Mostrando resultados por autor "Stephen Donald" en Todas las categorías

Though doting parents often teach their children the futility of violence, every rational human being also understands the hypocrisy inherent in such lessons, since life surrounds us with countless examples of practical solutions wrought in savagery. While each act of brutality inevitably debases all humankind, a maladjusted minority also recognize in it a tempting potential to make quick return on a prized reward. Perspective, then, becomes a matter of outcomes. Most of us will experience violence demeaning; few of us will know violence redeeming.

As the zombie apocalypse begins, a small group of civil servants find themselves locked in their tollbooths, which are heavily armored against run-away automobiles. Trapped inside their hellish fishbowls, they curse their situation. Yet they are safe... for a time. Cramped, dingy and institutionally depressing, their duty station becomes a backstage view of Armageddon.

Modern cultures are awash in the reflections of humankind's primitive past. Often, only graven images of ancient violence pass through eons of time to speak to us today, and it is these Death Eidolons that enable us to understand the darkest point of our collective origins. Whether looming implacably through a dense jungle tangle or winking grotesquely through the uncertain blue light of our television sets, we cannot escape countless contemporary examples of humankind's base nature, which most of us constrain daily with a tenuous mastery.

On Friday, October 13th of 1307, the Knights Templar ceased to exist. Imprisoned, tortured and executed, in a single day every soldier of that once-powerful order became a capital offender with no hope for reprieve. Fabulously wealthy at the time, the Templars owned vast estates that safeguarded legendary caches of treasure. Though their enemies seized much of their property, rumors of lost hordes echo through history to the present day.

Although all children do not become monsters, all monsters begin as children. Somewhere between the innocence of youth and the corruptions of adulthood, an infection of evil festers. In the aftermath, the progeny of apocalypse will always wonder what might have come from an early cure injected as a timely bullet.

In the distant future of humankind, an unscrupulous government embarks on a program of colonization, sending one moon-sized transport after another careening into the cosmic gulf, each utterly dependent upon the one gone before. Stranded far from home, their starship must rise from the ashes of a terrible conflagration, and he must lead them from beyond the threshold of a fiery grave. Billions of lives depend upon his success.

Wrongfully convicted and long confined in one of the worst prisons in the United States, he is bitter and angry. Despite a million-dollar settlement, his thirst for vengeance cannot be peacefully appeased, and his lust for blood ultimately turns on the sort of crooked prosecutors who ruined his life. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. He agrees.

Jo-Jo's father died young and his mother, while present, never picked up the slack. It's not easy to raise an unguided young man of high school age, especially a young man as misunderstood as Jo-Jo. Life is too short to mourn the dead forever. In a smile, a frown. In laughter, sorrow. Today is Jo-Jo’s “Big Day”.

Wealthy and bored, this unique human being has discovered an unusual way to pass the time of day. This is the ordeal he calls his “Dumping Game”. As its name implies, it begins with garbage and ends with garbage, but its ultimate goal is the destruction of human lives and the dismantlement of otherwise happy families.

It is lush, vibrant, and ever-changing. Though raucous and overgrown with a breathtaking variety of savory, beautiful delights, it is a deliberate expression of harsh discipline. Its keeper is a lonely old woman with a green thumb who seems harmless enough to the uninitiated. Homeless and wandering through a neglectful city, he ultimately finds his place in this world, tending her garden of evil.

No matter how harsh the instruction or inhumane the conditioning, military doctrine cannot replace compassion with uncaring steel. At his post in the bowels of a Japanese submarine, one frightened boy endures the unspeakable slaughter of an illicit war until he reaches a psychological breaking point. Drafted as a teenager into one of the bloodiest and most fanatical navies in history, he will spin the wheels for ill.

A trusted agent in the employ of an untrustworthy corporation. He knows too much and he realizes this knowledge will soon necessitate his own liquidation. Tired of the rat race, he has a plan for a fantastic exit. Sometimes, the rat gets the cheese and the trap springs empty.

A cosmic highway defined by scattered flexure points strung along the swirls of our galaxy's many spiral arms, the Serpentine is a fantastic new frontier that offers unimaginable riches to those who dare to brave its ever expanding hinterlands. Billions of hopeful human beings voyage there to profit or perish among the star systems of an otherwise empty cosmos. Despite its promise, amid the dawn of this golden age, one man tasked with a violent errand will discover an abiding evil that marks a terminal end of the Serpentine.

In this version of the future, science has learned how to identify a propensity for violence within the human mind before it manifests as action, and the violent ones have become targets for extermination. This is a humane, disciplined and well-intended social program, and civilization expects its unfortunate recipients to make dutiful sacrifices. Unfortunately, this sort of person is not likely to go without a fight.

At the last stop for provisions before they make their climb into the snowy mountains of Colorado, the locals tease these teenaged tourists about their lack of preparation for such a cold and unforgiving frontier. Though they scoff, these unfortunate youths will soon learn why the old-timers claim that the mountains sometimes keep their dead.

A city viewed from a jet liner is eerily indistinguishable from a vast, sprawling anthill. Both are industrious mounds riddled with innumerable burrows and endless trails, which endlessly crawl with toiling creatures, all bound from one mysterious errand to another. Amid the daily crush, a hapless drone occasionally awakens to question the drudgery of its existence. Within the hive, none can help him differentiate himself, man from ant.

He recently returned from an uneventful patrol through the near space of his solar system. Though he recalls nothing odd about the voyage, something has gone terribly wrong. Standing before a mirror in his home, he realizes he has somehow found himself on the wrong side of backwards.

She is educated, determined and ambitious. She has never failed at anything in her life until her child goes missing and is eventually found slain, in pieces. Only her anger delves deeper into hell than her unfathomable grief. She hunts her monster relentlessly in the months that follow. After she finds him, his suffering will be unspeakable.

He is a devil, not THE devil. Regardless, his productivity is a measure of human misery. His undertakings are of human vice. His indulgence is bound in human suffering. Follow him on a day-tour of the township and hear his plans for its inhabitants. These are the things and the human beings you need to keep the place running smoothly toward the final destruction of humanity.

Forty years a soldier. Forty years a spy. Forty years an international trafficker of weapons and drugs. All, the accomplishments of one nameless man, a “spook”. With all the powerful innovations of modern technology, no nation on Earth has succeeded in closing its borders to the illegal trade of drugs and weapons. This man can tell you why.