Bomber herded the small crowd of punks into a corner. He kept his pistol in hand as he barked orders. All he wanted was to make them sit together quietly and without any fuss, but he enjoyed the sinister weight of ceramic in his hands. It seemed to complete him. Just holding it was enough to tame the punks — they stared at Bomber with religious intensity, their eyes shifting back and forth between the black shape in his hand and the...

     Little Emily Vaughan lay on her perfect feather bed in her perfect room and stared at the perfect white ceiling. There was a white desk, too, and white cupboards to match the white textured walls. The whole house was like that. Emily figured her parents would probably be buried in white coffins.      “Emily Marie Vaughan!” her mother called from downstairs, still fussing at...

     “Jesus,” said Bomber, cradling his head. The worst hangover in history drummed in his skull and he hadn’t even drunk anything. street lights flashed pain onto his closed eyelids. He was definitely in a car, but when he finally dared to open his eyes, he only found the unpleasantly familiar sights of Bilbao. The Spanish sun seemed to mock him, still no closer to his...

     “Hey!” someone shouted in the distance and her cheek stung with sudden pain. The throne room grew faint, torn away from her eyes. She swam into a dark room where a woman in ordinary clothes was shaking her by the shoulders and shouting. Gina shook her head like a punch-drunk fighter, closed her eyes against the throbbing pain between her temples. Part of her was still missing, lost halfway between...

     Her numb cheek jerked up from the table with a gasp. Panic thumped in her throat, but it went away as she realised she was out of the nightmare. Looking out over a city caught in pale morning light, the bright neon now dim and desultory as if it resented the sun. The only thing that still burned with some life was the big sign that welcomed authorised visitors to Laputa.      I fucking...

     The universe burned. New galaxies of pain exploded out of the black, blowing through the flimsy barriers of human rationality and leaving them stripped bare. Sanity shattered into a million little fragments. The only thing left was a lone scream in the darkness.      Slowly the scream eased down, the pain faded away to a black calm. There was something conscious in this empty world, but...