8 Pedro was dreaming. The wind slapped his face with a strong aroma of smoke. He looked around and saw hell. There were fires raging all around him, but it had a vaguely familiar look to it. After looking around for a moment, he realized that he did know this place. It wasn’t hell. It was Dallas. There was so much chaos. People were running everywhere, from the demons. There were thousands of the creatures, and they were devouring everything that they touched. He saw a demon pounce on an old ...

1 Running. It seemed that she was always running these days. It wasn’t just the days, either. It was nights, too. She was even running in her dreams, which she knew this was. But the horrors that were pursuing her were relentless. She could not stop. She dared not stop. For if she stopped, she knew that she would never wake up. The tunnel seemed to stretch on for an eternity, and it probably did. She would keep running, though. She had to. Eventually she would wake up, if she kept ahead of t...

Robert Nightengale anxiously watched the clock. He knew exactly when the telephone would ring, yet dreaded every second that passed by. Every night at eight forty-five, he would try to think of something to do, something that could get him out of the house. At nine, though, he would find himself shakily reaching for the phone as the ringing echoed through his apartment. The sound reverberated through his skull, louder and louder, until he could take it no more. He would fight back the tears ...

4 Sonja awoke from the nightmare screaming fiercely at the walls of her nearly empty room. Her whole body ached as if she had just run a marathon. In her dreams, she had. She had run through the endless tunnel for what seemed an eternity. The monsters never caught her, thank God, but they had never ceased chasing her, either. She ran and the obsidian little devils pursued, that’s the way it always had been. There were never any differences in the dreams, never any great mysteries unraveled. S...

"Dad called me yesterday." That was all that Jason said as he stared out across the lake. Just your normal everyday conversation starter between two brothers. But there was nothing normal about what Jason had said. Our father had been dead for almost a year. Jason gave me a quick look, then drained the last of his Michelob in one large swallow. He started to get up from his chair, but I grabbed him by the wrist before he could get to his feet. "What did you just say?" I asked my younger broth...

“Is someone there?” Ralph asked. Nobody answered, but he could feel a presence in the room with him. “Please, if someone’s there, just let me know. I haven’t had anyone to talk to for a long time, other than doctors. And all they have to offer is more bad news.” Ralph waited to see if there would be a response from the presence, but none came. “Are you an angel?” There was a slight laugh off to his right. He turned his unseeing eyes in that direction. “Are you a devil?” A hint of fear was in ...

Isaac was sitting in his writing room when the first of the snowflakes began to fall. He watched out the bay window, bearing witness to nature’s wonders. At first, the snow did not accumulate, melting instantly upon first touch to the mountains and grass. But it wasn’t long before Isaac saw the beautiful landscape outside his window begin to transform into a picture of what he had seen on postcards many different times: The snow covered Rocky Mountains. He knew that his boys would be gatherin...

We decided that we weren’t going to take any chances with Mr. Hansen. None of us were positive that Bob Hansen wasn’t going to get up and try to kill us, like in the zombie movies. So we decided that it would be better to make sure that he wouldn’t. I know that it’s morbid, but Billy, John, and I drew straws to see who was going to have to put the bullet into Hansen’s head. I drew the shortest straw, making me the winner of that terrible duty. We brought his body out back so that the ladies w...

One lonely cloud loomed in the pale blueness of the sky. It passed over the slowly setting sun like a dead fish in the sea, floating toward nothingness. Phil looked at his Movado wristwatch. "Damn. Fucking things gonna make me late again." He was wearing a fairly expensive gray pinstripe suit that fit loosely over his tall, muscular body. His shoes were expensive, too, even though he had gotten them on sale. He paced back and forth along the platform in his expensive shoes, wondering why he p...

_____ When the first one came to the house, Billy and I were sitting on the porch. We were listening to the radio, shocked and frightened at the reports that we were hearing. Mass hysteria, panic, rioting, infection, pestilence, fear. Just about every report that we heard contained something to that effect. But as we listened, the newsmen didn’t say the one thing that both Billy and I already knew. This was it. The end of everything. I guess the reporters didn’t want to state the obvious. Th...