The sky was dark and clouded, no stars in the sky, and a general impression of pale pink and orange overlaid on the gray and black, light pollution from the streetlights reflecting off the clouds. A pale, lanky man with light brown hair parked his car on the street and went to the door of one of the townhouses, climbing up a short flight of stairs ( Read more... )

Mom stirred slightly, moaning. “Come on,” Norris said, shaking her. “Come on, Mom, get up! There’s deaders on their way over here! You gotta get up!”

“Go,” Mom slurred. “Norris… run…”

“No, Mom! You gotta get up!”

Some part of Norris’ mind knew that what he was doing wasn’t going to work, and was incredibly dangerous besides. Mom had gotten bit ( Read more... )

Norris had been with the doctors for two months by the time he made his first full costume. Jessie had made him a suit of leather armor because you needed to have that here, and a mask - he’d gotten one that looked like Spider-Man but colored like Venom because it was black with white lines - but she’d had him working on making one of his own for ( Read more... )

With the grate separating the seating compartment from the back of the van, the driver and passenger couldn’t get the longer guns from the back without opening their door and then the van side door to take the gun. Raoul handed Aileen a rifle, and she got back into the van and aimed it at the tree, while Sarah and Raoul got their grabbing poles ( Read more... )

They called him Alyn Ysmai, the White-Haired Boy.  In the village he came from, it was said he had fallen from the sky as a child, carried on a shooting star.  His skin was white as the clouds, and his hair as white as the Moon, and his eyes the golden color of wild animals.  From earliest days, it was said that the Lady of the Moon had marked him ( Read more... )

Daddy and I walked onto the fairgrounds. He’d just gotten one of his poems published in a major literary magazine, and we were celebrating. Suddenly, Daddy turned to me and asked, “Alyssa, do you still want to go on the merry-go-round?”

I had seen the merry-go-round several times, had soaked up some of its magic, and wanted to ride it more than ( Read more... )

The car jerked to a halt, jolting Alan awake. He opened his eyes to darkness, disoriented. The car reversed, went back, went forward again, and he realized where he was. "We're there?"

Diana spun the wheel, put the car into reverse again. "Quiet," she said sharply. There was a frightened tension in her voice.

Alan looked out the window. Though ( Read more... )

But I don’t think so. Stella wasn’t the kind of girl who stuck her fingers in her ears and went “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” when things were bad. She confronted bad stuff. She tried to solve problems. So I don’t think she would have told me some weird made up story and then by total coincidence her dad killed her the day after, and I don’t think ( Read more... )

Once upon a time, a hen, a cat, a dog, a pig, a goat and a rabbit all lived together in a little house.

Like good housemates, they all worked together to do the chores and pay the bills. In the front yard, Goat had a little pen. Children would come and pay to come into the pen and pet Goat. Sometimes the other animals came out to be petted too, ( Read more... )

Stepping down from a two-man ship, which is a shuttle from the starship Rhiannon, are the captain of Rhiannon and his best friend, Rhiannon's computer engineer. Matt Pison, human, terratype, Martian, is the captain. He is tall, blond, muscular from his life in the Martian colonies but pale from little sunlight, brown-eyed. Next to him is D'mir ( Read more... )