Part I Sara didn’t realize how much of the town was gone until she hit Main Street and found more plywood than glass. The old diner was a vape shop now. The hardware store her mother used to drag her through on Saturdays stood empty, windows painted...
Part I Dana Quill first heard the name in a voicemail that cut out halfway through. “The Pit,” the caller said, his voice low and ragged. “They’re not doing cage fights down there. They’re… growing things. If you want a story, this is it. But don’t come...
Part I Mindy Ayers noticed the new girl’s reflection before she noticed her. The conference room’s wall of glass caught everyone at the table in unflattering profile, except for the woman near the head. On the far right pane, Mindy’s own reflection blurred where the fluorescent light...
Part I Shawna Coleman rode home from her own wedding with the bouquet in her lap like contraband. The car’s interior still smelled faintly of hair spray and champagne. A few stray grains of rice clung to the fabric of her dress. Drew drove one-handed, his tie...
Part I Dr. Meredith Rowan preferred to schedule new patients at the start of the week, when her mind felt the cleanest. Mondays had a crispness to them, a sense that the slate had been rinsed overnight. By Thursday, the edges often blurred. Trauma work could...
Part I Stephen Hampton didn’t expect to find himself back in uniform, even part-time, but his phone began vibrating on the kitchen counter just after six in the morning. He recognized the number—Patricia Simmons rarely called him outside of holidays or bad news—and answered before the...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
