Blood, Gridlock, and PEZ

By Kevin Anderson

Blood gathered in pools around the body as the afternoon sun gave it a sickly glimmer. I remember thinking how much the dark liquid really seemed to belong on the pavement. Like oil, transmission fluid or lizard-green coolant, the blood was at home on the asphalt.

It’s amazing the things you notice when events force you to grown up in the span of a moment. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This story really starts two hours earlier, with Gina.

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The Excavation

by Ben Thomas

“There is a fossil bed here,” he declared, “that I could publish on for the rest of my life.”

Thom’s tendency was to become worked up about every dig he supervised, but he’d never claimed he could spend the rest of his life on a single one.

“Of course, we’ll have to wait until tomorrow, but wait till you see what I’ve found. You’ll feel like a boy in a toy shop!”

The Keeper

by Ken Goldman

An intermittent brightness from above allowed Shelby a study of her captor’s lumpish face that seemed more pockmarked with each new illumination. Standing near, the man stank like raw sewage. He polished off what remained of a sandwich, licking brown grease from stubby fingers that somehow remained filthy.

Shelby struggled against the knots at her wrists and those inside her stomach. Attempting some semblance of composure she breathed deeply, filling her lungs. It didn’t help much. A rotted smell imprinted itself inside her nostrils. Near her, shelves housed a grotesque assortment of stinking pumpkin heads, maybe a dozen of them reduced to disintegrated lumps surrounding the room, one-time jack-o’lanterns whose carved smiles had long since decomposed.

Fighting the urge to gag Shelby focused outside where the black ink of the Atlantic heaved in the darkness. Distant lights of the Jersey shore towns glimmered like painted stars, but nearby no lights shone. Rotating from a pedestal above, a huge beacon scoured the circular room. Its single ray flittered upon the ocean’s whitecaps and exposed a beach that turned to marshland, impossible to traverse. A small boat had been dragged away from the surf, its tracks upbeach indented in the sand near a small shed. The bastard had removed the outboard, probably locked it inside that shack. He had tendered her to this middle-of-nowhere light house, as isolated as it was remote, dragged her to its lantern room to fuck her and then kill her.

Or maybe he would kill her first, and then . . .

Shit . . . oh shit . . . breathe . . .

Fever

By David Malki

The sisters sat in the back seat, bundled up against winter, as the car idled in the driveway. Julie hunched low, staring at the seat in front of her; Emma slumped against the opposite window, staring at the snow that blanketed the world, staring at her friends, lying silently asleep.

“You’re such a freak,” Julie snarled. “You’re always causing such problems. Why can’t you just be normal.”

“I’m hot,” Emma croaked.

“Well, it’s like thirty degrees out there, have at it,” Julie said, and unclicked Emma’s seat belt.

Emma bounded from the car and ran to join her friends, feeling the refreshing rush of snow on her face. They cheered as she rubbed the ice into her skin, feeling weight lift from her lungs. She breathed in the cold deeply, and became more alive: she noticed the tang of pine in the air; smelled the dirty heat of the car’s exhaust.

She felt a deep hatred for her sister rise. Her friends felt it too. They didn’t need to be told what to do.

Tenant’s Rights

by Sean Logan

Albert climbed onto the shelf in his closet and lifted the hatch to the attic. He scanned his immediate surroundings for terrorists and spiders. Clear. He hoisted himself up and crawled along the stealthway to the lockbox hidden under the insulation in Sector Alpha. He removed a small baggie and a vial of liquid, slid them into a secret pouch in the left arm of his trench coat and returned to his room.

He dumped the contents of the baggie into a silver alchemist’s mixing bowl (they said it was a dog’s water dish at the pawn shop, but that seemed unlikely). He looked closely at the fine flaky powder and thought he could detect movement, which made sense, because at a microscopic level were millions of tiny insects. Itching power, the professional kind, illegal in the United States. Those little bugs crawled under the skin and caused unbearable irritation. And when Lance showed up at dinner tomorrow, itching like a mangy dog, there was no way Sally-Ann’s grandparents would want her living in this vermin-ridden hovel with that disease-carrying hobo.

And just to make sure it was effective, Albert implemented the next phase of his plan.