Stories by Marc Selby

-- Forest Outside of town 01:30 PM -- He wasn’t sleeping well, he kept seeing the bodies in his mind and when he slept they often penetrated his dreams. It was his day off, he had no uniform, no badge, no direct radio to his brothers and sisters in blue. Jimmy only had his gun holstered and hidden under his light tan jacket, and his cellphone with only one bar of service. He wasn’t expecting any trouble, not really, but he was returning to the scene of the first crime, and they always say serial killers do that as well, so he might as well have some sort of protection. Jimmy walked up the forest trail to the clearing still marked off with police tape. There were supposed to be follow up investigations here to try and find more evidence. It would be happening either today or tomorrow but with the new murder in the park last night and the already small town police force already being stretched thin meant the investigation would be pushed back, and most likely rushed. It was ove...

It was just past the witching hour when it finally moved. I had been sitting in silence, the only noise was the crackling from a dwindling fire in the hearth, looking outside down the path to my home. The only way I could imagine whatever had been killing my cows had been travelling. I built my cabin up against the back of several giant stones jutting from the hill. There was just enough room for my cabin, and my barn. Out past the path was the field where I grew my crops of different vegetables, those were undisturbed. So I stayed awake this night. I would keep the fire low, and I would sit, and with axe in hand I would wait for it. I thought, at one point, I saw something move at the corner where the path wraps around the big rocks, but I became convinced it was just my tired eyes looking for anything in the dark. However, what must have been two hours later, the movement I had seen repeated itself, pausing to watch my cabin before walking up the path to my home and the barn. ...

I’ve heard it said that in space, no one can hear you scream. However, due to the new Wide-Range Servo-tech communicators recently installed into our suits, that was no longer the case. Yet to me, coming to in my suit while floating in the emptiness of space, this is no comfort. My immediate action is to scream in panic, which I do, only for the HUD to flash red, catching my attention. With my current course of screaming my lungs out I was using too much oxygen and would kill myself even faster. We were on our way from the Mars Spaceport on a typical supply drop before heading home to the Europa colony. We charted a route through the Main Asteroid Belt, where the rocks are at their thinnest, brushing just past the dwarf planet Ceres. Captain Rajas was going to let the computer formulate a safe path that he would manually navigate, the safest course of action in the ever shifting belt. Everything had been going fine until we were passing Ceres. The computer tried to alert Captai...