Gabe rode into town on a red roan. It had been about a month since he had slept in a bed and he was looking forward to it. He studied the main street as he rode towards the livery. Nothing noteworthy. Some would take that as a good sign, welcoming and comforting.

Gabe knew it probably meant the town, or someone rich enough to own most of the town was hiding something. That meant two things to Gabe. One, his employer was probably justified in sending him here and two, if he was here it was because there was no one else with enough skill and experience to ride out of this snake pit alive.

Gabe reigned up at the livery and dismounted. Most people would not have noticed anything special about the way he got off his horse, the subtle way he kept his coat over his guns, how he faced away from his horse when he hit the ground and how he never took his eyes off the livery attendant.

“Two bucks a week includin’ grain and I’ll rub him down for ya,” said the young man outside the livery. Gabe handed him a dollar.

“I’m only staying till Wednesday.” He said. “Keep the saddle handy. I may need to ride out sooner.”

Gabe took his saddle bags and headed towards the saloon. Usually folks thought he was just a common sojourner looking for work or passing through on his way to the gold rush and that’s exactly how he wanted them to think. When Gabe got to work he needed whatever edge he could get. Coming across as a greenhorn had saved his hide many times. The problem was he was getting older. His every movement was practiced and polished and he now carried himself in a way that said he was not a person to be trifled with.

As Gabe entered the saloon one man took notice of him. He saw it happen. It was just a quick glint in the eye before the man glanced away. Even if someone else had noticed they would have discounted it as a regular response to a stranger entering the saloon. But Gabe hadn’t stayed alive all these years by ignoring the little details. Gabe worked in the time that existed between time. His workplace was the fractions of a second that others took for granted. Those fractions of time spelled life and death. Tick your alive, tock your dead.

The man’s attention was unnerving. For Gabe it meant it was time to quit. He had made up his mind on the ride in that this would be his last job and this man confirmed it. His employer would undoubtedly object, but he would deal with that when the time came.

Gabe scoped out the bar and strategically took a seat on the end and ordered a drink.

“I need a bed and a place to clean up. Do you have any vacancies?” He asked the bartender.

“Sure, fifty cents a night. Bath house is around back. I’ll heat up some water. It’ll be ready in about an hour.” Said the bartender

Gabe dropped a dollar on the table. “Thanks. I’ll take a steak too if you got any.”

The bartender smiled, picked up the money then went into the back to cook the food and heat the water.

Gabe discreetly fished in his pockets for a small vile containing a bluish liquid as the bartender served the steak. Gabe cut a small piece of the meat off and dropped it into the vile. The liquid stayed blue. The food was safe to eat. At least the bartender wasn’t trying to poison him. A good sign, it meant there were some people here that didn’t have to die. As Gabe ate his steak he noticed the man from before slip out. By the time Gabe finished his bath the big guns in town would know he was here. Figures, it always felt better to take a long, hot bath before attending to business and now it appeared that Gabe wouldn’t be able to soak too long.

Gabe dried and dressed. He buckled his rig around his waist. The weight of the double .45 colts was very familiar. He thonged the well oiled holsters to his thighs. Common practice for a gunfighter. He grasped each of the walnut grips reverently and pulled the guns out of the holsters a few inches. It was part of his ritual. He pushed his arms into the sleeves of his shirt then started to button it, careful to pull his cross outside his shirt. The cross was very old, given to him from his father and made of olive wood from trees grown in Bethlehem. Time to get to work. He put on his coat and hat, took a deep breath, and then opened the door.

Gabe stepped out and started toward the sheriff’s office. As he walked he became aware of several men paying him plenty of attention. The sheriff and about twelve others stepped out of the building. Gabe recognized one of them as the man from the bar.

“You picked the wrong town to ride into stranger,” said the sheriff. Several of the men behind him chuckled.

Gabe squared off and pulled his coat back to reveal his guns.

The sheriff and his posse laughed openly. The sheriff stopped laughing suddenly for effect before flipping out his fangs. “Them guns ain’t gonna do a damn thing,” said the sheriff. He smiled wickedly and began to advance on Gabe.

“God damn vampires.” Gabe said under his breath. He meant it literally. Gabe let go of the magic that kept his wings hidden. The sheriff and his posse, with smiles now totally erased from their faces stopped dead in their tracks. Gabe pulled his guns from their holsters and leveled them towards the vampric horde. His cross shone brilliantly.

“You’re wrong sheriff. Your time of reckoning has come. Prepare to meet thy Father.”

Author’s Note:I hoped you enjoyed this story. It was composed for Write Anything’s Fiction Friday challenge. This week’s prompt: Where your character is committed to a drastic or extreme change. Thank you for reading and commenting.

Jason opened his eyes against the bright lights. An antiseptic smell filled his nostrils as he tried to focus his sight on the moving blurs he figured must be people.

A disembodied female voice asked, “Mr. Jameson?”

Jason tried to answer but was only able to cough. His vision was beginning to clear. The face of a woman was beginning to take shape before him. She wore little makeup and appeared to be middle aged. Her blonde hair was cut short. She was wearing a long white jacket, the unmistakable uniform of a medical professional. Her nametag was still too blurry to read.

“Mr. Jameson, you have tubes in your throat, but you’re breathing on your own so I’m going to take them out. On the count of three I want you to exhale hard. Ready? One…Two…Three!”

Jason coughed hard for a few seconds. His throat was on fire.

“Mr. Jameson you’re at St. Joseph’s Hospital. You passed out and your wife called 911. You stopped breathing.”

Jason started to respond to the news that he almost died but only managed a few guttural noises. His facial expression asked the question for him.

“We don’t know why you stopped breathing Mr. Jameson. Preliminary tests show some sort of upper respiratory infection. Have you been anywhere where you may have become exposed to mold?”

Jason shook his head “no” but something in his eyes made the doctor question his answer.

“Mr. Jameson, if we don’t know what caused you to stop breathing we can’t guarantee that this won’t happen again.”

Jason shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, if you think of anything, let us know. And I suggest you think hard. You may not survive another episode like that one.”

Jason let his head sink into the pillow as he closed his eyes. He wasn’t talking for now. Keeping his mouth shut was his only shot of getting home. He thought it was funny that they thought Carol was his wife. That’s OK it suited his purposes for now. She had been hinting on getting married for about a year now. Jason kept telling her that their lifestyle would make it hard.

Jason was beginning to think he was in the clear until he suddenly stopped breathing again. He franticly pressed the nurse call button before passing out.

Once again Jason opened his eyes against the bright lights as the now familiar hospital smell hit him. His doctor was there again as he blinked his blurry eyes back into focus. Only this time there was a man dressed in a suit standing next to her. And next to this strange man was Carol. He flashed her a smile then noticed her face was tear streaked and her arms were behind her back. There was a uniformed officer behind her.

The doctor stepped forward. Her pleasant smile was gone and her tone was too professional, which meant nothing good.

“It seems you did indeed come in contact with something.” She said. “It seems your extra curricular activities have exposed you to a toxic nerve agent. You should be fine now that we know exactly what we are dealing with.”

Jason whipped his head around to glare at Carol.

“Jason, I’m sorry.” Said Carol. “I had to tell them. They said you were dying.” Carol wept openly and struggled against the uniformed officer as he coaxed her from the room.

Jason was grateful that they didn’t have to tube him this time. His throat was still killing him. He sent Carol a smile to comfort her. Talking was still not a good idea.
The man in the suit introduced himself.

“Mr. Jameson, I’m detective Roberts. I’d like to ask you some questions about a break in at the Holbert Research Facility yesterday. It seems someone broke into the facility and set about 100 animals free. Unfortunately they also released some toxic gas that was being tested on the animals. Under today’s patriot act I’m entitled to take you into custody as a suspected terrorist, unless of course you start talking.”

Author’s Note:This story was composed for Write Anything’s Fiction Friday challenge. This is my first time participating in this meme. The prompt for this week was “Your story involves an invasion of privacy” .
Thank you for reading and commenting.

I remember my grandfather telling stories of how he started this company. Especially the day he made his world changing discovery. It took him a solid year just to get his colleagues to accept his findings and release the results of his work to the public. Initially the idea of mixing vegetable and animal DNA was dismissed as a hoax and my grandfather was labeled a quack. His idea was inspired. For hundreds of years man had been raising domesticated animals in parts of the world where natural vegetation failed to thrive. By taking the genetic parts of animals which allowed them to survive in drought conditions and genetically splicing that trait to vegetables, they were able to create a viable, sustainable and delicious food product.

There was considerable debate and opposition as you may imagine. Religious communities declared the idea blasphemy. Farmers said it would make them destitute. His argument to the religious communities was simply that God placed this knowledge in front of us and he used it. He wasn’t playing God; he was simply using God’s ingredients. Everything about it was natural, no pesticides needed and it grew great without chemical fertilizers. That last part was a huge barrier too. Major companies have lots of money to pay lobbyists and lobbyists are experts at creating problems for new products. A major fertilizer manufacturer declared bankruptcy in the end, effectively putting an end to the capitalist fueled opposition. The government started showing farmers how to change their growing practices. That allowed farms to stay viable. Finally, an independent scientific research facility proved that our vegetables would extend the average human life by about 30 years. So after 75 years of trials, debates and laws, my grandfather’s technologies were finally accepted and this company was formed. Production flew into top gear and soon the entire world was eating our hybrid veggies. Man entered into a new age.

The world’s population flourished. For about 236 years. Our plants were so resistant to insects that the insects began dying. Big deal we thought until birds, who eat the bugs, also started dying out. Non altered trees started disappearing because there were no insects or birds to carry seeds. Oxygen levels started to dip and carbon monoxide levels grew. It was a domino effect on the eco-system. The temperature began to rise and every thing started dying out. Insects, birds, trees, livestock, humans, all started dwindling. Then our rivers and lakes began to shrink. One by one life as we knew it started to fade.

The countries of the world finally had a reason to work together. They had to, and fast. Quick thinking and rapid response saved us from almost total decimation of the planet. Years ago some forward thinking botanists had begun storing every seed known to man in a secret location somewhere in the Antarctic. It was a simple matter of duplicating the virgin seeds and splicing the animal DNA. A Geneva scientist filled in the last piece of the puzzle by discovering a way to turn carbon monoxide back into oxygen, thus rendering trees unnecessary. We were saved. Or so we thought.

History tells us of a sickness called “the flu”. Parents tell their children about it to scare them. It’s an incurable disease that can cause death and is spread by human contact. Supposedly doctors would have to guess how the flu would manifest each year and try to develop medicine to stop its spread. The common cold and the flu were eradicated by a lucky fringe benefit provided by our lovely vegetables.

What my grandfather didn’t know. What he couldn’t have known 250 years ago when he first discovered that animal and vegetable DNA could be spliced together was that the flu was directly tied into animal DNA. Over the years the hybrid plants evolved becoming more animal than vegetable. They began cultivating a rudimentary version of the flu. The flu is a virus and a virus is extremely prolific. Given enough time it adapts in ways that insure survival. My grandfather discovered that bovine DNA proved the most compatible with vegetable DNA and so pigs became the animal of choice when developing our new plants. Pig DNA is close to human DNA and over the course of 250 years the flu jumped species. “Swine Flu”, as it came to be known, quickly turned into a pandemic of epic proportions. The vaccination procedure taken from our ancestors was barbaric. They would infect people with the flu so their immune systems could learn how to fight it. That way when they contracted the virus for real, their body would already know what it needed to do. Unfortunately for us we didn’t have that luxury.

To future generations, if there are any, please learn from our mistake. We thought that we weren’t playing God; we were simply using his ingredients and improving on his designs. We were wrong. Man was never meant to create life. In the end however, we discovered we were very adept at destroying it.

My Darling Isabella,

Our captain, Christopher Columbus is a blithering idiot. In the time we have sailed I have not seen him make a single decision that could be even remotely construed as smart. How he convinced the royal court to fund this exploration is beyond my comprehension. I’m beginning to think my beloved Queen sent him off in hopes that he may never return. Despite my many attempts to convince him that he has indeed discovered new lands, he continues to insist we have landed in the Indies. I have proved his calculations regarding the circumference of the Earth are incorrect by approximately 7600 miles, yet he refuses to face the obvious, choosing instead to ignore the facts and mulishly push forward.

After many months at sea, we made landfall in the new land. Columbus pig headedly insists this is the West Indies. The Natives, whom we call Indians, having never seen ships the likes of ours, thought the small trinkets we carried came from the gods. Textiles fascinate them, so our captain decided to leave them with all the blankets that were used to cover our dead crew members. Unfortunately for the Indians those particular crew members died from small pox. Balance seems to have been restored since several of the crew have contracted syphilis.

Our idiot captain demanded we scour the land for treasure. We brought back quite a bit of new and exciting plant species that would, with proper cultivation yield Spain, many riches. I personally have discovered a new type of grape that appears to grow in most soils. Columbus, narrow mindedly, decided that we should only concentrate on gold, jewels and spices. I would be inclined to agree, if not for the fact that there simply isn’t any treasure here. Yet more proof of his miscalculations. As with everything else it is summarily ignored.

We have put back to sea to return to Spain. We are basically returning empty handed. Columbus still thinks we made land fall on the West Indies and quite frankly I am tired of trying to convince him otherwise. I have decided to requisition a lifeboat just before we return and partition my Queen to allow me to lead a return voyage. I believe I can make a strong case based on my botanical drawings alone. One fact is certain, should I be granted leave to return I will take credit for discovering the new land.

It has been a while since I have had a chance to continue this letter. In that time I have hatched a cunning plan. Tonight I will attempt a daring escape. I’ll wait until early morning to slip over the rail and lower the lifeboat. I should make landfall by noon the next day. I pray the tides are with me.

Dear God that man is a complete ninny. I was caught making my escape by a crewman in the crows nest. The captain declared my act mutinous. I was sentenced to be set adrift in a lifeboat. I almost feel bad for him. I shall await you at the royal court.

Your servant,

Amerigo Vespucci.