Showing results by author "Stephen Donald Huff" in All Categories

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.

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. A ruthless master of disguises, he lives many lives. Maybe one of them will be yours.

Awakening night upon night in a feverish chill, fresh from the throes of disturbing nightmares, one hapless human being ponders the separation of dream and reality. Eventually, muddy feet betray the truth. Black River runs through the center of Pecan Groves, Texas. Lately, it floats.

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.

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 with one selfish act of violence.

A young, newlywed couple. A new custom home. A good life. Yet nothing can ever be perfect. 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. They cannot possibly anticipate the truly horrid source of their discomfort.

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”.

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.

She has come to his office to give birth, but she is accursed and he knows it. Fortunately, she has chosen wisely and she can afford the best phy-magician in the country. He will safely deliver the demon inside her, and then he'll help her to determine who would cast such a spell on her in the first place. This is an age of science in magic. A phy-magician must master both trades with equal alacrity.

In the first days of the zombie apocalypse, a military physician and small team of survivors must gather their wits, their weapons, and their available resources to make a last stand. When nowhere seems safe and no-one seems immune to the rapidly spreading disease, they must choose a destination that is both attainable and sufficiently remote to assure their long term safety.

Klis would be their first failure and it would mark the end of their conquest. When the first Mongol envoy entered its city walls, he offered its citizens the same thing Mongols offered every conquest - tribute or extermination.

She's twelve years old and she's desperately in love with the fourteen-year-old boy who lives next door. He knows her as his best friend, but he's too preoccupied with his own travails to return her affection. Since his mother went missing three years previously, his father has become ever more violent and abusive. Now, each act of violence pulls the boy further and further away from Dorry’s loving embrace, and she'll do anything to save him.

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. Such twisted threads weave life’s strange tapestry. Of sinister phenomena, here find abundant evidence, and of aliens, eleven.

Declared missing-in-action while serving in Afghanistan, her eldest son's disappearance leaves a massive whole in this mother's life. Her misery cannot be assuaged by human sympathy or the keepsakes of memories. Many refuse to believe that a mother's love for her children can transcend time. She and her son know the truth.

How long can one sensitive youth tolerate the incessant shelling and mind numbing shockwaves of bombardment? How much terror can a soldier endure before he takes that last short walk beyond the trenches and coiled barbed wire into no-man's land? This is the bloodiest war of the bloodiest century in human history. For some, it never ends.

This is a new approach to criminal rehabilitation. This is tough love at its toughest. Here, complete isolation and unending hours of boredom act like an acid drip against the tough granite exterior of its recalcitrant inmates. Though it is a humane system, it offers no mercy to the incorrigible, and it has no patience for those who refuse to learn. Only the strongest can long resist, but no human being can resist forever.

On a beam of light as in the fog of dreams, a hundred human beings of all ages and walks-of-life find themselves standing on narrow pedestals in a strange auditorium filled with noxious, frigid liquid. With no room to sit or recline, they cannot rest or sleep. They can only shift from foot to foot atop the pedestals, standing for hours then days, their fears unresolved and their fate unknown. They disappear all over the world. Some of them eventually return home again.