Showing results by author "Stephen Huff" in All Categories

During the final years of the Soviet Union, its government started building an ultra-secret airbase in the center of a vast wilderness. Its secrecy outstripped its management such that construction continued despite its abandonment. At the end of a late night international flight from India to Russia, a weary traveler finds himself deposited in a lonely ramp of an empty terminal. As he navigates its endless gates and corridors, this hapless traveler begins to realize he has landed in no ordinary airport.

Every stellar rise deserves a cosmic fall. Inhumanly callous and ruthlessly selfish, he made a fortune in predatory mortgage loans prior to the economic collapse of 2008. In its calamitous aftermath, executive handlers staged him for a corporate patsy and left him to answer alone for their collective crimes. In the aftermath of his ruin, one man’s family confronts an epic plague of vermin when they move into a modest country home. They have all the benefits of human civilization in such a contest, but the rats have the numbers.

A compendium of three original novellas, this is the true-to-life horror story of a boy born without a name into a lifetime of loss, suffering, and sorrow. Bestially abused throughout his formative years, the boy has the appearance of a patchwork monster by the time he arrives at a notorious desert orphanage in Pecan County, Texas. There, the boy will travel new realms of torment in the company of his sadistic keepers, Momma and Eugene Parker, who will teach him every low art and mean skill with belt, strap, and whip. Stoic and untouched by the damage done to him, the boy named Manga will ...

Deep within the guts of this world, men and women struggle daily to deliver fuel to feed ravenous industry. It is dangerous work. Indeed, this is a story about fire catching in a coal seam buried deep underground, where a dozen lives hang, choking, in the balance. Regardless of color, creed or religion, hard-rock miners work together as one to avoid perishing individually and alone down in the dark where the devil dwells.

The last frontier is not a destination of space, but of mind. Above the constraints and laws of human civilization, freedom is the rule and confinement the exception. Social authorities detest the ideal and all who voyage there, because therein lies the ultimate unknown, the ultimate fear. Human laws and state control are unknown in Far-World.

At the last stop for provisions before they make their climb into the snowy mountains of Colorado, the locals tease these teenaged tourists about their lack of preparation for such a cold and unforgiving frontier. Though they scoff, these unfortunate youths will soon learn why the old-timers claim that the mountains sometimes keep their dead.

She is educated, determined and ambitious. She has never failed at anything in her life until her child goes missing and is eventually found slain, in pieces. Only her anger delves deeper into hell than her unfathomable grief. She hunts her monster relentlessly in the months that follow. After she finds him, his suffering will be unspeakable.

Civilization deconstructed itself like a riot in a madhouse. One minute it all functioned with a standard sort of craziness, and the next it devolved into ten billion psychotic inmates at each other’s throats like suddenly sprung animals. Survivors refer to civilization’s final irrational act as "Terminus", but this is an unofficial label. It simply gives them a handle with which to wield the concept of their end times. It bifurcates their memory. Before. After. In between, an unspeakable river of blood.

While waiting for his wife to finish shopping, he stumbles across a strangely ornate stairway hidden away at the back of the local mall. Bored, he decides to descend a flight or two to examine the strange window displays arranged along its outer wall. With each downward step, the displays progressively reflect history long since passed. Intrigued, he delves deeper and deeper into countless mysteries presented along his careless descent of the spiral stair.

This particular corporal served all four years of the bloodiest war in European history, many of them as a message runner - one of the most dangerous and elite jobs of trench-bound combat. By all accounts, he was a strange young man with many strange ideas. He should have died a thousand times. Though millions perished, the corporal would survive.

He is the most prolific sniper in a long, deadly war. In fact, he succeeds to the point that his own comrades have learned to shun him. It's his job. He's good at it.

Jo-Jo's father died young and his mother, while present, never picked up the slack. It's not easy to raise an unguided young man of high school age, especially a young man as misunderstood as Jo-Jo. Life is too short to mourn the dead forever. In a smile, a frown. In laughter, sorrow. Today is Jo-Jo’s “Big Day”.

Lovers reveal their most intimate and personal secrets on a breathless hiss, while murderous psychopaths use the same hushed voice to lure intended victims. Calamity often follows a violent shout, but we have more to fear from the occasional wee, wicked whisper. This is the medium of humanity’s most despicable tongue, for a quick whisper is the requisite mode of lies, the self-serving gloat of torment, the insidious confidence of slander, and the preferred protocol of psychosis.

As the zombie apocalypse begins, a small group of civil servants find themselves locked in their tollbooths, which are heavily armored against run-away automobiles. Trapped inside their hellish fishbowls, they curse their situation. Yet they are safe... for a time. Cramped, dingy and institutionally depressing, their duty station becomes a backstage view of Armageddon.

On Friday, October 13th of 1307, the Knights Templar ceased to exist. Imprisoned, tortured and executed, in a single day every soldier of that once-powerful order became a capital offender with no hope for reprieve. Fabulously wealthy at the time, the Templars owned vast estates that safeguarded legendary caches of treasure. Though their enemies seized much of their property, rumors of lost hordes echo through history to the present day.

He has perfected the necessary skills, collected the requisite equipment, and buried the resultant bodies. Like a grotesque human hermit crab, he periodically sheds one shell for another, gutting the original to make it his own, and no regard whatever for previous ownership. A ruthless master of disguises, he lives many lives. Maybe one of them will be yours.

When the constraints of the mission make it impossible to use electronics or cameras, they send him. His memory is eidetic. “Photographic”. His infallible mind is simultaneously his most blessed gift and his most devilish curse, because nothing is more haunting and vengeful than memory. His is a graveyard of murdered faces.

Facing the hangman's noose, he confesses everything. Because he lived a notoriously colorful life, most of his stories cannot be believed. Even so, he has one chance to make a final statement. He vows to make it count.

He is ruthlessly ambitious. He believes in selling people what they want. He's not a thief, but he'll take anything he can get. He's not a killer, but he's responsible for countless deaths. The first day he shows up at your door, it's a party. The last day he shows up at your door, it's a funeral.

A young, newlywed couple. A new custom home. A good life. Yet nothing can ever be perfect. Though their evenings at home are filled with playful lovemaking in the first months spent in their lavish new dwelling, a chill begins to settle over them with the passage of time. They cannot possibly anticipate the truly horrid source of their discomfort.