The flowers looked hungry.  The blossoms turned their stem-necks towards the family as they walked by.  Filaments rippled and gnashed together like teeth as ovules vibrated with pangs of starvation.

A red grevillea reached toward Brie.  Straining at its roots, tiny red petals, barbed at the end, reached out for flesh.  Grandma brought down her machete chopping the head off the flower.  It fell to the ground with a tiny squeal and rolled down an embankment into a swarming mass of tangled weeds. (more…)

The sound of chisel teeth grating against cinderblock filled the air. The noise made Masson and Jean’s skin crawl. Too bad it had nowhere to go…

Candlelight etched Jean’s forty-something face stark with fear. Her head looked like a boulder perched precariously on a mountaintop. She was six-foot-one and giving birth to three children put her weight at a solid two-twenty. “How long?” she asked. (more…)

Brian was aware that the brain he was dissecting was donated by a man who had suffered from an exotic necrotizing virus. That was nothing new. After all, nearly every brain he dissected came from somebody who had died of something.

He laughed at that thought. It was a running joke around the lab. It had started when a rookie assistant in the University Pathology Laboratory had absent-mindedly wondered where they got all of the dead brains that they studied. (more…)

This story begins in silence.

It ends in thunder.

Between those two points, there is much blood and screaming.

Have you ever heard the saying “In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is King”? (more…)

Johnny was the one who told me that she was still alive. “But don’t go over there.” He cautioned, turning his back on me as he walked across the room. When he got to the window he told me that he thought they had all the women they needed. He had even seen two teenage girls walking down the street unhindered. (more…)

The first indication Gil Pevney had that anything was wrong was when the power blipped, just past 3:30 am. He was sitting in the station’s small common room with his feet up on a table eating his lunch: a sardine sandwich. It was a little silly to call a meal eaten at that hour “lunch,” but as it was the second meal of his day, “lunch” would have to suffice.

“Aw, shoot,” he said as darkness enveloped him. He waited expectantly for the backup generator to come online, and relaxed when he heard it powering up, exactly as it was supposed to do. The generator at the transmitter shack a mile or so away would be doing the same, he knew. Sure enough, within 15 seconds of the outage, the lights came back on. The security lights outside in the parking lot stayed dark, but this was no surprise. They were off the main circuit and wouldn’t come back until full power returned. Gil glanced around while the fluorescents flickered back into life, waiting for further problems, but nothing else happened. It was unlikely that any listener would notice the brief signal drop-out. (more…)

As I wandered back into the Hotel St. George, it was summer, and my mouth was still sticky from the wine tasting next door.  Pete, Pete, possibly the greatest human that had ever lived was there, in the doorway, holding his cart, his beads around his neck.

He did look a bit like a homeless person, but he was not.  He was so “not homeless” that it pissed me off when he was regarded as such.  He was old, weathered, educated, alive.  “Helooooo, Ryaaaaaan, how are you?, are you getting good maaarks in your school?”, he dragged every word out, each syllable passing through its own accent, French, Jamaican, English, erudite, academic, compelling.  This man could read the phone book to me and I would sit, glassy eyed and cross legged in front of him until the birds stopped singing. (more…)

Trevor pushes a button on the cassette recorder. The tape begins turning. Grunts and growls, like some wild beast rooting in the forest, crawl out of the tiny speaker. What follows is a meaty tearing noise, with chewing and slurping. Then a voice comes from the past. (more…)

“Viruses mutate. They branch off through natural selection and evolve continuously. Microscopically, each new strand might look almost identical to the original, but the effects on the host can be radically different. Look at the Human Herpes Virus: HH1 is genital herpes, HH3 is chickenpox.”

I remember the lessons of my senior year biology seminar often nowadays. I wonder where Professor Schneiderman is now, if he’s still alive, still explaining virus behavior to a bunch of starving survivors. Probably not; most likely he’s dead and feeding on those starving survivors. I load my make-shift crossbow, take aim, and shoot–another undead falls and three push to take its place. (more…)