Showing results by author "Bryan Cassiday" in All Categories

Evildoers run riot across the sun-drenched Southern California landscape in Helter Skelter. Zombies, vampires, and other wicked creatures wreak mayhem and carnage in these shocking horror short stories by Bryan Cassiday. Not all of these tales feature supernatural creatures. Some of the evil creatures are human - perhaps the most terrifying creature of all. These stories defy logic, yet they obey their own inexorable logic of fear.

Brunette bombshell Araceli hires Scott Brody, PI, to find her missing brother Damian, whose life is endangered in the neon-lit playground of Vegas. To save Damian, Brody must contend with mafia leg breakers, feds, a murderous deep state cabal, CIA spooks, and a sicario hit team. Everybody, it seems, wants a piece of Damian, and they'll kill anyone who gets in their way.

Virulent pockets of plague, first reported in China, break out worldwide and spread with mind-boggling speed. CIA black ops agent Chad Halverson flies to Los Angeles to visit his brother after receiving a call that his brother has been hospitalized after a car accident. Halverson's Boeing 737 crash-lands in an eerie Los Angeles shrouded with an impenetrable haze of smog. But that is only the tip of the iceberg of Halverson's nightmare.

A PI's routine investigation of infidelity among Hollywood elite uncovers a transnational conspiracy of terror aimed at his client's entire family. Power-broker Hollywood talent manager Lyndon Fox's wife, Deirdre, hires epileptic LA private detective Scott Brody after a previous private detective she assigned to keep tabs on her husband's suspected infidelity is killed in Cabo San Lucas when she and her husband vacation there. As Deirdre's world collapses around her, she must find out the truth about who is responsible before she loses everything—including her life.

"This is the apocalypse. What's fair got to do with anything?" said President Uriah. Secretary of State Dean Uriah has declared himself president after President Mims’s assassination at Mount Weather. Uriah arrests CIA black ops agent Halverson and Marta Costello for the assassination even though they claim they are innocent. They break out of the brig and head for the Raven Rock nuclear bunker in Pennsylvania to find out if the speaker of the house is alive, for he is constitutionally next in line of succession, not Uriah. Halverson believes Uriah has illegally proclaimed himself ...

The end of America is near. A plague that kills its victims and resurrects them as flesh-eating ghouls has decimated the American population, forcing what's left of the government to take shelter underground in the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center in Virginia. President Cole must decide whether to start nuking his own country in order to save it from the virus that has a hundred percent kill ratio. Whether America survives or not, it will never be the same.

The world has turned. Plague-infected, flesh-eating zombies now infest the earth. Black ops agent Chad Halverson of the CIA's top secret National Clandestine Service and a motley band of survivors must do everything they can to survive one more day, even as they try to find out what caused the pandemic.

Prepare for extreme horror. This unique collection of 10 stories features a range of international talent: award-winning authors, masters of horror, rising stars, and fresh new voices in the genre. Take care as you reach into these dark places, for the things here bite, and you may withdraw a hand short of a few fingers.

Police investigate the murders of 13-year-old Lucinda Pugh's parents, who died in their beds after somebody soaked them in gasoline and set their house on fire in their hometown of Santa Loma, California. All evidence points to Lucinda as the emotionally ill culprit, despite lack of motivation on her part. When an exorcist attempts to exorcise her, Lucinda reveals that an alien invasion of Earth is imminent, and her parents' murders are just the beginning of a full-fledged assault.

A distressed young woman falls under the spell of a homicidal maniac and becomes his partner in murder in this disturbing psychological thriller. Pondering suicide sitting on a Malibu dock one night after running away from home, doe-eyed young Mina Deerling meets smooth-talking Gage Catton, who is trying to load his wife’s body wrapped in a blanket onto his boat. When Catton finds out to his shock that his wife is still alive in the blanket, he talks the distraught Mina into helping him finish her off with his knife.

Larry, a college student who is driving through the Mojave Desert to a party in Las Vegas, encounters a bus driver who has other ideas. What starts out as an annoying hit and run turns into something decidedly more deadly, with Larry's life at stake on a desolate stretch of highway.

America has been devastated by both plague and the nuclear weapons used to kill off the infected flesh-eating creatures that roamed across the land preying on human beings. National Clandestine Service black ops agent Chad Halverson and dress designer Victoria Brady take refuge in a blast shelter in the Nevada desert when an A-bomb is dropped on Las Vegas at the behest of the president of the United States. Halverson and Victoria are forced to leave the safety of their cement shelter when they run low on water.

Seeking sanctuary from the walking dead in Alcatraz prison, Halverson and his band discover that all is not as it seems on the island haven. In fact, they may have more to fear than the walking dead in the person of Alcatraz's reigning Chosen One, the charismatic proponent of law and order Jefferson Bascomb, who believes zombies have the right to a fair trial.

Finding plague victims inside their compound, survivors of the zombie apocalypse suspect that the zombie plague has mutated and is being spread by spores emitted by infected flesh-eating ghouls. People infected by the spores could be asymptomatic carriers. Meanwhile, at the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, President Cole declares a national emergency under Section 201 of the National Emergencies Act and proclaims himself president for life as he hunkers down in the bunker with what little remains of the US government.

All zombies all the time. Included in The Bus Stops Here and Other Zombie Tales are five zombie short stories by Bryan Cassiday that are together for the first time in one anthology. "The Bus Stops Here" is a brand-new short story that has never before been published. The zombie action is nonstop and lethal. During a zombie apocalypse, everybody is caught up in a Hobbesian world where life is nasty, brutish, and short. Along with graphic zombie mayhem, these tales depict the lengths that individuals will go to to survive.

Unhinged consists of ten stories that plumb the subterranean depths of the human mind to uncover the horrors that lie within. These stories plunge you into a world of murder, mayhem, and psychosis where anything goes, and your worst nightmare could be lurking around the next corner in the guise of something as innocuous looking as a ventriloquist’s dummy, where even an insane asylum offers no refuge.

Seven characters find themselves trapped inside an elevator during a zombie apocalypse. The narrator, the last passenger to occupy the elevator, tells them that his wife, who was murdered by a zombie, told him as she died in his arms that she saw one of the passengers get bitten by a zombie before the person ducked into the elevator, but she died before she could describe the victim to him. The terrified passengers know that the victim will soon turn and attack them. They must determine who it is and kill him or her before it is too late - if they don't kill each other first trying to find out.

What would you do if they were your daughters?As a zombie virus sweeps across the world in a matter of days, eighteen-year-old Siamese twins attached at their brain are attacked by a zombie in Los Angeles. Only one of the twins, Krissy, gets bitten and infected with the virus that turns her into a flesh-eating ghoul. Sami isn’t bitten and for some reason doesn’t become infected, even though they share a brain. She is somehow immune. Distraught, their father agonizes over what to do. There is no cure for the virus other than the killing of the diseased brain. The problem is the twins ...

Ivy, a Los Angeles real estate agent plagued with self-doubts thanks to an overbearing mogul father, is assaulted by two avatars in a metaverse called Rabbit World owned by her husband Orion. Traumatized, she refuses to sell property in Rabbit World, believing the metaverse is unsafe.

A motley team of warriors on a secret mission organized by the president of the United States take on infected flesh eaters in a nuclear wasteland, risking their lives in a convoy of three specially armored black Chevy Suburbans to obtain a vaccine against the apocalyptic zombie plague that is wiping out the human race.