Hearing the familiar teeter-totter of rocking chairs on creaking boards, Faux turned his face from the charred shell of the barn to the stone-walled farmhouse. Squinting against the sun, he focused on what remained of the veranda, gazing upon the planked overhang which had caved in on the right side of the porch so that fire-blackened joists, jutting out from under partially burnt sheaves of thatch, cast long shadows across the yard. In his joose-wracked mind, he began to see ephemeral shape...

As the door continued to creak open, Preacher-Man, the flesh and blood of him, stumbled against the jamb, his eyes flashing disbelief at the spearhead protruding through the right side of his bare chest, a piece of bloody lung dangling on its serrated edge. Brigitte screamed at the sudden appearance of him, pinkly white but for his hands and face, the man totally nude, with blood gushing from his chest and groin. Tripping on the breechclout flap of her gown, she fell to her backside and lay ...

The room was poorly lighted by a single dusty taper, melted at the bottom to stand on a chipped cup plate; because the candle burned on one of the ornately chased nightstands against the wall, most of the room stood in shadow, deepening to darkness. Wide enough for two, the four-poster with its ruptured canopy and sagging mattress matched the nightstands, as well as the dresser and the highboy at the dark end of the room. All the furnishings ~ the laving dish in the form of a seashell, the v...

Impossible creatures crept and crawled through the lost and forgotten crevices of his mind, before he projected their crudities across the dreary landscape: half the truth and half the lie. With each step he took, trudging through the depths of sand with the two women behind him, Faux surveyed the vast open champaign, seeing it for the enormous shallow lake it had been during the Cretaceous Period, over a hundred million years before. Marveling at the prehistoric flora on the distant shore, ...

Sitting on Pious Rock, his left elbow on his raised knee, the thick carrying strap of his hunting rifle swinging slightly underneath his right elbow, Paul Radford trained the cross-hairs of his scope across the body-littered ground. Within that dark magnified circle, finding the boma alive with bloodhawks and hyenas tearing at the grayed human flesh, he spied on the dead and dying, seeing first a bald pate exploded under a high-impact round, seeing next a khaki-shirted chest wheezing bubbles...

The bloodhawk marched across one of the rafters directly above the hayloft, executed a quick turn in almost military precision then marched in the opposite direction, scraping flakes and clods of guano off the rough-hewn beam. Down below, Faux turned in his sleep. After being awake all night, on guard, he curled himself on the straw-flecked boards, bundling his arms against his chest and warming his feet in a patch of sunlight from the bale hatch. When a clod of sparrow feces struck his ear,...

The bloodhawk marched across one of the rafters directly above the hayloft, executed a quick turn in almost military precision then marched in the opposite direction, scraping flakes and clods of guano off the rough-hewn beam. Down below, Faux turned in his sleep. After being awake all night, on guard, he curled himself on the straw-flecked boards, bundling his arms against his chest and warming his feet in a patch of sunlight from the bale hatch. When a clod of sparrow feces struck his ear,...

He was the man. He was the man of God. And it was he who would meet the devil on Pious Rock. Standing to his true height after his rough climb, Preacher-Man patted the dust, sand and dirt from the tails of his black clerical coat. He steeled his eyes to a pointed glare, preparing himself for battle. In the dark of late night, not a star or the moon in the sky, he surveyed the top of the bluffs, looking for the darker silhouette of the devil moving against the lighter gray-black of the sky be...

It was dark of night, though moon-lit, with pale flashes of lightning flaring the treetops a hundred meters to the sky. Scant moments later, a faint thunder rumbled in the far distance. Waggling the hide-bound grip of her knife, the citoyenne squeezed the dirty soak out of the slackened leather, trying to firm her grasp on the grayed wooden haft. Dragging the wet of her skirt in the mud, she sidled towards the stone wall, trying to get the moon in his face, all the while watching his eyes, w...

It was dark of night, though moon-lit, with pale flashes of lightning flaring the treetops a hundred meters to the sky. Scant moments later, a faint thunder rumbled in the far distance. Waggling the hide-bound grip of her knife, the citoyenne squeezed the dirty soak out of the slackened leather, trying to firm her grasp on the grayed wooden haft. Dragging the wet of her skirt in the mud, she sidled towards the stone wall, trying to get the moon in his face, all the while watching his eyes, w...