sound coming from across the lake. She looked in that direction, and a dark cloud appeared over the water, heading toward her. Mary ran toward the trees, casting terrified glances over her shoulder as she went. She was looking back when she tripped over a chunk of blackened firewood. The cloud descended on her, and she felt stinging all over her body. She scratched furiously at her skin. She tried to scream, and a dark, buzzing tentacle broke away from the cloud and dove down into her open mouth. Mary’s vision faded as the buzzing mass covered her eyeballs. By then she was nearly unconscious, and barely registered the stinging in her eyes. Soon the pain was gone and everything was black.

The nanobots flew back across the lake and though the portal into the lab. As Wilkinson drained the robots, he found they had collected an unusually small amount of blood. He checked his computer data, and discovered that not all of his nanobots had returned. About a third of them were unaccounted for.

The deputy coroner began his examination, dictating his report into a digital recorder.

“This is Doctor Lawrence Meggins with Wayne County Coroner’s case number 593-09. The subject is Mary DelMonaco, Caucasian female, nineteen years of age. She has a small rose tattoo on her right ankle. No other unusual features. Ms. DelMonaco appears to have died of exsanguination, although the source of her blood loss is not immediately apparent.”

The doctor used a large ceiling-mounted magnifying glass to examine the girl’s skin. “Ms. DelMonaco’s body is covered with thousands of tiny pinpricks,” Dr. Meggins dictated. “It’s as if she had been attacked by a swarm of insects.” Dr. Meggins lifted one of Mary’s hands. “Ms. DelMonaco’s skin also bears scratch marks, which I believe to have been self-inflicted.” He examined her fingers. “My best guess is that she was trying to fend off an insect attack.” Dr. Meggins looked closely at Mary’s fingernails. Underneath one of the nails he saw a small dark spot. Dr. Meggins clicked off his recorder, grabbed a scraping tool and dug under the nail, removing a small black object. He took the fingernail scrapings over to his microscope for a better look.

Dr. Meggins centered the scrapings on a slide and placed the slide under the microscope. Most of what he saw was unremarkable; traces of human skin, dirt and sand. As Dr. Meggins moved the slide around, the tiny dark object he had seen under Mary’s nail came into view. He gasped, and had to blink several times to make sure he wasn’t imagining the tiny machine he saw through the eyepiece. It had what appeared to be a dark, metallic body, wings and a sharp needle at one end.

Could a swarm of tiny flying machines have killed the DelMonaco girl and drained her of blood? He needed to call his boss to come take a look at what he’d found.

Dr. Meggins retrieved the slide and walked across the room. He reached for the phone, and that was when he heard the buzzing coming from the examination table behind him. He turned slowly, and watched in horror as the dead girl’s cheeks slowly puffed out. Her lips parted, and a black cloud streamed out of her mouth. The slide fell out of Dr. Meggins’ hand and shattered on the floor. He didn’t have time to scream before the buzzing cloud enveloped him.

Wilkinson found the rest of his nanobots patiently hovering outside the portal the next morning. He let them in and drained their bladders. He swirled a glass of the blood they had collected under his nose. Wilkinson found that it had a decidedly different bouquet than the girl’s blood, but it was definitely human. He took a sip, and while the blood lacked the freshness and tang of yesterday’s collection, he decided it would do quite nicely indeed.

—
© 2009 Robert C. Eccles

Weird things began to happen after Sam stole the gold statue of the Smiling Chinese Goddess.

The first night, he stashed the three-inch, ancient statue inside a vase.  The next morning, he was startled to find the goddess smirking at him from the dining room table.  He racked his brain trying to remember when he’d moved it.

Then Sam left the patio door open when he went to sun himself.   He heard something scraping against the concrete patio.  Seeing nothing, he went back to his detective novel.   Suddenly, a brilliant reflection struck the corner of his glasses.  He raced to the edge of the patio.  Just in time.  The statue looked as if it were about to burrow into the grassy knoll leading to a bamboo garden.

That’s when he noticed a strange voice in his head.  “Take me back home,” the voice said.

At first, he easily dismissed what he thought vivid imagination. But soon, he had to exert considerable effort to silence the intrusive, pleading voice.

The stupid thing’s trying to get away.  Now it’s talking to me.   Statues can’t talk.  This one must be possessed by evil spirits. Maybe I should hire Chinese exorcists to purge them.  Damn!  What the hell am I saying?  I must be going bonkers.  I better have a big slug of scotch.

As the days passed, no matter where Sam put the statue, it showed up somewhere else.

“All right, where the hell are you now?  I remember stashing you in the center drawer inside my argyle socks.”

“You’ll never find me,” the voice taunted.

“Wrong,” Sam said loudly, rooting in the bathroom hamper.  “I’m the best burglar in the business.  I can find anything.”

The moment he saw the lump within a soggy washcloth, Sam yanked the cloth from the hamper, put it on the sink, and untied it.  “How the hell did you manage to tie this thing on the outside when you’re on the inside?” he yelled at the sneering statue.

“I want to go back home,” the voice insisted for the hundredth time.

“When Danson arrives from London for the swap, you’ll have a fine new home, in wonderful surroundings.  Not like the dinky hole-in-the wall you had before.  And I’ll have a fine new home too.  A mansion in Mexico, thanks to you.”   Sam chuckled with pleasure when he thought of the three million Danson offered for the ancient, solid gold artifact.

“I don’t want a new home.”  The voice whined from somewhere deep within Sam’s skull.

Sam dropped the frowning statue into a glass jar. Tightening the lid with all his might, he shoved the jar into the microwave.  For a moment, he wished the statue were organic so he could fry the damn thing.

He couldn’t wait until he could fence the statue.  It’d been nothing but a headache.  But, Danson said he’d need two weeks to raise the cash.  Sam began to wonder if he could last until Danson’s arrival.

Two days before Danson was due, a tattoo suddenly appeared on the back of Sam’s left hand. Petrified, he soiled his underwear.

When regaining his composure, he examined the tattoo’s oriental pictograph.  “What the hell does this mean?” he shouted at the glowering statue inside the microwave.

Racing to a Chinese restaurant, Sam asked the middle-aged owner to translate the tattoo.

“You don’t know what you had tattooed on your own hand?”

“I was drunk.  I told the guy to do whatever he wanted.”

“It looks Chinese.   But I don’t know what it says.  Maybe my uncle knows.”

The old man looked through spectacles with lenses thick as the bottoms of shot glasses.  “It say, ‘whoever…read…tattoo…must…immediately.’”

“Must immediately what?”

“It not say.”

Sam thanked the man and left.   Back home, he cursed the statue, now baring its teeth.  “I don’t care what the hell you try to pull.    In three days you’re outta here, and I’m in three million.”

The next morning, Sam found a new tattoo.  This time on the back of his right hand.  After downing three double scotches in rapid succession, he hurried to the Chinese restaurant.

“Can I see your uncle again?”

The uncle adjusted his glasses and stared at the new tattoo.  He shouted something in Chinese, then collapsed.

Within seconds, the restaurant filled with panicked relatives.  An old woman grabbed Sam’s hands and read aloud, “Whoever reads these tattoos must immediately kill the wearer or die in his place.”

“I cannot kill,” she said, grabbing her chest and falling to the floor.

All shielded their eyes, as Sam ran out.

“Stop him!  Murderer!  Don’t look at his tattoos.”

Sam ran for his life.  Turning a corner, he slammed into a cop.

“Hey!  What the hell’s going on?”

“I didn’t do anything, Officer.  An old guy and woman looked at my tattoos to translate them.  They both fell over.  Just like that.  I didn’t touch them.  I swear.”

“Let me see the tattoos.  Hmm.  This is very old Chinese.  Sonovabitch!”

The cop pulled his pistol and fired point blank into Sam’s face.

A sweet, serene smile replaced the golden goddess’s homicidal sneer.

—
© 2004 Michael A. Kechula

Michael A. Kechula is a retired tech writer. His fiction has won first place in seven contests and placed in six others. He’s also won Editor’s Choice awards four times. His stories have been published by 124 magazines and anthologies in Australia, Canada, England, India, Scotland, and US. He’s authored a book of flash and micro-fiction stories: “A Full Deck of Zombies–61 Speculative Fiction Tales.” eBook available at www.BooksForABuck.com and www.fictionwise.com. Paperback available at www.amazon.com.