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

His nickname at work, where his colleagues avoid him like a plague, is "Mr. Accident". Alongside a lonely stretch of road on his way home one evening, he earns his reputation once again. While he sits with a dying youth trapped inside an overturned and crumpled automobile, Mr. Accident tells the boy how he earned his reputation. His is a sordid tale of endless cacophony and disaster, and death follows Mr. Accident like a shadow. Today, he earns his nickname with flare. If you should cross paths with Mr. Accident, beware.

Civilization deconstructed itself like a riot in a madhouse. One minute it all functioned with a standard sort of craziness, and the next it devolved into ten billion psychotic inmates at each other’s throats like suddenly sprung animals. Survivors refer to civilization’s final irrational act as "Terminus", but this is an unofficial label. It simply gives them a handle with which to wield the concept of their end times. It bifurcates their memory. Before. After. In between, an unspeakable river of blood.

Every man who murders his wife and every wife who murders her husband does so with the firm belief that they will never be caught, although this belief belies the inevitably obvious suspect. From time to time, however, chance mates with fortune to present the perfect crime. She's worth a life and the price of a bullet. He will risk all for one selfish act of violence.

He is ruthlessly ambitious. He believes in selling people what they want to find a shortcut to the good life. He's not a thief, but he'll take anything he can get. He's not a killer, but he's responsible for countless deaths. The first day he shows up at your door, it's a party. The last day he shows up at your door, it's a funeral. A working man. Keeping the appointments of a lifetime. It's a living.

He has perfected the necessary skills, collected the requisite equipment, and buried the resultant bodies. Like a grotesque human hermit crab, he periodically sheds one shell for another, gutting the original to make it his own, and no regard whatever for previous ownership. Fluid and untouchable, he stalks the nation, forever in pursuit of his next lifetime, and nobody knows his name. A ruthless master of disguises, he lives many lives. Maybe one of them will be yours.

When the constraints of the mission make it impossible to use electronics or cameras, they send him. His memory is eidetic. “Photographic”. His infallible mind is simultaneously his most blessed gift and his most devilish curse, because nothing is more haunting and vengeful than memory. His is a graveyard of murdered faces.

Upon opening a time capsule from 1968, the author finds a letter written by a condemned insurance agent from Texas only minutes before his arrest on capital murder charges. The letter relates this agent's downfall at the hands of a crooked police detective and a twisted woman. Though he was undoubtedly innocent of the crime, history long ago recorded his apprehension, trial and execution. By the time you read his letter, fifty years will have passed, and nothing can be done to save its author. His tale is a cautionary one, however, and so well worth reading. Beware of dames, dives, and death.

A young, newlywed couple. A new custom home. A good life. Yet nothing can ever be perfect. When the man of the house begins to experience bizarre nightmares involving a disturbing, pantomime face appearing in his wife's voluminous closet night after night, his sanity becomes an issue. Though their evenings at home are filled with playful lovemaking in the first months spent in their lavish new dwelling, a chill begins to settle over them with the passage of time. When disturbing images and inexplicable disappearances plague a young couple in their new home, they begin to question every ...

Jo-Jo's father died young and his mother, while present, could not pick 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. The last day of school will forever change everyone who experiences it. Life is too short to mourn the dead forever. In a smile, a frown. In laughter, sorrow. Today is Jo-Jo’s “Big Day”.

Insomnia is a special kind of torture. Its short-term effects are something everyone experiences from time to time, but its long-term effects are known only to an unfortunate few. These effects include panic attacks, paranoia, and phobias. Eventually, hallucinations and convulsions become noticeable, followed by symptoms of dementia, coma and then death. Inevitably, the difference between waking and sleeping dissolves and the two become inseparable. After months of restlessness, a chronically sleepless man loses the ability to differentiate between nightmares, daydreams and reality. While ...

The plight of the village is desperate and dire. Once protected by a powerful shaman, their savior has grown old and decrepit, perhaps too weak to save them from a violent storm brewing on the horizon. To save them, he must perform the ritual, but will he beat the clock and conjure before she comes, the devil? Ethereal and sublime, theirs is a lust to outlast the ages. No matter what else happens, their final tempestuous passion will make for one hell of a ride!

He is an escaped slave who traveled north to learn things men should not know. After accumulating a lifetime of esoteric knowledge and expertise in wicked magic, he has returned home to free his granddaughter from the exploitative grip of the south. There will be hell to pay, when paw-paw conjures! With the right words at the right time, magic is possible. Paw-paw knows.

During the course of their apocalyptic odyssey, one such band of desperate survivors must overcome petty, pre-Terminus differences to form life-and-death bonds strong enough to withstand the actual end of their world.

During his service as an intern at the SETI Project, Simian Wynwood fatefully records “first contact” with an alien intelligence. Captured in high-fidelity analog format, this broadcast message contains vast stores of advanced, world-changing technology. Within months, this so-called SETI-Tech becomes widely available to the general populous, and disturbing events rapidly begin to unfold around the planet as an apparently benevolent alien influence slowly embraces and then seizes control of nearly every aspect of human civilization.

After the apocalyptic Terminus Signal induces worldwide slaughter, a death-weary band of survivors has followed the exotically handsome Deacon into a desert wasteland equally plagued by semi-organized clans of Terminal-case burnouts and bizarre alien chimeras. From Badwater Basin, sunken into the lowest badlands of North America to the high, frozen icecaps of Antarctica, this hardy troupe of survivors has come to raise hell and kick alien ass.

After the apocalyptic Terminus Signal induces worldwide slaughter, a death-weary band of survivors attempts to rebuild their ravaged civilization amid an alien wilderness that overflows with bizarre savagery. Although copious quantities of drugs and alcohol disappear inside the Village each night, these tormented holdouts struggle with unquiet consciences that are hopelessly infected by endless black thoughts. For, having survived the ultimate act of genocidal self-destruction, each one of them bear their memories and scars – and the guilt of countless wicked, homicidal crimes.

Every ten years, a lottery draws them from all over the country. Every lottery is always the same: four boys and three girls, each with an exceptional mind and each mired in a neglectful or abusive life, which is sure to eventually destroy them. The spooky mansion at 472 Malign Terrace will become their home and their salvation, strange and mysterious though it may seem. Neglected by his addicted mother, a mysterious lottery is the one chance this boy has for a normal life. He reports to 472 Malign Terrace alone and trembling with a strange mixture of terror and excitement.

The Korengal Valley of Afghanistan was one of the most dangerous places in the world during 2008. There on a daily basis, brave Americans confronted the grim realities of a determined guerilla resistance as they opposed an all but invisible enemy exercising a ruthless determination to achieve their objectives at all costs and without heed to civilized rules of war. Using improvised explosive devices and ambush tactics, stubborn jihadists of the region worked fanatically to sap American will to fight by bleeding its forward forces white via use of the most brutal weapons on hand. Deployment ...

In this vision of the future, the most prestigious vacation money can buy is a trip to a corporate planet overgrown with a jungle wilderness. There, wealthy tourists gird armor and fantastically powerful weapons to hunt strange chimeras through an endless forest. These beasts are all genetically engineered to be fierce, bloodthirsty, and difficult to kill. Despite the benefits of their high technology, only experienced guides can lead their pampered clients safely through to the end of the game. Every year, countless bored tourists pay exorbitant fees to hunt terrifying synthetic monsters ...

In a dystopian future, humankind has lost its love of violence. Peace has so long ruled the land that we have lost all means of confronting the resurgence of a genocidal revolution, which threatens to reduce human society to a state of chaos and anarchy. The most vulnerable citizens face annihilation as they confront the revolution's inevitable success. Only one defense stands between them and oblivion. They are genetically modified warriors, bred and born to fight. They are Reapers. He has been biologically engineered to do one thing: fight for the survival of his people. Can one Reaper ...