The wheels on the gurney squeaked in time to the beat of his heart. He had forgotten to tell Mary and the kids something. He'd told Johnny and Sarah to mind their mom's words, to study hard, get good grades, everything you'd want to tell your children in 6 minutes before they wheeled you off into heart surgery. This time, will it take? Will I finally get the heart that belongs to me or will my body reject it, another hope dashed, another disappointment in its place. Another list, more waiting, more drugs, another death. Mary, he'd forgotten to kiss...
Ten! The crowd rose their voices to join the leader. Nine!Feet were stamped, hands raised in celebration. Eight! Faces were upturned towards Big Ben, the hands counting their lives. Seven! Some had tears beginning to roll down their cheeks. Six! Someone was screaming, but the sound was muffled by the bodies. Five! The mass chanting, the crowd undulating back and forth. Four! Liquid spattered down, someone's beer bottle flying out over the crowd, still full. Three! The chanting was getting louder. Two! Everyone was suddenly still. One. It was a whisper, Big Ben rang out as the hands came together...
They gathered in the woods. Huddled together, shoulders pressed against each other for warm and support and that deep basic desire for some sort of human contact.
"It's good to see you again John," an unclean, wirey man nodded to his fellow and they clapsed hands.
"You too. Have you news?"
"None. There hasn't been much activity the past month." The man nodded grimly as he listened.
"One of our nests got hit, we lost a few, but the rest of us are fine."
"How about the rest of you?" The other members of the circle, three men and one...
This is not what Steve had in mind when he signed up to test the virtual reality technology at work. Not at all. He thought it would be unicorns farting rainbows. But this was ridiculous.
The scenes were patterned after video games. Not because the team wasn't creative, but because that meant the testers didn't need to take the time to learn the rules of a new environment.
Steve had pulled Super Mario Bros. from the lot. Except there was a fatal flaw in the technology. Enemies didn't die, they just disappeared for a bit. Then they came back with...
Even before the industrial collapse, animals regularly came across absurd remnants of the human race.
Always practical, birds, squirrels, insects, and less visible creatures maintained just enough curiosity to see if an object in their environment had any survival value. There were no monkeys or animals with playful dispositions around.
Plastic was generally left to photodegrade and slowly contaminate. Cloth was picked apart by birds and reformed into nesting. A small percentage of the eggs turned into malformed hatchlings, owing to the vinyl in the plastic.
Always practical, mother birds pushed the failures out to make space for the well-formed...
My father and I were lying on the beach wondering why the moon looked larger than usual. My father argued idly--something about the flat terrain and the empty skyline. "If we could see a house, or a tree, or a traffic light, it wouldn't look so big."
It was a stupid explanation, but we are not the kind of people who carry iPhones, and whip them out to settle any debate. We hate those people. They ruin everything.
We'd been drinking wine from the motel's paper cups. We'd run out of wine a long time ago, but occasionally we still...
The Moon would never be the same again. No more bands, no more over priced beer. No more after prom parties.
But that really isn't any concern of mine. I always hated the place. It was where the worst times of my life went down.
The one that stuck in my mind the most happened because of a girl named Erin. I'd just moved to town and for some reason she caught my eye. I spent a while trying to get her to go out with me, but I couldn't ever get anywhere with it.
Then one day I got...
," chuckled Doctor Disaster. Twenty years of supervillainy was finally starting to pay off. He adjusted the dials on his cheese-ray to provide maximum transmutation output, then settled in to wait.
When the Moon was fully transformed into a large ball of cheese, the change in tidal forces would wreak havoc on the coastal cities and infrastructure of the modern world. Billions would suffer; unless, or course, they acknowledged Dr. Disaster as their overlord.
There was only one small obstacle for him to overcome.
His archnemesis, Improbable Man, would be here soon. There was no way Disaster could think of...
There once was a man in a sphere
Whose outward appearance was queer
He was hard to mistake
For the sphere was opaque
Because he had filled it with beer
Jason Adams was writing his last thriller. He wasn't concerned that it would be his last novel, in fact, it was as if all of his previous work had led him to this moment. This novel would be as close to real life as he could get.
Mark woke up, and in an instant he realized he was not in his bed. It was dark and damp, and he smelled blood. Just when he was about to stand up he heard the whimpering of a woman.
"Hello? Hello? Anyone, please help me. Where am I? Please, help me. Please" Janet...