Evan pulled into a spot in front of the diner and parked. He sat motionless for a moment, his hands hanging loosely on the steering wheel as he stared through the windshield and into the harsh yellow light of the diner beyond. He exhaled a...
My first love was Misty from Pokémon. Those legs, that sass, she was absolutely perfect. No one else could ever compare. When I played the games, I’d hang around her gym and pretend that we were on a date. I built my team to be...
“Is it true? Did every cop in the precinct call in sick tonight?” I asked my friend who lives across the street from the police station. “Yeah, Wayne.” I heard him answer as I could also hear him racking his shotgun. “Can’t say I blame them,...
“I know where them bodies are,” the boy said. Sheriff Burke eyed the skinny fifteen-year-old sitting in one of the two wooden chairs on the other side of his desk. He knew the kid. Knew him well enough to notice he was wearing his Sunday best,...
Screw Marvin Jenkins. The luckiest bastard in the world. Let me start at the beginning. I was born and raised in Flagstaff, second-generation blue blood. I think I first held a gun at the age of five. I known my way around these parts probably even before...
Oh, looks like someone’s waking up a bit. That’s real good. I was getting a little worried that I might have given you a bit too much… oh, hey. No, no, no, don’t try to be sitting up. You’re far too… well, you just don’t...
The far-off unfocused stare of a corpse is something that still unnerves me. Their gaze locked on to a spot somewhere out beyond the physical realm, the milky haze of the degrading cornea acting like a barrier between the living world and the endless black...
When I was a kid, my stepfather asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up. “A magician,” I answered quickly with worldwide clarity. He huffed at that answer. “That ain’t a job, son. Wearing makeup and doing a little dance at parties ain’t...
Most children say they want to run away from home but few ever do it. My brother Joey was definitely in the latter category, using the excuse of freedom and independence to constantly break our parents’ rules. He was a dreamer, an adventurer, someone that refused...
Some said it was the moon’s glow that would hit the aged broken glass of the church’s upper lofts on certain nights. Others claimed it was merely their imagination...
It’s not on record as the drowning experiment. The official name is AQ521-G4, but I’ve chosen to call it what it truly was. It was marketed as an opportunity for people with previous experience in aquatic settings to earn high positions for coastal work, aquamarine...
Edward Harker waited in his office until the financial management firm of Harker, Parks & Associates was empty, and then took the elevator to the parking garage beneath the Manhattan skyscraper. He found his Lincoln Navigator and started it up for the first time in...
I. From the Dark Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent disappearance, but was engendered by the whole nature of...
Being the divorced father of a kid can be a challenging and rewarding job all on its own. Especially when you’re running your own major business. I’ll be honest, I never wanted to have kids in the first place, and the whole married thing was...
Nobody believes in vampires. They’re just myths. Old folktales that have been bastardized by cinema, pulp horror and cheap romance. Done to death until they’re nothing but a cliché. Only children are afraid of them, which is a far cry from the fear they once...
I looked at the phone. I waited for the text to come back. It was maybe about ten, fifteen minutes. That hideous face popped up on the screen, with the reply. “You didn't do the last task I asked of you. Now, there will be consequences.” The last...
My name is John Dawson, and I was a beat cop for twenty-two years for a small town in rural West Virginia. People talk and stories get passed around, especially in small towns with few ears but big mouths. Sometimes, the people knew a crime...
The second Darryl’s keys were rattling in the lock Katie was off the couch and racing to the front door. “Did you do it? Did you do it?” She was practically bouncing up and down with giddy anticipation and unwilling to give him a second to...
“The year is nineteen-ninety-nine.” That sentence brings me back to my senior kindergarten class when I was five years old, where we used to read out the date on the blackboard every single day. The year 1999 exists as a stain in my mind, however, as...
