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"Take the fatal shot," said Horseshoe. He must have laid down his rifle because I remember him helping to steady my own. "Easy now, you'll own this forever—" I stared the thing in the eye and squeezed the trigger. It threw back its head, rising up. It gasped for breath, spitting more blood. It barked at the sky. Then it fell, head thumping against the deck. Its serpentine neck slumped. The rest of its blood spread over the boards and rolled around our boots and flowed between the planks. I was the first to step forward, looking down at the thing through drifting smoke. Its remaining eye seemed to look right back. I got down on my knees to look closer. The thing exhaled, causing the breathi...
ABE: (looks around nervously) Swede…? He looks for SWEDEN again, and again sees only the tops of the bushes, roaring in the wind. A beat later there is another crack! Another splash! ABE whips around. He sees, a few feet out, what at first appears to be a human arm reaching up from a gurgling eddy—deaden spidery fingers groping. He focuses his eyes upon it: the pressure stops cold as we see it is merely a gnarled branch. ABE exhales. Then, as driftwood is proving scarce on the island, he breaks off some willow stems and tries to fish the branch closer. The current dislodges it as he looks on and it floats down stream, bobbing and turning on the waves. ABE watches it go; it looks rather l...
An omnibus of science-fiction, fantasy and horror stories from Wayne Kyle Spitzer, author of the Witch Doctor and Dinosaur Apocalypse series ... It is raining. That’s the first thing I notice, the first thing that tells me I am no longer in the cockpit. The second is that I’m bleeding—bleeding from the leg, which is making it difficult to press the attack. The third is that I’m dying—as is my opponent—dying beneath a blood red sky. “It is finished,” he says, stumbling forward and back—his blood flowing freely, his hair matted in sweat. “Look at you! Your broadsword is shattered. Your armor is compromised. Why is it you continue?” But I do not know why I continue—only ...
When a recently orphaned boy befriends a juvenile T-rex, complications quickly arise--leading to a fateful, impossible decision ... He just looked at me, his little fore-claws opening and closing—a kind of prehistoric hand-wringing, I supposed. And it occurred to me—not for the first time—that, at least in the short-term, I might be his only means of survival; that, indeed, if I didn’t feed him he might very well starve. What did not occur to me, at least until he began sniffing the air between us and slowly moving toward me, is that I myself might be in danger—that, in lieu of more fish or perhaps even a big dragonfly, he might try kid. Might try lying little turd-wad who was goin...
It was the first night of the Sacrificium, a night of sacrifice and death, a night when the black coins tendered in the Lottery would be tendered back. It was also the Hora Mille Semitis, the Hour of a Thousand paths—for that is the day the Sacrificium had fallen on this year—the hour when best friends might become enemies, when lovers of longstanding might betray oaths, the hour in which anything and everything was possible. And the alignment was felt: from the upper echelons of the capitol to the poorest quarters of the downriver provinces. For the message of Valdus’ rebellion had spread—whether it was a tract nailed to a door before quickly being torn down or a blast in the night that caused the power to fail in entire regions. It was a night for dreaming and for huddled collusions, for the breeze to course through rustling leaves, for long dead hearts to awaken and start pumping blood. The Sacrificium had once more come to Ursathrax, but so had the Hour of a Thousand Paths, and Valdus’ Revolution, and something else, something elusive but impossible to ignore, nebulous, but as real as the River Dire, which seemed to have stolen into the world on the wind itself ...
They streamed out from the tree line in a veritable blitzkrieg, the guns of the tanks rotating and firing, the foot soldiers alternately taking cover behind vehicles and squeezing off bursts, the raptors and triceratops and stegosaurs charging—as Red and Charlotte and Roger and Savanna continued shooting and the children ran ammo and Bella lit the gasoline trenches, as Gojira and the clerk prepared shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. As hundreds of others joined the battle belatedly and began to kill and to be killed. And then they were there; they were at the gates, and the triceratops and stegosaurs had waded into the burning trenches and begun serving as bridges—sacrificing themselves ...
In a land of wind and willows, two canoeists encounter some other-worldly wind turbines. From The Sentinels: Dunn: He said that he was taking the way of the wind and the sky, and that he was going in—to Them—by which I presume he meant going into the tower and scaling the ladder. And he said other things: That our thoughts made patterns in their world—left ‘prints,’ as it were—as did theirs in ours; and that that was how they’d found us, by listening to our thoughts, zeroing in on our patterns. And he said that Bobby was merely a bundle of sensory organs wrapped in a skin of decaying matter and so wasn’t important, wasn’t needed. That only they mattered—they, the being...
He pauses, looking at the glass tubes, at the embryos floating in fluid. “Are you telling me that … those are all my daughters?” Again she just smiles. “What else? Yes, of course, every single one. Not just clones, mind you, but daughters, each with their own genetic makeup and individual traits—which will in time give rise to language and syntax, to dance and to art, to rhyme and verse and expression in a thousand forms. Indeed, they are, all of them, in a very real sense, our children. An entirely new generation born of both witch and Witch-Doctor, perchance to evolve into something neither of us could have imagined. Think of it, Patrobus! In the end that is all I ask of you; all that I ask in return for your life. Think of it … and sleep.” And then he does sleep, and it is good, at least until he awakens near New Salem and finds himself stumbling into it like a ghost; where he is greeted by civilian men and assisted to the Station House, and told by the few Doctors present that everyone else to a man has joined the raiding party, and that it is on its way to rescue him right now. On its way to something called Blair Coven. Where they will kill everything in sight.
That’s when I really noticed it, the fact that the landscape immediately around the car had changed; that it had—reverted, somehow. I can only describe what I saw, which was that none of the vehicles at the light could have been newer than a ’66, and that the light itself looked decidedly retro, decidedly quaint, at least compared to the one only a block away. More, the storefronts alongside had changed, so that a Kinney Shoe Store now stood where a Taco Bell had just been, and a Woolworth had replaced an Indy Food Mart. Likewise, the pedestrians had changed—yoga pants giving way to miniskirts, athletic shoes giving way to go-go boots and winklepickers, short hair giving way to long. And it was as I observed these things that I noticed something else—the Stingray’s reflection in the Woolworth’s front windows, or rather, the reflection of something which was not the Stingray but which stood—hovered—in its place: a long, translucent, green-black thing, like an enormous wine decanter, only laid on its side, which glowed slightly from within its bulbous body and seemed to warp the very air around it, to bend it, to curl it like burnt paper.
“Those I can hear,” said Luna—and began retreating up the stairs again. “They only talk when they’re about to attack.” Williams, meanwhile, had focused on Ank. “Jesus … it called me by name.” Ank stared at him from beneath his brow. Williams nodded slowly. “But how in God’s name? The only one who knew our names was … Unless—”