Shadow and Storm is a collection of four short stories/novellas in a variety of genres. This book is in the rough draft stage at the moment. I wrote these stories by hand a few years ago, before I had a computer (yes, I was a late bloomer technology wise). Portions of each story have been transferred to my computer, and the transfer process has also served as a revision process. It was during this time that I came up with the idea for my current novel, The Deal. I stopped working on the S & S stories to write The Deal. Once it is complete,  which I expect to be by the end of the year, work on Shadow and Storm will continue. Below are some brief excerpts from each story in the collection...

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The Fury

    It has been seven days, and I still can’t leave this house. Scott is angry again, and when the fury takes him, he doesn't allow me to leave. I could try (I have tried), but he always knows. He hardly ever leaves his room, but he still knows. When the fury comes, he is not himself. I mean this literally, not figuratively. Scott is a good brother, don’t get me wrong. He gets angry like a lot of people do, but unlike other people, his anger becomes tangible.
   Last Thursday, someone on the construction site got on his bad side. It was Bobby Prescott, the boss’s son. Bobby was forty-five, loved to drink beer (he had the belly to prove it), and was an asshole of the highest order. He was the kind of guy who would be a complete prick to your face (always finishing with “Just fucking with you, man.”) and an even bigger one behind your back. It was one such incident that set this whole thing off. Scott wouldn’t tell me what Bobby said (or possibly did), but when the crew broke for lunch that day, it happened. Bobby decided to finish the kitchen tile of the house they were working on since there were only a few left, while everyone else headed to McKay’s for burgers and beer. When the crew returned (wondering why Bobby hadn’t met them at the restaurant but not really caring), they found him lying dead on the kitchen floor, one tile short of complete.
   The first to find what remained of him was Daryl Means, who vomited on the new buckets of paint beside the kitchen’s entrance.
Bobby Prescott was torn to pieces. Both of his legs were ripped off and appeared to be partially eaten. They lied bloody and mangled on the ceramic tile near the open space where the stove would eventually sit. The meat on his thighs and calves were mostly gone, and the bones beneath were exposed. His left arm was lying on the brand new counter. The muscles within were strewn out from the severed end like a half-dozen bloody tails. His head was barely recognizable as human. It was topography of crimson rivers and valleys. The lower half of his body had been slashed apart and rendered mostly hollow. The kitchen itself was splattered with blood. Bright red chunks of skin and tissue clung to the walls.
   The police determined that Bobby had been attacked by an animal, though they could not say what animal could or would do that to a man, especially one inside a house in the middle of a Miami suburb. The truth is they will never determine what killed him. Whatever it was, it was nothing that exists on Earth. It was brought here by Scott. He did not call it forth deliberately, but on a conscious level he knew something would come, something would happen. Something always happened. Bobby did something to infuriate Scott and when that occurs, his hatred takes shape. It becomes a beast. And Scott’s beasts are always hungry.
   I asked him once where they came from. He told me he didn’t know, then paused and said, “From different levels.” When I asked him what he meant, he didn’t respond. He just raised the volume on the television, always turned to some old black and white movie or TV show. It is during these dark periods that Scott is someone else entirely. Not the older brother who took care of me after mom and dad died, who would do almost anything for his little sister. No, this was the Other Scott. The quiet one, the dark one.
   The problem with the fury is that when it manifests, his anger becomes amplified, it becomes something greater than him, something out of his control. He becomes a slave to it. It becomes a beast, a physical force given strength by his anger and hate.
   It has kept me prisoner here for seven days, the longest it has remained active. Every time, it stays longer. Every time, it is stronger than the last.
   I have mostly confined myself to my room. There is something in the foyer. I have not seen it, but I have heard it...

The Ressurectors

   Melissa White walked the bright hall of the hospital’s basement level. It was completely silent and made her flesh rise in goose bumps. There was no one living down there, no one but the dead occupied those rooms. She was well on her way to regretting her decision to take an extra shift, but she needed a new car. Perhaps not brand new, but at least something that would run. The sight of her broken down old Chrysler greeting her every morning as she set down the driveway towards the bus stop maddened her. She looked at the file on her clipboard and continued down the silent hall. The only sound was the click-clack of her shoes on the linoleum. She stopped before a door that read Room 9 and shivered. She suddenly realized how damn cold it was down there and stood a moment more before sucking in a deep breath and turning the knob. She fumbled for the light switch and waited as the fluorescents flickered to life. Gurneys filled the room in crooked lines. Upon them sat plastic bags, some white, others blue, all holding human bodies, empty of thought and will. Upon their chests lay clipboards displaying their final pieces of identification. Melissa walked quickly among them, keeping her mind focused on a specific name and little else. After several uncomfortable minutes, she found the name that matched the one on her clipboard.
    Sandra Beniger, 44, fatal automobile collision.
    She shivered again and wheeled the shell that remained of the woman into the hall. As she pushed the gurney down the long hall to the waiting elevator, she tried not to think of what the woman looked like within that plastic bag. She tried not to think of every zombie movie she had ever seen and focused on that elevator at the end of the hall. She could not wait to be around living people again.
    Melissa had been a registered nurse for over a year and even the bloodiest injuries did not bother her anymore. It was the frightened and distraught faces of the people bearing such injuries that did. She wanted only to have some part in helping relieve the fear and worry on those faces. She understood what lay behind those expressions because she had felt it herself once. Down there in the basement was what remained when those masks of fear and dread could not be removed.
    She was passing Room 3, thinking of those long months she spent in the hospital (which seemed like ages ago) when she heard a noise. She jerked back from the door, her heart drumming in her chest. The hairs on the back of her neck rose. She stood for a moment, shaking, wondering if it was her mind that had created the noise. She quickly decided that it had and turned toward the elevator again when she heard a man’s shaky, terrified voice.
    “Hello? Is anybody here?” the voice asked.
    Her mind tried to formulate a scenario of why a man would come to the morgue level of a hospital and ask if anyone was there. Must be crazy. Then a sudden patter of feet (bare feet, she thought) rushed closer. She leapt out of the way as the door flung open and a young, naked man ran out. There was something on his foot.
    “Where am I?” the man asked frantically.
    “In Lin-Lincoln County Hospital.” Then, “O-on the morgue level.”
    “Well what am I doing here?” he asked and opened the door, pointing inside. “Why did they put me in there when I’m clearly not dead?”
    He went back in, apparently uninterested in her response and scooped a clipboard from the floor. She cautiously followed him in, keeping her distance.
    “This is me”, he said, smacking the clipboard with his forefinger. “Jason Anaver. That’s me.” He finished this last smacking his chest with the same finger. Melissa moved within reaching distance and took the clipboard from this strange man, who had either not realized he was naked or didn’t care (she guessed it was the latter) and read the name printed across the top. Jason Anaver. She lifted the top sheet and looked at the picture beneath. It was a head shot of the same dark haired man, except that the man in the photo had pasty, white skin and blue lips. The man who stood before her had flushed cheeks and small beads of sweat on his forehead. His long hair hung down the sides of his face. She looked down at his feet. There was something on his right foot. A white string was tied to the big toe and at the end of it was a tag. A toe tag. She gasped and sucked in a deep breath of cold, putrid air. Her head filled with a sudden, alarming dizziness.
    She was unconscious before her body hit the floor.

The Path Beyond

 Excerpt Coming Soon...

 Afterlife

     I want to tell you about what happened to me after I died.
    I suppose I should start from the beginning: my heart attack. My parents told me my heart was bad when I was nine. I already knew to a certain extent, but it officially sank in when I was nine. My Dad stressed the importance of taking care of myself, and that’s when it hit me. My mortality was more fragile than most peoples. I am not going to go into the medical diagnosis but suffice it to say I had to be careful with what I ate and be sure not to over-exert myself. This lesson was lost somewhat as an adult. I pushed myself too hard and died at the age of 37. I am survived by my wife, Annabel, and my 11-year-old daughter, Raylee. I guess you probably should know my name. It’s Tom Ruttman. Pleased to meet you. I was raised Jewish. I had my bar mitzvah at thirteen and the money was put away for college. I attended New York University for K-12 education. That’s where I met Annabel. We were married after graduation. I became an 11th grade high school teacher, specializing in World History. My wife became a zoologist. By the time Raylee was six, we had two dogs, four cats, three fish tanks, two rabbits and an Orangutan who Annabel had raised from birth. Everyday at my house was like an episode of Wild Kingdom. When I died, the orangutan was gone, as were one of the rabbits. The Orangutan lives in the zoo and one of the cats, a big tom named Caesar, killed the rabbit when it got out of its cage.
    At any rate, I collapsed in the foyer of my house on Thursday, July 2, 2009 at 6:11 pm. I was pronounced dead at 6:27 in the ambulance. At first, I didn’t realize I had died. The pain in my chest was suddenly gone and I could breathe normally again. I sat up. The two EMT guys ran over to me. I smiled, trying to explain to them I was alright, and they didn’t need to freak out because I sat up. Then one of them reached towards my arm and passed right through it. The shock of that caused me to leap up. I turned to see my body lying on the gurney. And that's the moment I realized I was dead. Now, you’re probably wondering if I saw a bright light at the end of a tunnel and all that shit, right? Well, eventually I did, and to describe the light as “white” would be a major oversimplification. But I'll get to that later. There was no light in the ambulance because there were some things I had to take care of first. Put simply, I had to go through hell to reach my heaven...

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