Chapter 1 “Room C6″

It was a little past midnight when Tommy heard the sound of chains dragging on the tile floor.

The noise came from outside the room and down the hall: links clinking, sliding, drawing closer. Three rooms down. Then two. Then one…

Something waited outside. He hid against the opposite wall, knees tucked to his chest. A shadow appeared between the bottom of the door and the floor but it was soon obscured by…mist.

No, smoke. Drifting in through the narrow space.

Sometime after the End War, ghost agent Nova Terra returns from a mission to procure a phase disruptor for the Terran Dominion. She watches UNN, hearing of the controversy surrounding Senator Joss Brogan, and reflects on the nature of secrets, memories, and how she has the luxury of mind wipes to forget them. She then voluntary undergoes a mind wipe to forget the details of her previous mission, before being briefed personally by Emperor Valerian Mengsk, a rare occurrence for a field agent..

- Source: Official StarCraft 2 website

Chapter 1 ‘Therapy’

Click-click!

“Do you ever have nighmares about the Chosen killer? About that night?” Doctor Faulkner clicked his pen again, looking over the top of his notepad at Kacey, who barely registered the question; her attention was directed at the small window nearby and the steady rainfall just outside.

“Detective Dean?”

“Yeah?” she said, forcing her eyes back to the older man with the thin gray hair plastered to his pale skull, his glassy, bulging eyes gazing back expectantly.

Click-click!

Chapter 1 “Raggedy Man”

The beast chased Samantha through darkened woods.

Saplings whipped at her face as she sped, faster, faster— knowing all the while that she could never outrun it. She stumbled into a moonlit clearing and turned, shuffling backward, the fear at last overcoming her, preventing her legs from taking another step. No more running, no place to hide. It emerged from the night-cloaked treeline on two legs, its fur glistening in the radiance of the bloated moon, its eyes burning like twin pits of fire. Lips parted to reveal teeth evolved to tear meat from bone.

The maw opened, and a single word escaped:

“Eclipse.”

Finalist in the TNT TOP 100 Horror Contest

Chapter 1 ‘The Bullet’

Lexi Peterson found the bullet in a box of her dead father’s things.

There had been a stack of magazines-Fish and Stream, Outdoor Life, Guns and Ammo, a canteen, some gun oil, papers, an old pair of binoculars-and that bullet. It was weird; shiny and smooth, same color as the heart pendant Dad had gotten her for her ninth birthday, just last year.

Outside, Chewy was barking his head off. From where she was sitting in the middle of the daylight basement floor, Lexi looked through the two windows set high in the east wall to the sky outside. It was almost full dark.

Just then Chewy’s barking was overpowered by the sound of Tina yelling “shut up!” as loud as she could from the kitchen window.

The drums of war have begun to sound for Draenor’s orcs, and the power-mad warlock Gul’dan is the latest to play them. Brimming with fel energy, Gul’dan is convinced that his people will gain glory and strength if they only kneel to the demonic Burning Legion. But a hooded stranger has recently arrived in Gul’dan’s camp with a somewhat… contradictory vision.

The stranger has walked in places where terrifying war machines will soon shake the earth. From the smoldering ridges of Gorgrond to the hunting grounds of Nagrand, he watches over the orcish ranks, stoking their dreams of a united Horde: pure, free, and utterly dominant. And he has a message for Gul’dan.

- Source: Official World of WarCraft website

A multi-part, original Horror story previously published on Goodreads. A tie-in to a larger series still in the works.

Valla smelled the rotting dead from a mile away.

The air was warm despite the clouds that blanketed Khanduras as the demon hunter arrived in what was left of Holbrook—once a tiny, struggling farm community, now a deserted ghost town.
Or so it seemed; the heavy stench of putrification suggested that the residents were still present, just not among the living.

Valla’s mentor, Josen, stood in the center of the village, considering a pile of debris: scattered mason stones, upturned rock and soil.

He was dressed in the attire of the demon hunters’ calling. The soft light reflected dully off the plate armor that adorned half his body. His twin crossbows were slung from his thighs, within easy reach. His hood was down, and his cloak snapped in the gusting wind.

Valla was clothed in similar fashion, the greatest difference being the long, dark scarf she wore that even now covered the lower half of her face. The sawyer’s daughter slowed her horse, dismounted, and waited for a moment, silent and still, assessing.

There was a barely discernible, persistent hum. The only signs of life came from Josen and two other hunters, one searching the derelict structures, another standing near a rundown storehouse. Whatever had happened here, they were too late to do anything about it. Now it was a matter of looking for survivors. That was, after all, the second most important thing her people did: feed and shelter those left homeless in the aftermath of unthinkable catastrophe. Guide them, encourage them, heal them, educate and train them… to do the most important thing, should they so choose: become a demon hunter and annihilate the hellspawn responsible for evils like this.

Just another glorious day in the Corps.

Despite the sweltering heat on Gamma Dorian, Isaac White stayed cool.

No matter what, Isaac White always stayed cool. Not just because he wore a temperature-controlled hardskin. No, he stayed cool because in his line of work, if you didn’t stay cool, you could kiss your sweet ass goodbye.

Someday, maybe some chump would build a bomb capable of rattling Isaac’s cage, but that day was damn sure not today. Those panbrained, fekk-head Kel-Morians hadn’t even done a respectable job of hiding the detonator. Isaac could think of at least fifteen spots along the underside of the massive bridge that would have provided better concealment. But no, the idiots had placed the device just under the lip of a baseplate, practically in plain view.

Descending the dry gulch’s southern embankment had taken all of 30 seconds, and now Isaac found himself lying on his side, getting his first glance at the detonation system. The setup wasn’t just simple: it was archaic. An electronic time-delay device set to ignite several charges placed at intervals beneath the girders. The KMs had held the bridge and the territory surrounding it until a few days ago. They could have blown the bridge as they retreated, but instead they had opted to make a play at taking out the bridge and some Confed forces with it. And they didn’t think the Confederacy would check the bridge before crossing it? Stupid. Just plain stupid.

This stupidity was exactly why the Confederacy was sure to win the Guild Wars. The wars may have been dragging on for three years now, but there’d never been a doubt in Isaac’s mind that the home team would pull out the big “W” in the end.

Everything that is, is alive.

The words had become a mantra in his mind, a constant reinforcement of his newfound understanding. More importantly they were an epiphany, the key to unlocking a whole new universe of knowledge. And the epiphany was why he was here.

Nobundo took comfort in the words as he slowly negotiated Zangarmarsh’s forest of colossal mushrooms, their spores glowing green and red in the early morning mist. He traversed the creaky wooden bridges that stretched over the shallow marshland waters. In just a few moments he found himself at his destination, gazing up at the radiant underbelly of a mushroom that dwarfed all others. There atop its cap, the draenei settlement of Telredor awaited him.

He progressed with trepidation, leaning heavily on his walking stick and cursing the pain in his joints as he stepped onto the platform that would carry him to the top. He was worried, for he was still unsure how the others would react. There had been a time when his kind had not even been allowed to enter the settlements of the unaffected.

They are just going to laugh at me.

He took a deep breath of the cool, misty marsh air and asked it to give him courage for the challenge to come.

Once the platform came to a stop, Nobundo carefully shuffled through the arched entryway, down several shallow steps, and out onto the landing overlooking the settlement’s small plaza, where the assembly had already gathered.
He gazed down at the hard-set faces of the various draenei, whose disdainful, superior eyes stared up at him.

He was, after all, Krokul: “Broken”.

To be Broken was to be outcast and vilified. It was not right or just, but it was the reality he had been forced to accept. Many of his unaffected brothers and sisters could not understand how the decline of the Krokul could have occurred, and especially, as in Nobundo’s case, how one who had been so gifted and so favored by the Light could have fallen so far.

Though Nobundo himself did not know exactly how it happened, he did know when. He recollected with startling clarity the exact moment that marked the beginning of his own personal descent.

- Source: Official World of WarCraft website