Friday Free Fiction

Happy Friday











@Boston Review: "Thirty Seconds From Now" by John Chu. SF. [Via SF Signal]

"One second from now, the beanbag will thunk into Scott’s left palm. From reflex, his fingers will wrap around it before he’ll toss it back up again."

@Daily Science Fiction: "Volition" by Alec Austin.

"T minus three and a half years: In two weeks, Karl Hoestler will graduate from the Akademie Der Zeitreise with an Untersturmführer's commission in Temporal Operations. Karl does not know this yet. At the moment, he stands fidgeting in the chill white hall outside a classroom door, listening to the low voices of his thesis examiners percolate through the gap separating the door from the hallway's polymer tiles."

Serial Fiction
@Author's Site: "Deluge (Part 86)" by Brian Keene. Horror.

"Each of them was armed with more than one weapon. Caterina had a knife from the galley and a broken broom handle that she’d turned into a makeshift spear. Mylon carried a shotgun, and had a pistol and a knife holstered at his waist."

@Author's Site: "Paradigm Shift #10" by Misa Buckley. Paranormal.

"A scream woke me up. It took a moment – and Raul racing into the bedroom, hair deliciously awry – to realise that the sound had come from me. I pushed my fringe off my forehead and felt the hot sweat beaded there."

@Author's Site: "Nothing is Beyond - Cahpters 1-5" by Davy Minor. SF. [via SF Signal]

"As the world around him collapsed, all Drake Ovchinnikov could do was tumble along inside the hurricane. For a while, he thought he might just escape unscathed."

Audio
@Classic Tales Podcast: "The Statement of Randolph Carter" by H.P. Lovecraft, read by B.J. Harrison.

"below me, some peril beyond the radius of the human imagination. But my friend was in greater danger than I, and through my fear I felt a vague resentment that he should deem me capable of deserting him under such circumstances. More clicking, and after a pause a piteous cry from Warren"

@Drabbecast: "Followed" by Will McIntosh.

"She came wandering down the sidewalk like any other corpse, her herky-jerky walk unmistakable among the fluid strides of the living. She was six or seven, Southeast Asian, maybe Indian, her ragged clothes caked in dried mud. Pedestrians cut a wide berth around her without noticing her at all…"

@Pseudopod: "Kavar The Rat" by Thomas Owen, translated by Edward Gauvin, read by David Rees-Thomas. Horror.

"But he’d been a skillful artisan, and remained so. At the beginning of his career, his real specialty had been locksmithing. Ah! Nothing to do with today’s dumb little locks, all identical, with grooved keys and four screws to be slapped up any old where, which came apart with a blow of your fist."