Story Excerpts

Sin Eaters
by Mark W. Tiedemann

Pollard listened for the signal that the tactical units were in place. The van around him felt close, as if every molecule had paused in sympathetic imitation of all the held breaths. He stared at the array of screens displaying the exits from the three-story mass of dingy brick. Color was muted in the early morning overcast.

Movement snagged his attention on the top left-hand screen. A pale cat, emerging from behind a discarded door, searched its surroundings, obviously sensing the threat gathering around its home. It darted off, and Pollard returned to the other screens. READ MORE

The Origami Man
by Doug Franklin

Something about the water ahead of us was off. The waves were subdued, as if weighted by a blanket that absorbed the afternoon rain with no rebounding spikes. An oil spill, maybe, or a ghost net. Nothing we wanted to troll through, so I wheeled Arctic Rose ten degrees to port and grabbed the binoculars from the dashboard clutter.

An object floated in the middle of the preternaturally still patch of water. At first I thought it was a sea otter, then a bird of some sort. It looked like a raven, through the haze of rain, but what was a raven doing this far out from land? Then the sea otter dove, and the raven took flight, leaving behind a low rounded shape that looked unpleasantly like a human body. READ MORE