It was the hiss that woke him. It always was. He’d seen other people come out of the big sleep, and it wasn’t pretty. A lot of people have bad dreams just as the computer is waking them up. Not normal bad dreams, but bad, bad ones. Like your worst…

The last time Jax saw his mother, it was the middle of the night. Well, to say he “saw” her isn’t exactly true. It was very dark and she didn’t turn on the light. It would be more accurate to say Jax felt her. He felt her weight on the…

Where Gerald opened his front door that morning, the neighborhood kids were blocking the street, shouting and kicking a ball around. His nerves burned at every shout and kick as he locked each of three locks from the outside. They all took separate keys, but as this was his practice,…

Grace was nowhere to found. It started just like any other day. Tom waited in the pick-up line with the other parents, inching his white Camry closer and closer to the curb where the kindergartners waited in a jagged row, twisting and swinging their backpacks and occasionally covering their mouths…

The thunder and lightning from the storm outside had lulled me into a kind of stupor. Well, that and the beer. Because of this, it barely registered when the cat came in. What did register was how the bar fell silent in two heartbeats. The silence stemmed from two extraordinary…