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

Near the turn of the First Century, the Ninth Legion disappeared from frontier borderlands separating Romanized Britannia from the uncivilized lowlands of Caledonia. Between its first deployment there during Agricola’s invasion in 84AD and the return of Emperor Hadrian in 122AD, all mention of the Ninth fades from memory. No authenticated record confirms the legion’s military annihilation on a field of battle, and no evidence confirms its reassignment to any other region of the empire. Contemporary Rome, and all of history, seems to have simply forgotten the Ninth. Until now.

Simian Wynwood opened Simian’s Gate by recording first contact with alien intelligence. Within weeks, civilization rapidly changed. Renewable energy, resolved. Global pollution, remediated. Cancer, cured. Eighteen months later, six-and-a-half billion people lay withered in death, victims of a technological Trojan horse. In the aftermath, survivors divide, hunter and hunted. Extinction looms. No one will survive Simian’s Way unscathed.

Humankind knows countless destinations, whether of mountain, river, meadow or lake. Each domain offers a unique experience, and, so, each attracts visitors with common yet specific interests. Of all destinations, sandy beaches may provide the archetypal candidate for recreational pursuits, and merest mention of the locale invites visions of loungers, cocktails and palm fronds stirring before a moist ocean breeze. Travel there now to wade through a surging surf toward a sanctuary beach, but be warned and beware... both treasure and tragedy beckon from shores of silver seas. Weather violent ...

Welcome to Darling Girl's first ever Trilogy of Holiday Horror. In this macabre collection you will enjoy her first three holiday adventures - and nary a serving of pancakes in the bunch! Darling Girl's Halloween Carol tells the tale of Halloween and her fifteenth birthday, when something terrible happens! Something wonderful and awful and terrifying and beautiful and TERRIBLE! Darling Girl's Memorial Day Fireworks sets her in the company of a hippy ghost and a homeless Vietnam veteran, and Darling will play a vital role in the city’s Memorial Day ceremony. The stage is set for sundown at...

Rascals, rapscallions, villains and varlets; all terms of a bygone era intended to describe the guy in the black hat, that perverse character of low virtue and strayed morality who forever ties the distressed damsel to cold, steel rails. Gasp! Within fictional fantasies, they are always guys and damsels, and they must wear black. In reality, we still mostly read about bad ‘guys’, but the women tend to fight back now, often with devastating effect. Tonight, the devil laces thigh-high boots over fence-net stockings before taking a turn through town. Be warned and beware. Of evil delight ...

While we collectively fear wild animals and muggers, most contemporary plagues come in the guise of unavoidable corporate logos and unforgettable commercial jingles. This new and most modern form of disease presents symptoms that include unhealthy obsessions, unwise compulsions and preprogrammed responses, all accompanied by an irrepressible tune that inevitably drives a rational mind to the very brink of lunacy. Visualize anything except the latest fad slogan while engrossing yourself in a moment of hysteric interest, and then pause to think. Of dreamscape dominions wrought from the felt ...

Peddlers and snake oil, pimps and pornography, lunatics and paranoia… each pair travels the same darkened alleyways to service identical shadow-bound gates. We receive them by the backdoor, thank you, and always well into the evening. These are private matters undertaken and clearly marked by clandestine hush and furtive sidelong glance. Sometimes concealed in the open but more often hidden in a fog of disinformation, our every secret contains a kernel of truth wrapped within a burlap of proficient lies. Patience and due diligence may unwrap the enigma to decipher a hidden message, but ...

While the vast majority perishes in quiet anonymity, a tour of any national monument quickly reveals countless names carved into stone. These names generally identify three classes of people; scribe, conquered and conqueror. Indeed, if anything, life is an endless series of contests, large and small, but these stone-graven records typically ignore the latter for the former. Too often, history overlooks the struggles of mundanity, which perhaps better define those who endure. Pause a reflective moment to ponder the future – anticipate all the boastful elite to be immortalized there. ...

Champions come in all shapes and forms. The same is true of cowards. Most of us line up somewhere between these two extremes of potential, but none of us eagerly anticipate having to prove ourselves in a crossfire. In fact, most notable acts of heroism are not the results of well-considered, carefully laid plans. Rather, these are often spontaneous yet deliberate demonstrations of selflessness occasionally on display when normal human beings must confront life-threatening risk. Take a deep, calming breath now before you dare gaze into the face of death. Trembling, heed its heckling catcalls...

Within each human being lingers a mischievous child, but each of us also cages an unformed primitive. We keep our individual id-monster within the tempered bars of civility, yet it remains our secret delight of a darkened, unobserved evening and we make it our fondest fetish at every available opportunity. No matter how mightily we struggle, history scrawls with endless tales of failed self-control, so each scandal both titillates and disgusts depending upon personal sensibilities. Indulge your inner-beast. How it roars! Of broken souls crushed between despair and revenge; of normalcy ...

Boogeymen, banshees, werewolves and vampires; all figments of horror drawn upon parchments of fable, each the scrawl of individual phobias revisited by trembling quills dipped into inkwells of collective nightmare. Despite vaguely amusing caricatures, these monstrous legends probably developed from grisly human origins. Indeed, we confront our violent primitives in every new atrocity, and each murder teaches a simple lesson that humankind consistently resists. Consequently, we forever lack viable means for exorcising so-called ‘inner demons’. Even now, your secret devil whispers into ...

Human beings are abundant. Yet for every person on Earth, countless insects thrive, chewing through the roots and underpinnings of nature. This year, it will be a very good year for bugs! An ocean of insecticide cannot suppress their demonic hordes. They could easily dominate the planet. Why not?

Several of the best human hypocrisies are immortalized in catechisms. We say “violence never solved anything” when history repeatedly teaches us otherwise, and once we prematurely labeled an entire, global war as “The War to End All Wars” long before we recorded its half-formed outcome. Dynasties fall. Empires rise. In marble, granite and concrete, we immortalize these events, large and small, and we celebrate the human beings named heroes there. Rightly so. Pause a moment before The Wall – let your finger trace names in stone. From pits of despair and summits of glory, they ...

Corporate lobotomies. Psychotically amorous semi-sentient bots. Endless corridors. Countless unlabeled doors, all viciously locked. A lethally dysfunctional social infrastructure rife with corruption, inefficiency, and crime. Spiraling homicide rates… Welcome to your corpulent, overpopulated future! Here, everyone loves you, because everyone wants to screw you before they sell your living body to illegal pharmaceutical tumor-farms, which are also a popular method of suicide, because death-by-tumor is not as bad as many (though it is also worse than some). In this world, a much-hated ...

Isolated by rumors of adultery and murder, ‘Cat Lady Cassie’ has long lived alone amid Florida’s sprawling Everglades. So, when several of her felines disappear one after another, Cass begins to worry. Lately, an eerie silence rules the hollows and basins that surround her porch. Even the largest alligators have gone missing. Clearly, a ravenous new invader has arrived to trouble paradise.

In a limb-mangling medical emergency, semi-sentient robots will save your life, but they will also steal your identity, pilfer your belongings and sexually assault your unconscious body at the same time. In this satirical (but true) depiction of your near future, humanity collectively struggles to accept the horrific and surprising ramifications of the FUST (Fast-Universe-Slow-Technology) conundrum, which proves that the universe will always expand faster than the advance of space travel technology. Thus, thanks to the discovery of some dumbass scientist, everyone knows that they are ...

In the aftermath of a genocidal galactic invasion, a remotely isolated colony cut off from all sources of resupply must devise a desperate plan to save themselves from certain annihilation. With their last reserves of fuel and determination, they salvage and resurrect a centuries-outmoded spacecraft named Titan, providing it with a skeleton crew consisting of three novice young men led by two sage combat veterans. Their best hope for success resides in the ship’s volunteer captain, Paladin, a genetically modified warrior descended from an elite race of martial experts. Cold, hard, and ...

Are we alone in the universe? To date, all indications tell us we are the only intelligent form of life currently inhabiting our Milky Way Galaxy. Aliens may survive in government laboratories, but they are naturally difficult to record with any convincing fidelity. Yet yesterday’s far-out conspiracies too often become today’s startling headlines given a bit of unwanted exposure. Pause one moment now to take note of a shadow-bound summons, but beware. Your paranoid shade whispers. Of bright lights on calm nights; of tasks at hand delivered with a foreign understanding and unspeakable ...

Terminus I – III (Conquest) is a Terminus Series Compendium containing the third trilogy of the series. This special edition contains three complete novels; Terminus, Terminus II (Control) and Terminus III (The Wild Bunch). Terminus Part I: Civilization deconstructed itself like a riot in a madhouse. In the aftermath, a handful of guilt-wracked holdouts stumble onto a terrible secret. To learn the final truth and save their species, they must cross a blood-soaked wasteland, where they confront and overcome hordes of crazed lunatics and ravenous chimeras to investigate the long-standing ...

The worst of the worst, he is notorious even within a notorious system. When the most violent prison riot in the history of human corrections threatens to bring down a prison’s walls, this consummate gangster will trade inside information for removal of his tattoos, one image at a time. Afterward, he will become a different man. Only a clean skin can provide the key to his cages.