Young Theo sets out on a long dead highway in search of deer, plastic artifacts and the secret of his past. While he'll settle for a friend, what he finds instead are three enemies, one of whom may very well be himself.After Oil is a short story set in a past future.

"Just after Halloween 1964, H. Beam Piper, the now-famed science fiction author and the writer of a "locked room" mystery titled Murder in the Gunroom was discovered dead in his own well-stocked gunroom, an apparent suicide. The manuscript to his as-yet unpublished manuscript, Only the Arquebus, disappeared. Piper had told an editor that the story was a historical piece: an account of the zero-sum game played between Ferdinand of Spain and Louis XII of France for the control of Naples....

From the Text:"An undulating blanket of ruin spread to the horizon off the port side of the Mackay-Bennett. Wedged between gray sky and blue-black sea lay the thin brown netting of shattered wood and the dead. The Embalmer saw a bright flash of color: the circle of an unstained red and white lifebelt, bobbing, empty.He tried to count the bodies, corked and frozen stiff on the waves. Ten. Tens. Fifty. More, spreading, to his untrained eye, for a nautical mile, perhaps more. ...

In this Tale of the Haunted Titanic, a giant of the deep rouses from a ghostly slumber, taking a chance to make history at history's end.From the text:"Since then, tens of thousands of ships have sunk in the World Ocean or the rivers that trickle into it, or the seas that once touched the soles of the ocean's feet.Every ship that sinks, whether crewed or abandoned, leaves behind a spirit of varying vigor, fated to loosely follow its mortal course until the end of ti...

In this Tale of the Haunted Titanic, one survivor is unaccounted for: a song which outlives its performers.The band famously played until the bitter end of the maiden and final voyage of the RMS Titanic. The ship sank to a depth of four thousand metres, but what the music unleashed was impossible to fathom.From the story:"The collapsible had taken on a splash of water when it struck - soaking his left leg in ice. He'd been the last one to step upon it as the endless...

"The ice was strange. He felt warmth along his arms as he approached it.At first, he wondered if it was not ice, but a new food chemical he did not know. Science had taken off at such a remarkable clip in the new century, he learned something new every day. The men handling the ice, however, wore gloves, as would be expected.He held his hand half a foot from a block on the top of the stack. Heat poured off the ice like it was a stove top. The block began to move toward his ...

"Greaves. Grief. Aromatic Polyamide.As I hung by my shins on two hooks over a wide, shallow glowing pool littered with ancient stones and the slow-dying bodies of my predecessors, my thoughts centered on these.The polymer greaves, glorified soccer equipment, had been a gift of fortune. Our Province Guard gave them to me at my send-off, a poor substitute for a breastplate, the last of which had been destroyed by the Cannibals. Snagged in a forest of hooks, the greaves lynched...

Three short tales of monstrous magic explore the recesses of scientific godhood.The Devil You Don't - A hoodlum pushes the limits of reality.Verdure Inferno - Agricultural development carries the seeds of its own backlash.Deuce X - A pleasure cruise to Jupiter stretches the definition of pleasure.

When Quentin discovers four relatives dead on the eve of his son's wedding, the bride missing, and a horde of goblins closing in, those are the least of his problems:His wife has put him in charge of tracking down the cake.Quentin the Troll and the Wedding of Doom is a short fantasy of monstrous proportions.From the Story:He already had more than enough trouble on his massive hands. His oldest son's wedding (to the ugliest girl on Three) was in five days, hi...

When a small-town sports reporter decides to do a feature on a local pro football bad boy, he finds himself running in all the wrong circles. Of Hell.The Midway Monster is a short story of monstrous magic.From the story:"Marcus "Mack" Henry is a back-up inside linebacker for the big boys, a team that practically invented the position. The guy ahead of him on the depth-chart hits so hard, his opponents' ghosts wake up in the Hall of Fame. So even though Mack sees the...

Arclight's in trouble. Out of work and out of time, he's losing his own mind in search of someone else's.That's the good news.It seems that dementia isn't the only thing in North Tree that is in the business of swallowing hearts. When Arc goes down, he goes down hard.Make it to the end, and realize why the question really isn't:Will Arc Adams survive the dead vault?...but, will he want to?

In this Tale of the Haunted Titanic, a mystery surrounds the funeral of one of the survivors, and the only clue is provided by one of the victims.A ghostly tale of time, memory and the razor's edge.From the text:"The icy shock struck him like a hammer, from the inside out. His lungs filled with what at first he thought was sea water. He was under, his clothes dragging him like lead weights. He did not know if he was going up or down. A force, like the hand of God, s...