Stories by Marc Selby

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...

“My name is Bradley, it is December 13th and as of writing this I am thirty-four years of age. “ A man read aloud to his two companions, pausing to look to them to make sure they were listening. “I am writing this so no one else will end up like the Richardsons. So everyone can know that their fears were real, and no one has to make the same mistake as I have. I purchased this cabin last winter and when the snow thawed in the spring I moved in. What I did before this I will not go into here, just that I have been here for a little over 8 months. Everything was wonderful, spring up here on the ridge is great, peaceful. Plenty of wildlife and gorgeous scenery, it is truly magnificent. Then, once the initial supplies and food began to dwindle I decided it was time to do some hunting. Maybe bag a nice deer, grab a few rabbits, might as well fish as well, there was a small lake, nearly a pond, nearby that was lousy with big mouth bass. I’d gone out, rifle slung over one shoulde...

Lower East Side -- 8:05 AM Jersey was not a happy man. He had been woken up in his little hole in the wall studio in some heap of an apartment complex in the lower side of town. It was early, his alarm wasn’t set to go off for another hour, but someone was banging on his door. He threw back his blankets and peeled himself out of bed, yelling to whoever the hell it was waking him up. “Yeah! I’m up! A second!” This seemed to be good enough for whoever was at the door and Jersey grumbled obscenities their way as he wiped his face with his hands. He grabbed at some pants he had lying near his bed and put them on before grabbing his phone. He turned it on and saw a text from Nathan, which was normal, and a missed call from Erica, the Pack Leader, about three hours ago. She didn’t leave a message though, so it must not have been terribly important. He half-stumbled across his room to the door and stood there silently a moment, sniffing the air. Whoever was on the other side ...