Bad things happen to the people that Pablo loves. Bad, bloody things. Indeed, his hapless path through life is littered with the human wreckage of lives badly wasted; of men, women and children inexplicably maimed and murdered. Though his presence is ever the common denominator among the many deaths that surround him, evidence never ties him physically to any of the crime scenes. One frustrated Texas detective believes Pablo is culpable after one fashion or another, but he can never prove his suspicions beyond reasonable doubt. When Pablo's threat becomes personal, however, he is hard pressed to act outside the law. During multiple decades of service to the City of Pecan Groves, Texas, he rose from the rank of patrolman to retire as a well-respected homicide detective. In all that time, he never experienced the sort of luck, both good and bad, exhibited by Pablo Chavez. How far will a lawman go to preserve the institution that he serves?
1943. World War II. The U.S. government drafted him out of his life of normalcy and complacency into the life of a United States Marine Corps officer. After intensive training, he would serve during some of the bloodiest assaults of the war. The violent rigors of combat would teach him the rules of long-term survival amid the most lethal fighting in human history. Those who failed to learn these lessons would not return home to their families. During the bloody throes of combat, all is fair and the only rules that apply are those that promote survival. When confronting evil, what is the nature of right and wrong?
She is educated, determined and ambitious. She has never failed at anything in her life until her child goes missing and is eventually found slain, in pieces. Only her anger delves deeper into hell than her unfathomable grief. She hunts her monster relentlessly in the months that follow. After she finds him, his suffering will be unspeakable. He picked the wrong child and the wrong mother. His act of violence will pale in comparison to her intended retribution.
Wrongfully convicted and long confined in one of the worst prisons in the United States, he is bitter and angry. Despite a million-dollar settlement, his thirst for vengeance cannot be peacefully appeased, and his lust for blood ultimately turns on the sort of crooked prosecutors who ruined his life. From city to city and state to state, he wreaks havoc on the justice system, one civil servant at a time. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. He agrees.
It's a new approach to criminal rehabilitation. It's tough love at its toughest. There, complete isolation and unending hours of boredom act like an acid drip against the tough granite exterior of its recalcitrant inmates. Though it is a humane system, it offers no mercy to the incorrigible and it has no patience for those who refuse to learn. Only the strongest can long resist, but no human being can resist forever. Unreasonably hard and unforgiving, this prison receives only the worst of the worst, and it serves only one purpose. Despite his vows to break it before it breaks him, he will soon learn time is endless inside solitary confinement.
Declared missing-in-action while serving in Afghanistan, her eldest son's disappearance left a massive whole in this mother's life. Her misery cannot be assuaged by human sympathy or the keepsakes of memories. Although he is certainly dead, she refuses to speak of it and insists he is still alive somewhere out there in the world. On her deathbed, she reveals to her family that he has been calling her every Friday when it rains. A mother's love for her children may transcend time. When it does, who can determine where reality ends and desperate fantasy begin? Only she and her son know the truth.
In a dystopian, apocalyptic future, he is the quintessential survivalist, a heartless loner. The only things that stand between him and death each day are his maxims. He relies on them to manage the violence inherent within a world gone mad, and they are as unforgiving as his soul. Nothing he witnesses or does can bend or break them, until a single unwilling act of kindness alters his philosophy and his outlook with the same stroke of mercy. His maxims keep him alive in a world of harm, no matter the cost or the consequence to those around him. Then she comes along.
In the limitless expanse of the cosmos, intelligence need not be confined to water-filled flesh. For every form of imagination, there is an embodiment of it out there in the void. On this world in this system, everything may be uniquely alive, from the rocks to the sandstorms. How does one conquer the wind? It is an alien intellect in the shifting sands of a waterless planet. Journey here to die. Or be reborn.
Campaigning with Alexander the Great to wage war on a high plateau above an un-named eastern sea, he suffered a bite from a giant canine. His life would never be the same. Wandering through the ages from continent to continent, an immortal, his only distraction from eternity is warfare. Having fought in every major war through human history's long, bloody list of such conflicts, he ultimately finds himself mired flanks-deep in the trenches of World War I. There, he encounters his own kind for the first time in three thousand years, and he realizes the other side is destined to win with such soldiers fighting among their ranks. Immortal and feral, he is the ultimate beast of battle and few live to describe his canny technique. Fur and blood will fly when the most desperate conflict in human history lets slip the dogs of war!
The worst of the worst, he is notorious even within a notorious system. When the most violent prison riot in the history of human corrections threatens to bring down a prison's walls, this consummate gangster will trade inside information for removal of his tattoos, one image at a time. Afterward, he will become a different man. Only a clean skin can provide the key to his cages.
He's a notorious corporate spy. His last job uncovered a disturbing truth long and deeply buried by the powers-that-be. Though his corporate enemies have kept him imprisoned by flying him endlessly around the world, he is neither forgotten nor alone. When a band of anonymous hackers finally locates him within his prison in the sky, they will stop at nothing to free him and expose his discovery. It's a hell of a way to travel!
What becomes of a man born evil, a man so evil that he manages to slay his own mother while still a toddler, a man so wicked that countless nannies and teachers and caregivers follow, a man so deadly that not even Africa's heart of darkness can tolerate him? He must one day find himself bound for Texas, of course!
Alter the future today by reading this story. Edited untold eons into our future to manipulate their past, our present, the message of this story is tailored word-by-word to exact a desired effect from each reader. The resultant distortion of space and time has a subtle but powerful ability to alter the individual psyche, which exerts an exponential force on the future as it propagates through our population and then countless generations of our progeny to come. The editor of this tale is the last standing Veer, the lone survivor of a time war devastating humankind's future, and she needs your help today!
On a beam of light as in the fog of dreams, a hundred human beings of all ages and walks-of-life find themselves standing on narrow pedestals in a strange auditorium filled with noxious, frigid liquid. With no room to sit or recline, they cannot rest or sleep. They can only shift from foot to foot atop the pedestals, standing for hours then days, their fears unresolved and their fate unknown. Only one man among them, a hardened felon zapped out of solitary confinement, seems to have any answers to their questions. Countless hapless human beings relate tales of alien abductions, and each story harbors some modest kernel of truth. They disappear all over the world. Some of them eventually return home. Yet nobody knows for certain what becomes of the missing while they are gone.
During the summer of 1968, the Nightland, Incorporated carnival stopped in suburban Pecan Groves, Texas to stage a one-week show. Its performances paralleled a three-man prison escape, the miraculous resurrection of a cherished young boy, and the mysterious appearance of a young lady with a potent pedigree. If the squalor of its Freak Show and the rigged games of its midway are now known only within the faded archives of history, then contemporary society is its primary benefactor and direct ancestor. We see its shadows and hear its echoes everywhere. Welcome to the Freak Show. We are it.
No matter how harsh the instruction or inhumane the conditioning, military doctrine cannot replace compassion with uncaring steel. At his post in the bowels of a Japanese submarine, one frightened boy endures the unspeakable slaughter of an illicit war until he reaches a psychological breaking point. Then he begins opening valves that should be closed and closing valves that should be open. Drafted as a teenager into one of the bloodiest and most fanatical navies in history, he will spin the wheels for ill. What causes the discipline of duty to descend into the degradations of madness?
His nickname at work, where his colleagues avoid him like a plague, is "Mr. Accident". Alongside a lonely stretch of road on his way home one evening, he earns his reputation once again. While he sits with a dying youth trapped inside an overturned and crumpled automobile, Mr. Accident tells the boy how he earned his reputation. His is a sordid tale of endless cacophony and disaster, and death follows Mr. Accident like a shadow. Today, he earns his nickname with flare. If you should cross paths with Mr. Accident, beware.
Tarn is a water world, covered from pole to pole by an incredibly deep ocean. Humankind built only one city there. Situated directly on its equator, terraformers strategically emplaced this massive port to continuously exploit the planet's boundless fisheries. Because Tarn orbits its binary system on an extreme axial tilt, each day also measures a year, and because its suns are lethal, Tarn fish only rise to its surface in the darkness. Fishing there is a dangerous business, but the planet's entire economy subsists on the larva of a single enormous predator, which the galactic elite consume as a delicacy. Unfortunately for the common sailor, adult fish are many times larger than the comparatively tiny boats that hunt their offspring, so the death toll climbs after each six month tour. Human labor is cheap. From bloody experience, one outlaw crew has discovered this monster's greatest danger, and they are determined to fight for their lives, heedless of consequence. Though this hunt will be decidedly one-sided, they must finish it. Which is the quarry?
While waiting for his wife to finish shopping, he stumbles across a strangely ornate spiral stairway hidden away at the back of the local mall. Bored, he decides to descend a flight or two to examine the strange window displays arranged along its outer wall. With each downward step, he realizes the displays progressively reflect history long since passed. Intrigued, he delves deeper and deeper into the stairwell's many mysteries. Has he gone too far? It's a deep, dark hole hidden away at the back of a suburban sanctuary. Lured by its presence, he loses his sense of time and then he loses his sense of judgment. Beware the point of no return.
As the zombie apocalypse begins, a small group of civil servants find themselves locked in their tollbooths, which are heavily armored against run-away automobiles. Trapped inside their hellish fishbowls, they curse their situation. As they watch the world fall apart around them, however, they realize they are safe... for a time. Cramped, dingy and institutionally depressing, their duty station becomes a backstage view of Armageddon. Even a bad day on the job is better than a good day amid a zombie apocalypse!
A ravaged, remnant human population claims the Earth's dismal daylight hours, while bloodthirsty savages rule the night. One aging warrior struggles to take back the darkness. He fights bloodlust with bloodlust, but his most powerful weapon is a terrible one that might turn on him at any moment. He knows his one-sided war is a fragile thing, because he understands his victory will be decided as a desperate race against time. Yet history leaves him no option but to fight. In a bleak post-apocalyptic future, monster confronts monster for ultimate control of the planet. One man and one beast stand between civilization and oblivion. Which bloodlust will be bloodiest?
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