“Run,” Talip screamed as the villagers, including her mother and father, came rushing after them with eyes hungry for the orb. Milta let her shield drop to the ground and secured the orb with both hands as she ran. Talip tried to ask what the plan was, but she couldn’t find the words or the courage to open her mouth.
There was a surge of blue light and a scream and Milta crumbled to the ground. Her helm had been knocked off and smoke rose from the back of her head. “Milta!”
Milta looked up at Talip and rolled the orb towards her before the villagers descended upon her like a pack of wild animals. “Get it far from here!” she heard Milta yell before she started screaming.
Talip grabbed the orb and ran with tears streaming down her face. In her hands she held the orb and its blue light flashed directly in her face. It made her feel slow and sluggish and temped to stop and stare into its gaze. “I must keep going,” she said out loud over and over again to keep herself from falling into the orb.
She came to a stop. “I must keep going.” She tried to close her eyes, but they forced themselves open to peer down at the orb. “I really need to keep going.” Talip shrugged and stared into the glowing ball. A fireball whizzed past her.
“No!” she screamed and raced forward and found herself in the clearing surrounding the smoldering ruins of Milta’s house. Every step was difficult and it felt like there was an invisible rope around her waist pulling her backwards. She dropped to her knees and tried to inch her way forward through the mud. A group of hooded figures emerged in the forest behind her. Somewhere far away, she could hear the howls of the villagers.
“I must keep going. I must cover the light.” She dug her fingernails into the ground and pulled herself forward towards the nearby pond, the one place no one in the village would come near. She could feel the hooded figures on her heels stalking her and hear the crackling sounds of blue fire. Clawing forward, she came to the edge of the pond and dangled the orb over the water, but it would not leave her hands. She tried to throw it, but it stuck to her skin as if a permanent adhesive had been applied.
She staggered to her feet and took one last look at the hooded figures before falling backwards into the pond. The scum and dirty water rushed into her mouth and her nostrils as she rocketed towards the bottom of the pond. Her face hit its sandy bottom first. The orb continued to glow, lighting up the murky water. Talip dug with what little energy she had left and buried the orb, smothering its light with a layer of mud. Talip floated towards the surface, hoping that was enough, but she prepared herself to face a volley of blue fire if it wasn’t.
She reached the surface and crawled out of the pond, sucking in as much air as she could. There was no sign of the hooded figures and the noise from the village had died down. When she returned to the village as the sun was rising, she found the square quiet and empty.
Her mother was the first to greet her when she walked through the door. “When did you get back, sweetheart?”
Talip looked at her mother’s kind eyes. Her face looked cheerful and full of life. “You don’t know? You don’t remember?”
Her mother gave her a confused look. “Why are you soaking wet? I didn’t hear any rain.” She wanted to tell her mother everything, but the words wouldn’t leave her mouth. Instead, she sat down at the table and her mother began preparing a dish for her. “I can’t wait to hear all about your trip.”
Her father appeared in the doorway with a rag he was using to wipe blood off his hands. “What did you do to yourself?” her mother asked him.
He shrugged. “I don’t know what I did. Must have cut myself on something.” He came over to Talip and gave her a kiss on the forehead before going outside.
After a few days of watching everyone in the town go about their business as if nothing had happened, Talip stood in the middle of the town square. She dropped her paintbrush and looked at the blue and yellow butterfly she had painted. “There,” she whispered, “You’ll always be a part of this town.”
CONTRIBUTORS
F. Paul Wilson is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of the Repairman Jack series and more than 40 books spanning science fiction, horror thrillers, contemporary thrillers, young adult books and some novels that defy categorization. The Tomb, the book that introduced his popular antihero, Repairman Jack, is in development by Beacon Films. Wilson has peeked into Jack’s teenage life in three young adult novels: Secret Histories, Secret Circles and Secret Vengeance.
Wilson has also edited two anthologies - Freak Show and Diagnosis: Terminal - and written for stage, screen, and interactive media. Among his many awards: Wheels Within Wheels won the first Prometheus Award in 1979; Sims won another, The Tomb received the Porgie Award from The West Coast Review of Books and his novelette Aftershock won the 1999 Bram Stoker Award for short fiction.
Jeffrey Westhoff has served as a film critic, feature writer, reporter and copy editor in his career as a journalist. Westhoff wrote his first novel, The Boy Who Knew Too Much, while working as a freelance writer.
Westhoff grew up in Erie, Pa. where he spent his Saturday mornings at the library and his Saturday nights at the movies. His love of reading and films prepared him for his future as a movie critic. During his 25 years as a film critic Westhoff interviewed every actor to play James Bond except Sean Connery. He has contributed to RogerEbert.com and written book reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times. Westhoff lives in Chicago’s Northwest suburbs with his wife Jeannette and is hard at work on his second novel. The Boy Who Knew Too Much is an action-charged YA adventure that blends the suspense of Alfred Hitchcock with the thrills of James Bond.
Jeff Ayers and Kevin Lauderdale write cross-country between Washington state and Virginia. Jeff is the author of Voyages of Imagination: The Star Trek Fiction Companion and the novel Long Overdue, and is a regular contributor to multiple newspapers and magazines with several short stories to his credit. Kevin’s short fiction has appeared in numerous genre anthologies, raging from the worlds of Star Trek to Lovecraftian mythos. Jake and Kayla’s adventures continue in the YA novel, The Fourth Lion.
Victoria Pitts Caine is a native Californian and lives in the San Joaquin Valley with her husband and two daughters. Her interests include genealogy and exotic gemstone collecting, both of which she’s incorporated into her novels. While her genre is inspirational, she likes to refer to herself as a Romance Adventure Novelist.
Caine’s three novels-Alvarado Gold, Cairo, and The Tempering Agent-form a mystery/suspense trilogy spanning two continents. She also has two novellas, Like a Lily and Not Bound by Time. All of her current works have been on the genre best seller’s list on Amazon.
Caine has received recognition in both fiction and nonfiction from: Enduring Romance top 10 picks, William Saroyan Writing Conference, Byline Magazine, Writer’s Journal Magazine and The Southern California Genealogical Society.
Caine is a former staff technician for the environmental sector working in air pollution control.
Kevin Singer is an army veteran and former journalist who has covered stories ranging from murder trials to cancer breakthroughs. His suspense fiction combines his interests in the supernatural, psychology, and the generally offbeat.
His short stories: Road to Magdalena, Always Mine, Left Among the Mutants and Demon’s Reach–are available on Amazon.com, as is his full length novel The Last Conquistador.
Singer lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.
C.A. Verstraete enjoys writing stories with a scare or two. Her short fiction has appeared online and in anthologies including Timeshares and Steampunk’d from DAW Books, Athena’s Daughters from Silence in the Library, and coming in the Baby Shoes Flash Fiction anthology.
Girl Z: My Life As A Teenage Zombie, received a 2014 Lovey Award for Best Paranormal and Sci-Fi book at the Love is Murder Mystery Conference; and was the 2013 Halloween Book Festival Young Adult Winner.
Verstraete has also written a nonfiction book on miniatures collecting, In Miniature Style
II, and a children’s book, Searching For A Starry Night, A Miniature Art Mystery.
Visit her at http://cverstraete.com or see her blog, http://girlzombieauthors.blogspot.com.
David Perlmutter is a freelance writer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The holder of an MA degree from the Universities of Manitoba and Winnipeg, and a lifelong animation fan, he has published short fiction in a variety of genres for various magazines and anthologies, as well as essays on his favorite topics for similar publishers. He is the author of America Toons In: A History of Television Animation (McFarland and Co.), The Singular Adventures Of Jefferson Ball (Chupa Cabra House), The Pups (Booklocker.com), Certain Private Conversations and Other Stories (Aurora Publishing), and Orthicon; or, the History of a Bad Idea (Linkville Press, forthcoming).
Morton M. Rumberg is a retired U.S. Air Force Officer who served as a Rescue and Survival technician teaching escape and evasion and survival techniques to air crew members; he survived a tour in Vietnam and barely survived two hardship tours in the Pentagon as a computer systems action officer. Mort was also an information technology consultant and a manager with a large international health care insurance company designing computer business systems. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration, a Master of Arts in Teaching, and a Doctorate in Education. He was an adjunct professor of computer sciences for several universities in the Washington, DC area. He was also a volunteer with Alexandria Police Department and the Animal Welfare League of Alexandria, and active in the Northern Virginia chapter of the Association of Information Technology Professionals. Visit his website at mmrumberg.com.
Amy Kaplan holds an MFA in sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art and spent several years teaching art in the public school system. Her work has been included in the anthology, Suppose: Drabbles, Flash Fiction, and Short Stories, and Dragonfly Arts Magazine 2014. She is also the current president of the Maryland Writers Association’s Howard County Chapter. You can read more of her short works and poems at ALKaplan.wordpress.com. When she is not writing or indulging in her fascination with wolves, Amy manages props for a local dinner theatre. She lives and writes in Laurel, MD.
Deborah Walker grew up in the most English town in the country, but she soon high-tailed it down to London, where she now lives with her partner, Chris, and her two young children. You can find Deborah in the British Museum trawling the past for future inspiration or on her blog: Deborah Walker’s Bibliography. Her stories have appeared in Nature’s Futures, Cosmos, Daily Science Fiction and The Year’s Best SF 18 and have been translated into a dozen languages and dialects.
Anne E. Johnson–Drawing on an eclectic background that includes degrees in classical languages and musicology, Johnson has published in a wide variety of topics and genres.
Her tween paranormal mystery, Ebenezer’s Locker, is available as an e-book from MuseItUp Publishing. Green Light Delivery and Blue Diamond Delivery, noir-inspired science fiction novels for adults, are now available as print and e-book from Candlemark & Gleam. Trouble at the Scriptorium, a medieval mystery novel for tweens, is available from Royal Fireworks Press. Her speculative fiction has been published in FrostFire Worlds, Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide 2015, Rainbow Riot, Slink Chunk Press, and elsewhere. She’s written feature articles about music for The New York Times and Stagebill Magazine, and seven non-fiction books for kids with the Rosen Group. She’s published dozens of short stories in a variety of genres, for both children and adults. Anne lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Chantal Boudreau is an accountant by day and an author/illustrator during evenings and weekends who lives by the ocean in beautiful Nova Scotia, Canada with her husband and two children. In addition to being a CMA-MBA, she has a BA with a major in English from Dalhousie University. A member of the Horror Writers Association, she writes and illustrates predominantly horror, dark fantasy and fantasy and has had several of her short stories published in anthologies. Fervor, her debut novel, a dystopian science fantasy tale, was released in March of 2011, followed by its sequels, Elevation, Transcendence and Providence. Other books published include her Masters & Renegades fantasy series (Magic University, Casualties of War, Prisoners of Fate) and The Snowy Barrens Trilogy, her YA tribal dark fantasy trilogy.
David Turnbull is a writer of fantasy living in London. Sometimes this includes a ‘Sci-Fi’ or a’ Horror’ slant. The Wreck of the Blue Plover is set in the same world featured in his Middle Grade fantasy The Tale Of Euan Redeap published by Wyvern Publications, due to be re-released Springbok Publications as book one of a three part trilogy. Two other stand-alone stories also set in this world have been published in ‘The White Sail’ (Knowonder) and Different Dragons II (Wolfsinger Publications).
Milo James Fowler is a teacher by day, speculative fiction writer by night, and an active SFWA member. When he’s not grading papers, he’s imagining what the world might be like in a dozen alternate realities.
His short fiction has appeared in more than 100 publications, including AE SciFi,Cosmos, Daily Science Fiction, Nature, Shimmer, and the Wastelands 2 anthology. His novel Captain Bartholomew Quasar and the Space-Time Displacement Conundrum will be available later this year.
Jack Mulcahy has been published in a number of markets, including Flashing Swords, Abandoned Towers, and Pulp Empire. In his secret identity, he is a resume writer.
Nathan Hystad is a writer from Alberta, Canada. He’s had flash fiction published in both Kraxon Magazine, and Saturday Night Reader. A Haunting Past can be found in the anthology, Malevolence: Tales from Beyond the Veil. The Attic was included in Whispers from the Past: Fright and Fear, and The Garden can be seen in 9 Tales Told in the Dark 4. He also has stories slated to be in the upcoming anthologies: The Secret life of Ghosts, and The Ghost Papers Volume 1.
H.L. Pauff is a science fiction, fantasy, horror, and anything-else-he-want-to-be writer living in Baltimore. He has written a handful of novels, none of which he is ready to share with the world. Some of his favorite authors include: George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Peter Watts, and Jack McDevitt. He tries to write as much as possible, but when he’s not writing he’s reading, playing basketball, traveling, or making blood sacrifices to this thing that lives in his room and meows at him all day.
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