THERE’S ALWAYS FOOD
They walked through a couple of grey door flaps from what had to be a back-storage area and into what used to be the bakery aisle. There was moldy bread still in their plastic wrappings, but the stench of old, rotting fruits and vegetables from the nearby garden-foods section assaulted Jennifer’s nostrils. She gagged a bit and held her nose and mouth. Hopefully, there really was still edible food here…
REMNANTS OF THE RAZOR’S EDGE PART I
Breaches were inherently unstable, so even if they were opened by cultists or a necromancer, they would eventually collapse without the direct intervention of said cultists, necromancer, or…something else. Hence, the boss of a breach arena. Without the cultists or necromancer, the breach could only stay open with a Class 5 Breacher keeping it open, so you kill the boss, you cut off the breach’s energy supply, and the rift closes. End of story…
REMNANTS OF THE RAZOR’S EDGE PART II
James felt his skin crawl as Malik made a beeline toward them. Something was off here, and James could feel it, right down to his bones. He had not imagined the naked specter of Malik he had seen before, nor was he imagining the absolute feeling of dread sinking into him right now…
CHEATER
The huge TV screen on the back wall lit up with the top half of a guy, a young white guy with short brown hair and brown eyes. He had on a red T-shirt that had the word “Yenjo” spelled out across it in white cursive…
SARSAPARILLA
The sarsaparilla was in the ice bucket, several bottles of it, one from Big Lenny’s, the rest from Clancy’s, and that one from Big Lenny’s?…That was the killer. All one had to do was pop the crown cap, pour in the arsenic, and lever the cap back on. Sure, the cap was a little bent, but all you had to do was grab the bottle for him, remove the cap, and give the boy a drink…Easy as apple pie…
THE LAST STANFORD
This child’s eyes were not quite aligned horizontally, the lips wrong, curved on one side and straight on the other, the face angular in a way where the chin was too long, too narrow, one arm longer than the other, the hands too big, adult-sized…
THE BOOK OF CHAINS
There was a simple wooden chair about twenty feet in front of him, but that wasn’t what held his attention. What kept his eyes locked was the corpse of a man in a grey three-piece suit sitting in that chair, the face a withered grey husk with hollowed-out eyes and wisps of white hair upon its leather-stretched skull…
THE HARROWING OF JOSH AND AMY
It was his car. His little blue 2006 Toyota Celica was destroyed. It had crashed into that telephone/power pole he had thought he’d avoided. The front end of the car had caved in, that front end was wrapped around that pole, the windshield a cracked mess, but it was the figures in the car that caught his eye…
Q.C. CLEANERS
You see, you work for Q.C. Cleaners, owned by cleaning magnate Quincy Corman. Your three “brothers” are actually your three clones, though they have no knowledge of this. In fact, you can remember quite clearly the company process of extracting a bone sample from your right femur, the drawing of your blood from your left arm, and the shaving off of a slice of your skin from your right hip for your D.N.A…all for the explicit purpose of creating your clones…
