Groaning, he tries to sit up, but the ground is unsteady. It rocks beneath his weight. His good eye goes wide, and he freezes.
I’m in the goddamn boat.
Carefully, not wanting to tip, he reaches out to grip the railing, pulls himself to a sitting position. Glancing around, he realizes he’s well out in the water, thirty or more feet from shore.
There are no oars.
She must have pushed me out here. God damn her …
BUMP.
Something smacks against the boat’s bottom, inches beneath the cold, filthy water he’s sitting in. “Shit!” he yells, but with his broken jaw and missing teeth it sounds more like sshhth, and the pain from trying to speak is so severe that black spots cloud his vision, forcing him to close his eyes and take a wet, raspy breath.
When he feels confident he won’t faint, he opens his eyes once more. He sits up onto the bench, feels the cold morning air on his skin …
and realizes with alarm that he’s not wearing a shirt. Further, he’s surprised to see so much blood on his arms, his chest. There are long gouges across his stomach, the backs of his hands.
Wait.
From the shore, Jessie cups one hand to her mouth, gives a little wave with the other. “If you’re looking for your shirt, it’s just there,” she says, pointing to one side of the boat.
Slowly, Tom leans over, wincing at the pain of movement, and notices what Jessie’s pointing to.
One sleeve of his flannel shirt is tied to the base of the oar lock. The rest of it drags in the water.
The shirt is soaked in blood.
“Just chumming the water,” she says, smiling.
Tom stares back at her for a moment, as if confused, then realizes what she’s done. Broken face be damned, he bends himself over the boat and grabs the shirt, yanks it from the water. For a few seconds, he stares at the oily surface of the lake, the swirl of dark blood.
Below the surface, something rises toward him, black as ink, big as a bus.
A hundred eyes open wide.
A mass of long shimmering tentacles erupts from the water, wrap themselves around the boat, and around Tom, crushing him flat against the bench.
“Nooo! Oh God, no!” he screams as the boat is driven backward, shooting away from shore toward the deepest part of the lake. Spitting water overflows the stern of the small rowboat, washing over Tom as he grips the railings with white-knuckled hands.
Jessie yells more loudly this time, making sure he’ll hear her over all the noise.
“I hear that bitch is always hungry!”
There’s a loud CRACK and the bow of the boat shoots skyward. A great gush of water erupts upward like a fountain of blood. Jessie watches as something breaks the surface, something with too many eyes and an alien skin blacker than outer space. Hundreds of long tentacles wave wildly through the air—too many for her to count.
There’s one last scream, the bone-cracking sound of shattering wood, and then ….
Nothing.
For a few moments, the water churns, followed by an eruption of bubbles that break the surface before settling. A host of ripples make their way toward shore.
Jessie, weight on her good leg, continues to watch. To make sure.
Minutes pass. The crown of a golden sun appears above the treetops, and the lake turns smooth as glass once again, reflecting the world that surrounds it like a mirror; a great eye, staring, wet with wonder, at the sky.
The rising sun gives the shining surface an amber glow, bright as a jewel, rich as honey. It fills Jessie with the deep, hopeful splendor of a brand new day.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
All of my story collections are—to some extent—themed.
Behold the Void is filled with “gut-punch” horror stories. Old-school, dark, dirty, angry tales filled with violence and mayhem and a dose of the surreal.
The stories in Beneath a Pale Sky, to me anyway, are more along the lines of supernatural thrillers, with the book containing strong thematic elements of the afterlife.
For No One Is Safe!, I wanted to have some fun. I wanted to create a book that stretched across genres, that gave off strong pulp vibes and was just a bit more off-the-wall bonkers than the collections I’d previously released. I purposely curated a book of stories that blurred the lines of sci-fi and horror, toggled between humanistic dread and dark comedy; that rode the swirling dark line between fantastical and terrifying.
Or, if nothing else, that it entertained. I hope it did, and I also hope it tickled the nightmares hiding deep inside your mind, lured them forward, out of their caves and into your dreams.
While I’m here, I’d like to thank some folks.
