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PUBLICATION HISTORY
“A Thing for Zombies”
1st digital edition (by Brinestone Press via KDP)
9/9/2011.
“The Grin”
“The Scenario Egg”
“Reached in Error”
“Raise the Dead”
“The Sacrifices We Make”
“The Promises We Keep”
1st digital edition (Brinestone Press via KDP)
2/10/2012
All stories ©2012 by Saul Tanpepper.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Saul Tanpepper is a writer of speculative fiction for teens and adults. A former molecular geneticist originally from Upstate New York, he now calls Northern California home.
If you enjoyed INSOMNIA, please check out his other collection, Shorting the Undead and Other Horrors: a Menagerie of Macabre Mini-fiction, available in Kindle and paperback format from Amazon at http://amzn.to/vYAjDv.
Also stay tuned for his zombie pandemic novel, tentatively titled Touch Me and Die, which will be released in late spring 2012.
For more information about the author and his writings, please check out his website: http://www.tanpepperwrites.com.
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SHORTING THE UNDEAD & OTHER HORRORS
Available from Amazon.com in Kindle and paperback formats
Includes the following individual titles:
CONTINUE FOR EXCERPTS FROM THESE AND OTHER TANPEPPER TITLES
Excerpt from THE HEADHUNTER
Promise me, darling. Promise you won’t rest until you take my killer’s head.
† † †
When the last shard of the day’s sunlight fell from his ceiling and twilight painted the walls crimson in a sweet seduction of darkness, Bill Hawkins unfolded his legs and levered himself off of the ancient couch he used for his bed. His joints ached, though neither from the chill of the approaching winter nor the stiffness of age, nor even from the hardness of the cushions, but from the tension that had parasitized his body since the Uprising, since the time the killings began. The world had died a living death, and now it was the curse of those who remained to relive it each and every night that followed.
Stay in.
She haunts him: his beloved wife. She haunts his every thought.
Stay in, or at least go back to the old place where we were once so happy.
He raised his arms, stretching, rotating his head until it no longer creaked like an old pine bending with the wind. The twilight lingered, as if the day were reluctant to go. It would pass soon enough. Night would fall and it was best if he were dressed and gone before the hordes of undead began their nightly crawl out of their holes to search the city for hapless victims.
He’d promised Reggie a week ago that he’d hunt with him tonight.
You promised me, too, darling. Remember? Reggie won’t mind.
“I owe him. And, yes, he will mind,” he uttered into the darkness, hoping she would leave him be. Knowing she wouldn’t. “Just one night, my dear. I promise.”
She didn’t answer.
It felt like a betrayal. Just like it felt each and every morning he returned without the head of the murderer, the she-beast that had taken his Karen from him forever.
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Excerpt from MR. NOVEMBER
There are all manner of hauntings: of places, of things, of people. There are hauntings of the mind, just as there are hauntings of the body and of the soul. But the worst sort of haunting is the kind which infects the spirit, entwines with it, subsumes it. The kind that cannot be easily exorcised.
Not, at least, without first killing the host.
† † †
Standing there on the sidewalk, enveloped in the hot July sunlight, I can’t help but be struck by how little the place has changed over the past twenty years. The newspapers had called it Malvern Manor, so named after its last owner back in the nineteen-eighties, but as kids we’d always just called it The Place On Dunbury Hill. Even now, as I look at it through an adult’s eyes, it still feels as possessed of evil as it had back then.
Despite the brightness of the day, a pall of oppression hangs over the lot, a hazy sense of perpetual decay and yet, at the same time, a self-indulgent refusal to concede the passage of time. As if a structure made of wood and stone can feel resentment, much less express it. Maybe it can. Maybe the place resents its abandonment so long ago; or maybe it’s offended by the rumors that persist about it, stories of pain and suffering that have survived despite the waxing and waning of so many generations
There are people who say the rumors are just malicious stories, conceived by parents wishing to keep their children safe. But they are mostly transplants to this place; they don’t know this town of Edgemont as I know it. They don’t know what it can do to a person.
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Excerpt from OCCUPIED
It was nine-thirty at night and I was already sitting on a razor’s edge waiting for the LA-bound redeye out of Hamilton, when I first noticed the fat guy standing over by the boarding gate. What had drawn my attention to him wasn’t the thinning, greasy black hair on his head or the briny sweat stains spreading from underneath his armpits, though they certainly added to the overall effect. He had this guarded look about him, a way of standing and glancing furtively about that suggested his appearance was just that: an illusion. There was an intensity in his eyes. He looked like someone waiting to explode. All it would take was the smallest spark to set him off.
It felt like I was looking in the mirror.
Not that I’m fat and sloppy-looking or would ever dress anything like that. At least until my crash down in Australia six months ago, I’d been pretty fit and trim. I still was, for the most part, though I’d gotten a bit soft. It couldn’t be helped.
No, I meant the stuff going on inside the guy’s head. And mine.
He was pacing. He’d cleared a tiny space for himself at the front of the queue and he was careful not to stray too far from it. I figured what was going through his mind was someone trying sneak in front of him. He kept glaring at the people behind him, as if he thought they might try.
Way to go, Frank, I thought, sighing down at my chest as I sat on the unforgiving seats of the airport terminal. This is supposed to help calm me down?
Frank Gorme, my shrink back in LA. Make that former shrink. He’d come up with the idea about a month ago, suggesting that if I studied how other people acted under situations that I found stressful, maybe it’d help calm me down. Problem with that theory was, you gather enough folks together in one place at one time—like an airport terminal in Bermuda, for example—then one of those people is bound to be bordering on the edge of psychotic.
And, naturally, one’s attention always tends to gravitate toward such people, doesn’t it?
Read the rest at AMAZON.COM
Excerpt from THE OBJECT OF HER OBSESSION
Can you smell the rain?
It comes I tell you.
† † †
There’s something about Felipe-Janssen knives, the fancy ones you used to be able to get at Milano’s on Tenth Street in downtown Grand Forks. My Uncle Phil got us a set of them for Christmas a half dozen years back, the ones with the guaranteed Eversharp™ blades that come in one of those fancy velvet-lined boxes.
Most of them are gone now. Misplaced or thrown away. All except the filleter. I was always so careful to keep that one hidden away. I wanted to make sure it wouldn’t get lost or misused like the others.
Despite its claim, the blade started to dull after a while. No big surprise there, I used it all the time. I learned how to keep the edge as keen as a razor; a drop of oil and a whetting stone and a lot of patience was all it needed. I found the rhythmic act of sharpening oddly calming. Besides, a sharper blade makes a finer cut.
It was just so perfect, the knife: long and thin, well-balan
ced, gently curved. The handle was soft to the touch, carved out of some exotic wood. Mahogany, I think. It didn’t have the rough feel of pine or even oak. It felt like it knew what it was meant for: for being held.
I almost feel sorry for it, sitting all alone in the drawer with the ordinary knives now, the mismatched set Mom and Dad found at the St. Christopher’s rummage sale when they got married and which now only get used whenever Mom gets the urge to scrape the mold off the bathroom tiles. I doubt my father would’ve approved her using the Felipe-Janssens like that. He thought they were special, too.
Sometimes, sleepless in the dark, I lie and I wonder where the rest of them are, where they’ve gotten to. Maybe they’ll turn up in some evidence box somewhere someday, like on those TV crime shows. Isn’t that a strange thing to wonder? Honestly, though, it doesn’t seem so farfetched, especially now that summer is over and somebody’s bound to notice that the fences are a long way from being finished.
Good killing knives.
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Excerpt from OPEN WIDE
I remember the day the two of them hooked up, Kerry Anne and Dean. The day we all graduated. I remember the relief I’d felt knowing that she’d turned her attention onto someone else. A terrible weight had finally been lifted from my shoulders. Now that weight was Dean’s to bear. Well, good riddance, and all that. Problem was, despite everything that had happened, I still wanted her.
Badly.
The thought had entered my mind that maybe I should warn Dean about her. After all, he’d once been a friend of mine, back in the day, back before either of us had ever met Kerry Anne and had entertained thoughts of what it would be like to be with a girl like her. But by then we hated each other’s guts. In my opinion, he was lower than low: he was sewage. So the urge passed without me ever acting on it.
Not a day passes now that I don’t stop and wonder how differently things might’ve turned out if I had. For one thing, I wouldn’t be sitting here sipping weak chicken broth instead of slicing into a nice juicy steak.
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Excerpt from NOCTURNE
The Man had already cheated Death once this morning, so when he turned away from the radiant face of his wife and stepped off the porch and into the busy-bright flow of the September day, the crisp, loud clack of the hard rubber soles of his shoes on the sidewalk sounded to him like an affirmation of life and living and all things that are vibrant. The breathless air was crisp and clear. He held his gaze determinedly forward, in front of himself. A sort of a smile touched the corners of his face. Today will be different, he assured himself, even though he knew it wouldn’t be. Before he had even reached the front sidewalk, his footsteps sounded to him like the ceaseless ticking of a clock.
He cheated Death like a man cheats at poker, by knowing he will someday be caught; a man who plays at the game long enough and cheats often enough knows it is inevitable. Maybe not this hand or the next, but eventually. Sooner. Later. The game must end: win, lose or draw; whether by fair or by foul.
He didn’t fear the end of the game—not really—only the waiting, and the form it might take.
You don’t get to choose.
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Excerpt from GOLGOTHA
He was a religious man, so the first time Special Advisor to the President of the United States Richard Daniels heard the recording, a single word rose up in his mind. The second time, he became violently ill and also afraid. The third and final time, those emotions were still there, but by then he’d managed to control them. He was a religious man, and he wished he wasn’t, for how could any god, much less the God of his religion, forgive what he had done?
† † †
“My name is Gene Halliwell. Eugene Douglas Halliwell. I am a professor of immunology at Royce State College and…”
[rustling sounds]
“Okay, I wasn’t sure this was recording, but it is. Royce State College…immunology… Okay. Okay. I should’ve made better notes.
“I am making this recording on the twenty-third of December. It’s a Saturday. The current time is…six-seventeen in the evening. I am in my laboratory. I am alone.”
[…]
“The children are… They’re at their mother’s house for the holiday. They won’t miss my absence. Neither they nor my ex-wife Sophia, my students and colleagues here at the college, know a thing of what I am about to attempt; they are all innocent, and I do not wish them to be implicated in this in any way. I am not naïve enough to think they will escape scrutiny; I know that when this all comes down, there will interrogations and they will be treated harshly. There will be the inevitable arrests, charges, slander—maybe even torture—and for all that I have the deepest regrets. But there is no other option left to me. Only I am guilty for what happens here. If you hear this, you must believe me: they are all innocent.
“I just wanted to make that clear.
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Excerpt from OUTSOURCED
“Do you remember when outsourcing meant hiring cheap, unskilled labor in some faraway place, like Asia or South America?”
Nobody answers. The sun beats relentlessly down on us and we all just shuffle forward and keep our thoughts to ourselves. Nobody speaks, except him. He just won’t shut up. I swear I’m going to shoot somebody if he doesn’t shut up.
“Those were the days,” he finishes.
I roll my eyes and pray he doesn’t remember me from yesterday. What was his name again? Bill something or other. I forget. Smith, I think. Or Brown. Something obnoxiously vanilla and utterly forgetful. Not that it matters. He could be named Jesus H. Christ for all it matters. Won’t change how I feel about the guy, which is that I hate his freaking guts. And he only just started coming here this week.
“I used to write books,” he tells the guy behind him.
I’ve heard this story before, three or four times at least. I could practically recite it by memory.
Now I can’t even get a job flipping burgers.
“Now look at me. Couldn’t even get a goddamn job in a fast food joint. Not that I’d take it, mind you, if I got offered one. Who the hell wants to work for what they’re taking nowadays? It’s just not right.”
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Excerpt from FLAWLESS: A CLAIRE FONTAINE NOVELLA
Available from Amazon.com
Was it really such a bad thing if, despite all the years that Claire Fontaine had been friends with Heather Graham, she’d never actually paid attention to the girl? The truth was, Heather was the kind of person who… Well, to put it delicately, she was one of those girls you could take only in very small doses.
Indelicately, the girl was a complete motormouth, except she was perpetually running on idle, never actually going anywhere, just spewing exhaust. The guys liked her, though. “Heaven on the eyes,” they’d always say, “but hell on the ears.” And Claire couldn’t disagree.
But it wasn’t her ears she was worried about, it was her sanity. Heather was so totally unaware of the effect she had on people that many ran away if they saw her coming. Without the ability to block her out, a person might be driven to do something horrible. Murder, for example. In fact, the thought might have crossed Claire’s mind if she hadn’t figured out a way to ignore Heather early on in their relationship. It was only because of that that they’d managed to stay such good friends over the years, even, at time, best friends.
Currently, they weren’t best best friends. For the past year or so, that position had been occupied by Deirdre de Havilland. Still, third best friends was pretty good, all things considered. And no one was complaining, least of all Heather. Plus, everyone got to keep their sanity. It was a win-win situation all around. Ignoring the girl was proof of how much Claire actually cared for her.
But then, everything got all mixed up and turned around starting—what?—two, three weeks ago?
Four, actually, Claire reminded herself, counting
backwards. It had been almost a month since Heather had suddenly stopped being so obnoxiously sweet and chirpy. A month! Funny how time flies. Imagine, almost four weeks since Dennis’s funeral, four weeks since Heather had had that scary episode during the memorial service. And it had been scary. Anyway, it was right about then that Claire had decided she’d better start paying attention again, if only so then she’d know exactly when it was that Heather had finally completely flipped her lid.
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Available from Amazon.com
Available from Amazon.com
Available from Amazon.com
Available from Amazon.com
Insomnia: Paranormal Tales, Science Fiction, & Horror Page 27
