Science Fiction: Welcome to my Worlds

didn't think he would be moving again any time soon.

"Your son's out in their car Sylvia." He could hear her rush out as Dora's footsteps came through the kitchen doorway.

"The big goon is dead." Isaac thought she sounded quite satisfied with herself. "Nice move with the gun. You are quite the old coot, aren't you?"

Again he felt the fan of air as she picked up the painting. He waved goodbye. "Be careful Dora. You were a good housekeeper."

"Yeah. For too many years. But that's gonna change now." Dora’s footsteps went out the back just as he heard Sylvia came back in the front with her son.

"Thank you Isaac. I don't know how to thank you enough for helping me get my son back."
He felt her arms around his neck and a kiss on his cheek. This time he was almost blinded by the flash. They were all sitting at the kitchen table-- the boy obviously three or four years older and the two of them holding hands with sappy smiles on their faces. He smiled. "I think you'll find a way."

"I'll be gone before they get here anyway." Dora’s footsteps headed toward the door and then the screech of braking tires on asphalt outside obscured the sound. A thump signaled the painting being set down. "What do you think we should do?"

Isaac positioned them quickly then removed his hand from the bug saying, in his best querulous old man voice, "Ladies... Don't leave me alone with them... It will take me too long to get to the back door." He removed the bug from the wheel, stuck it to his chair arm, and started bumping his chair noisily into the doorway to the kitchen.

In back he heard a crash as the door was kicked in-- probably by the hired goon, he thought. A gun fired and there was silence from that direction. Footsteps on the carpet told him the strawberry-marked boss was entering through the still open front door. A loud meaty 'thwack!' and a thud on the carpet told him that one was down.

Isaac’s finger brushed the bug again triggering another frozen flash. This time he saw the aristocrat raise his gun to fire at Sylvia as she turned to see what was happening in the back. "Sylvia, look out!" He jerked his chair forward and chopped down with the edge of his hand. The gun made a soft thud on the carpeted floor then there was a satisfying crunch as Sylvia struck the man. Isaac

conversation! A bug had fallen off and stuck to his chair wheel. He had to guess that those who had hired Sylvia were on their way over because Dora was out to transfer the painting-- and whatever its illicit contents were-- to a different buyer.

This just kept getting worse. But at least he and Sylvia hadn't walked into a trap with them. They certainly knew about his 'helpless blind man' ploy. Isaac didn't know for sure how far away they were but he had a sense of short minutes. Unless he could do some fast thinking none of them would survive the encounter.

He put his hand over the bug as well as he could and spoke softly, "Forget the painting. Sylvia's employers will be here in less than five minutes and we'll all be dead shortly thereafter if we don't cooperate. There is a bug under my right hand on the wheel of my chair they are listening to right now." He put a finger to his lips, raised the hand covering the bug and pointed.

"Don't be trying to pull something funny. How could you possibly know that?" Dora snorted.

Isaac clapped his hand over the bug at her first syllable. He just hoped it wasn't sensitive enough to pick up her voice through it.

"He does! He has visions, or something."

A gun complicated things. He couldn't see where it was pointed nor could he really move fast enough to get out of the way. The scent of lilacs grew stronger as Dora approached. "Why did you do it Dora? What's in the painting?"

"Lot's of money. Don't care."

Isaac could feel a fan of air brush his face and assumed that Dora had grabbed the painting.

"Don't even think about it, sweety."

He could hear a hard edge to Dora's voice that had never manifested during her time as his cleaning lady. "Easy Sylvia. You are no use to your son dead."

"They'll kill him!"

Isaac knew the women were in a faceoff. He could feel the tension in the air. He had never felt more useless than he did right now. Anything he did was likely to get someone killed and unlikely to help the situation at all. He gripped the wheels of his chair fiercely, wanting to do something. Then his fingertip slid across something metallic stuck to the rubber wheel.
Another flash went off in his head and he was presented with a slice of frozen time. It was a still picture of the two men and Sylvia's son in a car. But over it he could hear voices. Echoes of Dora and Sylvia's

It was her turn to laugh. Her laughter quickly became hysterics mixed with hiccups and sobs. Isaac aimed a moderated slap at where he knew her face must be and she subsided into snuffles. "I would have killed you."

"I know."

"Why would you help me?"

"Because I know Mothers must try to protect their young. It's built in." And because there is something about you that reminds me of my Angela, he thought.

"But how?"

Isaac smiled with only a touch of humor. "No one notices a blind man. They won't check to see if I'm armed if I go in with you."

"No, but I will," a new voice came from the open door.

"Dora. Your timing is…"

"Impeccable?"

"I was going to say regrettable." He'd figured it had to be her that placed the painting. No one else had access to the house. You just couldn't trust anyone anymore. She was older than he was and he would have sworn that she was as boring as his old maid aunt.

"She's got a gun," Sylvia hissed.

He could hear Dora moving across the carpet toward him. He had no weapon but his muscles tensed in readiness.

his cheek you will die. Your son may not fare much better."

"How did you know… You're just saying that so I won't take the painting!"

"I don't care about the painting. It isn't mine and I don't know where it came from. It isn't even good art. I have no idea why someone would kill for it, but that is what will happen." He also didn't know why he cared about this woman and her son, but it seemed that it was so.

Isaac could hear the woman sink onto the cushions of his couch. No one had sat there since his wife… He wrenched his mind away from that thought. Her low sobs tore at him. "Why do they want this painting? It isn't worth anything."

"I don't know. They just told me to bring it or they'd kill my son." She took a deep breath and he could hear a wheezy rattle as if her chest was congested.
He was no doctor, but he'd had enough medical training in the military to know an early sign of pneumonia. She hadn't been taking care of herself. There really was no excuse for anyone getting pneumonia these days. He almost mentioned it, then decided it really wasn't the time.

"Look-- uh-- what is your name?"

"Sylvia."

"Sylvia, I'll help you if you'll let me."

There was a long silence then, "You can't stop me from taking it."
"I'm sure you can fashion an excellent career around stealing from blind men." He heard her moving and it wasn't long before there was a thump on the carpeted floor in front of his feet. Curiosity, he knew, was a powerful force. It had certainly gotten him in trouble enough times. He reached out, his fingers encountering a rough canvas surface.

Isaac's mind lit as if by an exploding flashbulb, searing a scene into his consciousness. The painting was there. Not the work of an old master at all, he noted. But the rather ordinary pastoral scene depicted in the painting seemed unimportant as he noticed that the woman in the black jumpsuit was also there bleeding on the floor, and apparently dead. Two men stood over her: A short heavyset man, whose face seemed to be mostly eyebrows and pug nose, wiped off his knife. A younger aristocratic gentleman, appearance marred only by a red strawberry mark on his cheek, admired the painting while holding onto a crying boy.

His mind faded into its usual formless blankness as some of the things he'd seen clicked into place. "If you take this painting to the man with the strawberry mark on

lot of trouble for nothing."

"Ahhh." Her neck turned under his arm. "None except that one, I suppose." The sarcasm in her voice was hard to miss. "Clever making it look like part of the wallpaper. I'd have seen it earlier, though, if it weren't so damn dark in here. I'm only looking for one and that certainly appears to be it."

What could she be talking about? She seemed to think there was a painting here in his living room. The sharp sweetness of her perfume distracted him as he tried to think. He had a hunch that he needed to make the right choices and make them fast. He didn't want to kill her, and he was beginning to realize that he didn't want her to kill him either. At least not now. Something about this painting was important, although perhaps not to him exactly. But he did need to know about it.

"Bring it to me." Isaac released her throat and gave her a firm push away from him.

"What?"

He could tell from the tremor in her voice that he had taken her completely by surprise. He just hoped that he was right about her. "Bring the painting to me and let me touch it. Then you can either take it or I will give you what you think it is worth."

his rib against the arm. “I think it’s…” he began in a hoarse whisper, then stopped.

“Where is it!”

He could feel her leaning forward and his old Commando training took over. His arm was a striking snake, grabbing her neck in a chokehold and snapping her head to his lap. She fell to her knees then tried to scratch at his eyes with her long fingernails. “They are already gone,” he spoke quietly into her ear. “Move again and I will snap your neck.”

She got very still. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Try me. I have nothing to lose. Now why are you in my house?”

"The... painting." She managed to get the words out past his hand around her throat.
He loosened his grip slightly so she could speak but kept his other hand firmly wrapped in her hair. "I have no paintings woman. I've been blind for over twenty years. Why would I collect art?" Isaac could feel her shrug against his knee.

"Investment."

"I don't need..." he started, then decided it would be foolish to tell her anything about his finances. "I have no paintings. Whoever told you I did has gotten you in a

Then, just as suddenly, he realized that it was no daydream. It was a vision. He hadn’t had one of those since he’d been blinded in the war. Since the last time his life was in danger, he realized. As it was right now. He could feel the presence of his own death very near. It smelled like the heavy ozone of a hovering thundercloud.

Isaac couldn’t help it. He burst out laughing. He might be in a wheelchair but his lungs were still strong, and the house rang with peels of his mirth. He’d spent the whole of last week planning methods of suicide. What good was life without his sweet wife Angela, after all? Together they’d been strong, even when both were in ill health. Alone he was nothing. Less than nothing.

“Shut up old man!”

The woman slapped him, her long fingernails savagely scoring his face. His hand went instinctively to the sting, coming away wet with his blood. What kind of woman slaps a blind man?

“I don’t have time for your hysterics. Where is the painting?”

He didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, but he was really beginning to dislike her tone. “Hidden where you’ll never find it, I hope.” This time her slap rocked him in the chair bruising

Seer
by Don
(Previously published in Romancing The Ozarks anthology.)

Isaac heard a noise at the door and went to let the cleaning lady in. One wheel of his chair made a ‘click’, ‘click’ as it rolled over the marble of the entryway. Must have picked up something on the wheel, he decided. He could have her look at it while she was here. Abruptly the chair stopped moving, throwing him forward, and he heard the footrest strike something. But nothing should be there. He was very careful about clutter. No one else had been here since Dora was in last week to clean.

He reached out with caution to see what the chair collided with. The door. It was open. He hadn’t opened it… and Dora didn’t have a key. Then he touched the doorknob and it was as if a lightning flash went off in his mind illuminating, for a fraction of a second, a striking female figure with unnaturally red hair wearing a clingy black jumpsuit and, he was quite sure, nothing under it but her. What a stupid time for daydreams. There was an intruder in the house…