God, it’s cold. Shivering, I push my hand out of my coat sleeve. Check my watch. Seven thirty. It won’t be long now. I scan the edge of the field, just to be sure, then reach for the thermos. I twist off the cap. Steam rises from the opening. The scent alone’s enough to get the blood flowing, but it’s the heat I need. I don’t bother with the cup. Don’t take my eyes from the path. I know how much time I have. The bitch is nothing if not predictable. Up at six, shower, cereal in her robe, then it's time to get the daughter ready. Cute kid. I wipe my lips dry on my sleeve and screw the cap back on. Doesn’t know a damned thing about the world, but cute. I set the thermos back down on top of the… I glance over at the slide, the ladder of twisted tubes on the other side, the bridge between, and pull my hand back inside my sleeve. Whatever they call this crap. Cold stings the ends of my toes. I flex them, just to keep the blood flowing, and heave out a silent groan. Smoke rises from my ...

Annette Grayson liked the part of the day when everything finally went quiet. The last of her third graders had been collected, the last forgotten lunchbox reclaimed. She’d stacked math workbooks, wiped stray marker streaks off desks, and turned off the humming fluorescence in her classroom until only the soft ...

Part I Christian Ward had driven into strange towns before, but Hollow Creek greeted him with a kind of quiet that suggested the place was thinking. The highway wound through the Appalachian foothills in a series of broad, predictable curves until the last stretch, where the road began to narrow ...

Part I Alden Richards watched Ambrose Massey through the cracked pane of the bar’s side window, the glass warped enough to twist the man’s head into a mild distortion. Neon from the sign outside bled over Ambrose’s hair as he sat in his usual place near the end of the ...

Carlos became aware of the damp brick against his back, cold and rough through the thrift-store parka. He opened his eyes, grateful that the rain had stopped, but unsure how long he’d been out. No dreams, thankfully. It must not have been long; the last few wisps of soft blue ...

Nathan Rye was six years old the first time he heard the wall move. It was a Tuesday. He remembered that much, mostly because Tuesdays were spelling test days, and because his mother had said it out loud when she tucked him in. “Long day, Tuesday,” she’d murmured, smoothing his ...

It was supposed to be the summer that finally gave him a chance at feeling normal. In 1984, sixteen-year-old Wyatt is sent to Camp Chattahoochee—an escape from the state home, from cruelty, from the ghosts of the family who abandoned him. Instead, he finds first love, new hope… and the ...

Brad Carter only wanted one thing: to save his daughter. When he finds a strange, warm egg deep in the woods, it feels like fate—an impossible discovery at the exact moment he’s drowning beneath medical bills and running out of time. What hatches inside his home defies explanation… and brings ...

I have a skull in the corner of my office. It sits on a shelf a little above my eye line. It watches me, and fills me with great dread. I acquired it at an open air bazaar in China. If you wish for a street or a city, or ...

Samantha Barkley has spent years fighting to keep her home bakery—and her family—from collapsing under the weight of impossible expectations. When a vindictive client destroys her reputation overnight, Sam finds herself desperate, exhausted, and cracking under pressure. Then a stranger tells her about someone called the Happy Man, a figure ...

 In a faraway future, across limitless desert wastes, living in the ruins of the old world, lay the emaciated colonies of the new one. The feral lands of Zimitra. The land of forgotten knowledge. The land where the memories of the ancient world were lost to the sands of time, ...

Part I  I work nights at our old middle school. It’s a small place—two floors, one gym, a cafeteria that still smells vaguely like canned green beans even when it’s spotless. Budget cuts mean the day crew leaves at five and I handle the late shift alone. I don’t mind ...

Part I  The tires hissed over gravel as Alexis Kidd turned off the county road and followed a winding lane that sloped toward the lake. The air cooled the deeper she went into the trees. A thin mist hung in the birches like gauze, and the occasional glimpse of water ...

There was a time when I could still tell the difference between work and distraction. Now, they’re the same thing. Lines of code, endless and sterile, fill the hours I used to spend sleeping. The glow of my monitors paints the apartment in perpetual dusk. Dust collects around the edges ...

I hated John Sweeney from my first breath. That might be a slight exaggeration, but not much of one. The feud began in my grandfather’s day–a dispute over an insult which escalated into a blood vendetta over the next two generations. So, I guess you could say I was raised ...

Looking for a new beginning, Cameron takes a high-paying job at a pharmaceutical plant with a lot of secrets—and even more red tape. But when his body begins changing in impossible ways, he suspects the work isn’t just dangerous—it’s transformational. As he peels back the layers of corporate deception, Cameron ...

My hometown of Mildensboro is shrinking. Cherie, my wife, was the first to call it. One night, on our back porch over a beer, she pointed toward the old water tower out past the treeline and remarked that it sure seemed closer than she remembered. Too close. Cherie and I ...

When art teacher Seth Kline moves into an old farmhouse with his five-year-old daughter, Lila, he hopes the light-filled windows will help them heal after his wife’s death. But as Lila begins to draw impossible patterns—colors that shouldn’t exist, shapes that shift when unseen—Seth realizes her imagination may be something ...

There’s a lotta darkness in this world. That’s a lowercase ‘d’ dark, mind ya. There’s also the capital ‘D’ kind, but that’s another kinda thing all together. Now, some people’ll tell ya that it’s the big Darkness that ya gotta watch out for, and in some ways they’d be right ...