PROLOGUE
It started as a distraction. Sandy
Parker did not, as a rule, answer her cell phone when she was at
work. Her job as General Manager of the local Hacienda Taquito, home
of the Buffalo Chicken Finger Lickin’ Taquito Bites, was much too
important for her to consider stopping her prep-work for the day for
frivolities like that. It rang first about an hour before the
restaurant was scheduled to open. She paused from cutting tomatoes
long enough to acknowledge that her phone was indeed rin

I might have gone over
to the cabinet above the fridge for some Scotch, except that I could
hardly stand, and my belly would have certainly prevented me from
getting too close. And I'd need the stepstool to get up that high,
and with my gargantuan tummy, that is a whole comedic scene waiting
to happen. So, all I could do was sit on the floor and panic. I
haven't smoked since before my daughter was born, but the anxiety of
the situation left me craving something to calm the nerves. This was
a

~~Are you tired all
the time?~~
Martha nodded in
response, shoving another mouthful of popcorn into her face. She
barely had enough energy to get up off the couch to pee these days.
Her 'spot' on the couch had a permanent butt-print. It wasn't that
she didn't notice the huge mess in her house: candy wrappers,
almost-empty chip bags, bits of cheese and stale bread… grimy,
caked-on dishes with utensils perma-stuck to them… dirty clothes in
every corner and crevice of the floor. She saw it

"So, that's it
then?" asked Bradley. "The Chrono-whosit is gone?"
Charles sighed,
nodding his ancient head slowly. "My brother Devon is dead- his
plans thwarted, his existence erased. The Chronomancer is no more."
Holly sat upright
suddenly, her arms flailing about again as if still defending herself
from the nightmare that had nearly killed her before. After just a
second of this, she stopped abruptly and turned toward Charles. "The
what-now?"
Bra

It just didn't make sense. It was 2:26 in the morning when Georgia Harrington waddled into the hospital. She was wearing a light colored bathrobe firmly tied just below the bustline, with her dark wavy hair loose and trailing long behind. With one hand on her back and the other poised almost daintily on her belly, and that tell-tale flushed look with occasional huff as another contraction came, she looked quite, well, petite. The surveillance footage confirmed it- she looked barely big enoug

ONE.


“This weekend? Yeah, I'll do it. No, don't worry about it- I've cleaned pools before. Aunt Nita, I already told you- letting me stay at your place is payment enough. No, I'll be fine- I've got plenty of gas, and the supermarket is just down the street, after all.”

Bonnie rolled down her window a bit as she rounded another country corner on the rural road she was traversing. Instantly, the overwhelming heat blazing in her car was cut by a cooling breeze. Gracious (a

Notes for Umberth College

“BUNHS-718”

“Officially” stands for Biohazard: Upper New Hampshire Supervirus. The 718 stands for 7:18pm, the approximate time that the plague was first discovered. This is what the populace at large at Umberth believes. The cover-up is completed by the government, stating to the world at large that the people who died in a small village near the Canadian border had in fact died of hypothermia and extreme cold, which had been plaguing the

The scene was quiet, serene even, and rightly so. Earth Mother lived there. She sat in her two-room bungalow, quietly reading by the fire, stroking her gravid belly before her. It looked just as any other bungalow might- relatively cheap paintings adorned the walls, which were of course a muted green. Even the rug looked `normal', of a fairly simple floral pattern. She sat in her armchair in a lavender robe, with matching slippers propped up on the footstool.

The room was decidedly femini