D E C I S I O N
P O I N T S
UNCORRECTED
ADVANCE READER COPY
D E C I S I O N
P O I N T S
E d i t e d b y
B r y a n T h o m a s S c h m i d t
WordFire Press
Colorado Springs, Colorado
DECISION POINTS
Copyright © 2016 Bryan Thomas Schmidt
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including
photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where
permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places
and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real,
used fictitiously.
Book Design by RuneWright, LLC
www.RuneWright.com
Published by
WordFire Press, an imprint of
WordFire, Inc.
PO Box 1840
Monument CO 80132
Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers
WordFire Press Trade Paperback Edition 2016
Printed in the USA
www.wordfire.com
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
1
Sisters
3
By Jonathan Maberry
Sankofa
24
By Nnedi Okorafor
The Prince of Artemis V
34
By Jennifer Brozek
Aftermaths
45
By Lois McMaster Bujold
Driving a Bargain
57
By Robert J. Sawyer
My Father’s Eyes
72
By E.C. Myers
Like Thief in the Light
85
By Alethea Kontis
Clockwork Fagin
98
By Cory Doctorow
Postcards
128
By Rebecca Moesta
The Outbreeders
143
By Robert Silverberg
Rivalry on the Sky Course
156
By Bryan Thomas Schmidt
An Echo in the Shell
172
By Beth L. Cato
The Milky Way Dance Hall
184
By Lou Antonelli
Blood and Water
193
By Kate Corcino
Edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt
The Boy Who Yelled “Dragon”
214
By Mike Resnick
Newts
221
By Kevin J. Anderson
Babydoll
240
Shade
254
By Steven Gould
Granted
270
By Jody Lynn Nye
A War of Gifts
278
By Orson Scott Card
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I N T R O D U C T I O N
On every journey there is a path you choose to follow or the path
you choose to make.
Decisions, decisions—life is full of them, and many stories
revolve around them. Hence the concept for the anthology you
hold in your hands. The idea was gifted to me by my friend and
fellow editor, Jennifer Brozek, whose own story herein is one of
my favorites of her stories ever. I expanded the concept to cover
a range of time and genres—not just stories of science fiction but
also fantasy, dark fantasy, and horror—as well as writers both
known for writing young adult stories and writers who aren’t.
Before Y.A. became a genre designation, there were always
stories about young people—some called them “juveniles” or
various other titles. And the stories you’ll find here include some
really good ones involving such characters, but because not all
of them might be stocked in a bookstore as specifically Y.A., you
might miss them. Twelve of the twenty stories here are making
their first appearance in an anthology with this collection. Six are
brand new originals, others are reprints. All have in common
decision points that affect their outcomes.
The stories include some from popular series such as Lois
McMaster Bujold’s long running Vorkosigan Saga, Orson Scott
Card’s Ender series, Jonathan Maberry’s Rot and Ruin series,
and Steven Gould’s Jumper series. Then there are stories from
newer series like my own Saga of Davi Rhii space opera series,
Kate Corcino’s Spark series, and K.D. McEntire’s Lightbringer
Urban Fantasy series, inspired by Peter Pan. Others standalone,
including several from very popular young adult authors like
Alethea Kontis, Cory Doctorow, Nnedi Okorafor, and Eugene
Myers. All have been chosen for their variety in tone, plot, and
even moral (if they have one). The idea here is to give you
choices as well about what you’re in the mood for each time you
Edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt
pick up the book. Or perhaps to just guarantee you a different
reading experience each time you decide to open these pages.
However the book touches you, I hope it’s as rewarding for you
as it was for me during the three years I spent putting it together.
The decision point is now yours—you already made one by
deciding to open this book. More decisions follow—some
thrilling, some frightening, some heartwarming, some more
somber. All of them enjoyable in their own way. This book is
intended to offer a lot of variety, not just to make you think and
question, but to entertain you; to be the kind of book you can
pick up and ready one story a day and find a different experience
each time. So allow me to step back out of your way and let your
journey begin. I hope you find it an enjoyable one.
Bryan Thomas Schmidt
Ottawa, Kansas
January 2016
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We begin with a long awaited origin story from Jonathan
Maberry’s bestselling Rot and Ruin series, wherein two sisters
face the kind of impossible choices that those living in a zombie
infested world must face as they fight to survive.
S I S T E R S
( A S t o r y o f T h e R o t a n d R u i n )
By Jonathan Maberry
- 1 -
It rained the day the world ended.
That’s how she remembered it.
The rain fell cold and hard. That day and every time the world
ended. For Lilah there wasn’t just one apocalypse. They kept
happening to her.
And each time it was raining.
- 2 -
The first time was when she was little. Too little to really
understand what was happening. She was just learning to speak,
barely able to walk, hardly able to form the kind of memories
Edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt
that could be taken out later and looked at. She remembered a
wom
an’s face. Her mothers, but Lilah didn’t really understand
Lilah remembered her mother holding her, and running. And
other people holding her. And running.
And the monsters chasing.
Grabbing. Tearing. Taking. Biting. Eating.
Always.
One of them had bitten Mom. Lilah had seen it happen but
did not know what the bright colors and loud shrieks meant. Not
then. Not until later.
She remembered the house where her mother and the other
grownups had hidden. She remembered her mother screaming.
Mommy, with her big, swollen belly. Screaming.
That’s when Annie was born.
Lilah did not understand birth, either.
Or the death that followed.
Or what happened when Mom woke up.
She saw what the others did, though. She understood it on
some level that ran so deep age didn’t matter. She screamed
louder than the newborn Annie. She screamed louder than the
people who swung clubs and pipes as Mom tried to bite them.
She screamed so loud it made her spit red.
After that Lilah didn’t have much of a voice. A whisper. The
first words she learned to speak were said in that whisper, and
every word since then. Every single word.
It had been raining that night, the drops thudding on the roof
and tapping on the windows and knocking on the door. The rain
hissed in the trees outside. Lilah recorded it without having labels
for any of those tings. Despite the rain, those memories were
burned into her. She was too young for any of it, but the world
ended anyway.
- 3 -
It rained the day George went away.
George.
Lilah never knew his last name. Last names didn’t seem to
matter much. People in books had last names, and people in the
stories George told. And maybe he even told her his last name,
but she forgot because there was no need to remember it.
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George was the last of the grownups. The one who didn’t die.
The others did. They went out of the house, one by one, over
the weeks. Looking for help. Looking for answers. Finding
nothing, it seemed, except the end of their own stories.
George stayed with Lilah and the baby. He named her Annie.
After that it was Lilah, and Annie, and George for years.
And years.
Sometimes George did go out, but never too far and never for
too long. He waited for times when the biters weren’t so thick
around the house and then he’d slip away, quiet as a mouse and
vanish in the tall grass. Those were bad times. At first. Lilah
would try hard not to cry because it scared Annie when she cried.
So Lilah forced her raspy voice to be still, blinked her tears away,
held the screams in, and waited.
George always came back. He was the only one who ever
did. Pushing a wheelbarrow full of cans from someone else’s
kitchen. Bringing clothes and toilet paper and toys and books.
Always books.
Bringing weapons, too.
Never bringing other people. There were none. They were all
sure of that. No one but George, Lilah, and little Annie.
Childhood was learning to be quiet, learning to hide, learning
to trick the dead. George taught them to fight as soon as they
could hold tools. They spent long nights together turning wood
and duct tape and kitchen knives into weapons. Quiet weapons.
George wasn’t a fighter. He told the girls that he used to sell
shoes. He wasn’t a hero like the princes and champions in the
books he taught them to read. He wasn’t big and full of muscle.
He wasn’t as handsome as Prince Charming or Aladdin or
Captain America. He never took karate or anything like that.
Everything he taught them was what he could make up, and some
stuff he learned from books he found that weren’t Disney books
or comics. They all read as much as they could. They read
everything. It was how George taught them about the world that
was. A world Lilah and Annie would never know. Could never
know because the dead rose and ate it all up.
Eight years. Just the three of them.
When Lilah was ten and Annie was eight George met a man
in the woods. Not another biter. A living man. He was dressed
like a hunter from pictures they’d seen. Camouflage clothes. But
he smelled like one of the biters because he smeared something
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on his clothes that made the monsters think he was like them, and
they didn’t eat each other.
George almost killed the man because at first he couldn’t
believe that he was alive. He couldn’t be alive because the world
had ended and everyone died. Every single person except the
three of them.
But the man was alive. Really and truly alive.
When George realized that, he went running from cover and
grabbed the man and embraced him, weeping, kissing his face
and hands, sobbing out loud.
The hunter was happy to see him, too, but unlike George he
hadn’t believed the world was destroyed. Not completely.
“There’s a lot of us left,” he said. “We’re taking the world
back from these zoms.”
Zoms. He called them zoms. Short for zombies. A strange
word that Lilah had read in books and which didn’t seem to fit.
Zombies were dead people brought back to life to be slaves.
These dead people ate the living. George usually called them
biters or ghouls. Zoms was a new word.
George was so happy that he brought the hunter back to the
house to meet the girls.
Lilah remembered that. She was absolutely terrified of the
big man with all the guns and knives who smelled like a biter.
And he was strange-looking. The man had the palest skin, almost
as white as a corpse, and he had one blue eye and the other was
as red as blood. He had lots of scars and he smiled all the time.
Lilah hated him and tried to stab him with a spear. Annie
threw stones at him. It took George a long time to convince them
it was safe.
Safe.
Funny word.
For Lilah ‘safe’ meant the three of them inside the house with
the doors and windows shut. That was safe. It was the only safety
she’d ever known.
After a long, long time of talk and promises and even some
yelling on George’s part –something he almost never did—Lilah
stopped fighting. It took Annie a little longer to settle down.
Unlike her big sister, Annie had never seen any adults other than
George. They’d all died when she was a baby.
They all sat in the living room, and the big hunter with the
red eye sat on the floor. He’d taken off all of his weapons and
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Decision Points
given them to George to hold, just to prove that he wasn’t going
to hurt them. Lilah and Annie crouched like dogs on either side
of George, ready to run, ready to bite.
“It didn’t all fall down,” said the big man. “We lost a lot of
land, sure, but we’re taking it back. This is one of the last areas
that hadn’t been cleared out yet, but my guys are out here doing
just that.”
“Your guys …?” asked George, and as she squatted next to
him, Lilah could feel him tremble with excitement.
The hunter took a couple of candy bars from his pocket and
reached over to offer them to the girls, but Lilah recoiled. Annie
hissed at him. The man’s smile flickered and he placed the candy
on the floor and shifted back away from them.
“They haven’t had much candy,” said George. “And I trained
them to be careful.”
“Stranger-danger,” laughed the big man. “I get it. It’s cool,
and that’s smart. Big ol’ dangerous world and you can never be
too careful.”
The candy bars lay there, untouched.
“You said you have people out here?”
“Sure. Part rescue team and part hunters. We’re quieting the
last of the zoms as we go.”
George repeated the word, “’Quieting’.”
“Yeah, it’s what we call it when we put the zoms down.
Bullet in the motor cortex or a blade through the brain stem. Only
way to get ‘er done.”
“Quieting,” murmured Lilah, and then Annie repeated it.
“Look,” said the big hunter, “these woods are still pretty
thick with zoms. Not safe for you to be here. My camp’s a few
hours walk, but we have food, a stockade, horses, and a hell of—
oops, I mean a heck of a lot of guns. We could go there and get
oriented, then I can have a team take you and the kids to the
closest town.”
“Town …” said George and he swayed as if he was going to
faint.
“Yeah. Towns all over. Closest is Mountainside, which they
set up just after the problems started. Built around a reservoir and
backed up against a mountain. And it’s up high because the zoms
won’t walk uphill unless they’re chasing something. Big fence