Mrs. Branson Calling

by Johnny Compton

He checked the slip of paper in his pocket yet again. Kayla: 555-6213. She had drawn a smiley face encircled by small hearts after the last digit. She was young, a few weeks past her twenty-first birthday if she had been honest with him, and chances were it would not develop into anything serious, but she seemed nice and Shaun was a hopeless sucker for a nice girl. Maybe it was the alcohol applying a rosy tint to his immediate memories of her. Then again, maybe he genuinely was enamored with her, and she with him. Hell, she must have seen something she liked in him; she had even bought him few drinks. A small gesture, but he had been out before with girls who were undoubtedly interested in him but hadn’t bothered to pay for their own drinks, much less buy him one. So maybe…

The Cutting Room

by Shane Jiraiya Cummings

Read by Damaris Mannering

Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae.

The plaque gleamed, caught on the cusp of shadows and fluorescent light. Burnished copper letters. Stark Roman font.

“This is the place where death delights to help the living.” Parrish’s recital of the phrase was now ritual as he donned the second pair of latex gloves. They snapped into place with a satisfying echo that hung in the air. Smells of rubber and disinfectants clung to the place, thinly  masking the stench of decay.

The plaque had been there for as long as he could remember, even before the tenure of crazy old Doc Kaufmann, who once famously ate a cadaver’s eyeball, and perversely, taught him everything he knew about forensic pathology.

“Doctor Parrish?” The diener said, throwing his concentration into turmoil.

“What is it, err… Greg, wasn’t it?”

“Gary. The body’s been prepped.”

No Tomorrows

by Steve Cooper

Six months ago, it was all sugar and no shit. Six months ago, in a private Istanbul club called *Imshi*, I’d snorted coke out of the shallow belly button of an ex-Soviet farmer’s girl, reared on Georgian corn, marinated in Belorussian vodka, garnished in best Turkish blow. Say what you want about the Eastern Orthodox Church, the college of bishops really knows how to throw a party.

The fat commission on that job, though, was running low, and now I was in Leeds, in a filthy hole of a club called *Tiggers*, leaning back against the bar with a little plastic bottle of water and watching the crowd. The boys were thin hungry jackals and the girls were glittering, animated sausage-meat. The place was slaughterhouse-romantic.

I’d come to meet a man on borrowed time. Horton had been borrowing time since 1673, and I had come to loan him a little more.

The Skull-Faced Boy

by David Barr Kirtley

He turned his eyes back to the road, and in the light of the high beams he saw a man stumble into the path of the car. Without thinking, Jack swerved.

The car bounced violently, and then its left front side smashed into a tree. The steering column surged forward, like an ocean wave, and crushed Jack’s stomach.

Dustin wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. He flew face-first through the windshield, rolled across the hood, and tumbled off onto the ground.

The Land of Reeds

by Patrick Samphire

The dead, he had discovered, had mouths and could speak, but they could not be heard.

Or, they could not be heard by the living: the dead talked among themselves with voices of sand and dust. Amenemhet did not wish to talk to the dead. A man who has been murdered wishes to speak to those still living, to lay testament before them, to give warning.

The dead, in their crowded voices, said that Re no longer travelled through the underworld each night. They said that his face was now no more than a ball of fire in the sky. There were no more demons in the underworld, no Apep the serpent, no Amemet the great devourer, no gates, no judges, no scales. There was no Land of Reeds.

The Sloan Men

By David Nickle

Mrs. Sloan had only three fingers on her left hand, but when she drummed them against the countertop, the tiny polished bones at the end of the fourth and fifth stumps clattered like fingernails. If Judith hadn’t been looking, she wouldn’t have noticed anything strange about Mrs. Sloan’s hand.

“Tell me how you met Herman,” said Mrs. Sloan. She turned away from Judith as she spoke, to look out the kitchen window where Herman and his father were getting into Mr. Sloan’s black pickup truck. Seeing Herman and Mr. Sloan together was a welcome distraction for Judith. She was afraid Herman’s stepmother would catch her staring at the hand. Judith didn’t know how she would explain that with any grace: Things are off to a bad enough start as it is.

Full text available here