Borderlands 5 Read online

  No one answered at his office when he tried to call in sick again. Around noon, he strolled downstairs to check his mailbox. It was full of letters addressed to someone named Walter. Jeff’s first impulse was to drop them into the outgoing mail slot, but he took them back to his living room. They made for interesting reading and helped him pass the afternoon, especially now that his computer had vanished.

  Jeff lay in bed that Monday night, idly wondering what the next day would bring. Or take away. He didn’t miss going to work five mornings a week, but he did miss his computer and Judy. At least the comic section still ran in the newspaper—even if he didn’t understand all the jokes—and maybe he’d get some more interesting mail for Walter. His loafers had solved that annoying shoelaces problem and he’d grown accustomed to using his finger in place of his toothbrush.

  MARCH 30

  Tuesday morning the outer wall of Jeff’s apartment vanished. Window and all. The first thing he saw after waking up was a pigeon perched at the foot of his bed. He felt an unfamiliar breeze and then became aware of vast space. From his prone position he could see only sky, though a nagging voice in the back of his mind suggested that he should have been able to see at least the apartment building next door.

  He climbed out of bed naked, disturbing the pigeon from its perch, and strolled to the edge of his bedroom. His former wall had once held a small window and a framed print of a painting by Camille Pissarro. Entrance to the Village of Voisins. Jeff stared through the gaping nothingness that now occupied one full wall of the room. A gentle breeze rolled in, tousling his hair and hardening his nipples.

  Outside his apartment building, in this direction at least, there was absolutely nothing but blue as far as the eye could see. No buildings, no people, no clouds, no sun, no sound. Jeff craned his head around the edge of his bedroom wall but vertigo overcame him, forcing him back into the room.

  Still naked, he wandered into the living room and found that the outside wall had vanished there, too. Similarly in the bathroom. Jeff had a hard time peeing in front of all that wide-open space, even though no one could see him. He ran the tap for a few seconds to get his own flow started and then he was okay.

  The absence of a wall and the disconcerting nothingness beyond (Entrance to Village Infinity?) made it hard for Jeff to enjoy the book he was reading. It was the same one he’d started on Saturday but all the character names had changed and instead of being set in Edinburgh the action now took place in Reykjavik. Iceland was a country Jeff had always intended to visit because he’d read somewhere that it was so much like the moon’s surface astronauts had trained there back in the 60s. Some people even believed that the astronauts hadn’t really gone to the moon, but had staged the whole thing in Iceland. Jeff didn’t subscribe to that theory.

  Shortly after noon, Jeff opened his apartment door on the way to the lobby to see if Walter had gotten any mail. As he was about to step out into the corridor, he realized that everything had disappeared in that direction, too. Whatever was responsible for stealing his external reality had been kind-hearted enough to leave him a door he could lock against intruders, though.

  He imagined that his apartment would suffer a considerable crosswind if two opposing walls went missing. As it was, he had to shoo pigeons out twice that afternoon. He never saw them fly in—he never saw anything beyond the endless blue interface that began where his outer wall used to exist—but the pigeons materialized in his living room all the same. When he chased them into flight they flitted around the room in momentary confusion, looking for an escape route. Both of them eventually darted into the blue neverland and immediately vanished.

  Jeff spent the afternoon reading about a hardboiled cop who drank heavily and patrolled the mean streets of Reykjavik. That afternoon, he reread the book, which now featured a spinster amateur detective who solved cases from her cozy living room in New Delhi.

  No one had phoned him since his father’s call on Sunday. He dialed the airline number he found on the back of the frequent flier card in his wallet, the card that occupied the slot that used to hold a picture of him with Judy, and booked a flight to visit his parents. He hadn’t figured out how he was going to get to the airport, but that was a detail he’d handle when the time came. The airline refused his credit card but seemed satisfied when he read them his YMCA membership number instead.

  MARCH 31

  The slight breeze had transformed into a moderately healthy gale by Wednesday morning. Jeff’s bedcovers rippled under their assault. He snapped on his bedside lamp but the light only penetrated a perimeter of a few feet. Beyond its sixty watt glow, nothing. Even the pigeons had abandoned him.

  Fortunately, he’d brought his book in from the living room the night before. He started from the dog-eared page about a third of the way through, reading about a tough but sensitive ex-cop who ran a private detective agency out of the basement of his house in Gdansk, which he shared with a golden retriever. Jeff occasionally allowed his gaze to drift from the pages to take in his surroundings, but one time when he looked away too long he had to start the book over again because the Polish P.I. was now a former child psychologist who assisted the police with their inquiries in Montevideo. Just when Jeff was sure he’d figured out whodunit, too.

  He found a couple of chocolate bars in his nightstand and stopped reading long enough to eat them. For a moment he considered saving one for later, but at the rate things were going—going away—he didn’t think it mattered. He tossed the crumpled wrappers into the darkness surrounding his bed. The steady breeze caught them and carried them away without a sound.

  Turning back to the book, he discovered that the main character was a burglar who ran a used bookstore as a cover for his clandestine activities in the streets of Nicosia. Jeff Adams shook his head, leafed back a few pages and started the chapter over.

  Fatigue overtook him shortly before midnight. He dog-eared the paperback, rested it carefully on the nightstand and turned out the light.

  APRIL 1

  APRIL 2

  Adam Jeffries woke up on Friday morning. He sat up, slipped his feet into his moccasins and tied the laces.

  Nice and tight.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  GARY A. BRAUNBECK is the author of several short story collections, among them Things Left Behind; Graveyard People: The Collected Cedar Hill Stories, Vol. 1; Sorties, Cathexes, and Personal Effects; A Little Orange Book Of Odd Stories; From Beneath These Fields Of Blood; and the science fiction collection x3. He lives in Columbus, Ohio and doesn’t get invited to many parties, which everyone agrees is for the best.

  DOMINICK CANCILLA’S work has appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies, including Cemetery Dance magazine, Robert Bloch’s Psychos, and October Dreams. His first novel, Revenant Savior, is available from Cemetery Dance Publications

  MICHAEL CANFIELD’S work also appears in Mota3:Courage, edited by Karen Joy Fowler. He’s employed full-time in the Northwest, has many close friends and a number acquaintances.”

  JOHN FARRIS sold his first novel the summer after he graduated from high school, in 1955. By 1959 he had his first million-seller, at age 23, with Harrison High—which spawned four sequels. (Farris was writing about students planting bombs in high schools in 1962.) You could call him a suspense writer, a blacksmith of ironclad thrillers. But that would overlook the magical aspect that informs the point of view in most of his work. You could call him a horror novelist, but that’s just a launch footing for his mordant sociopolitical observations. He works labyrinthine intrigues better than nearly anyone writing, but to categorize him into a single genre would overlook the fundamental basis of his fiction—the complex characters that he tinkers together from the ground up, and his efforts to realize each book as an entity whole and apart from the preceding book. One-liner descriptives fall short for the simple reason that he is sui generis.

  BRIAN FREEMAN’S short stories and novellas have appeared in over a dozen publications. He is the editor of D
ueling Minds, a hardcover limited edition anthology to be published by Endeavor Press. After graduating from Shippensburg University in May 2002, Brian moved to Baltimore to work fulltime at Cemetery Dance Publications. He can be found on the web at BrianFreeman.com

  ADAM CORBIN FUSCO was an associate with a casting agency in Baltimore for more than ten years. He has worked on such films as Serial Mom, Avalon, CryBaby, Pecker, He Said, She Said, and the television series “Homicide: Life on the Street.” His short fiction has appeared in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventh Annual Collection, Science Fiction Age, The Best of Cemetery Dance, Touch Wood: Narrow Houses 2, and Young Blood.

  BILL GAUTHIER started writing in 1990, when he was thirteen, inspired by the first few pages of Stephen King’s novel The Shining. He made his first sale to a small press magazine in 1998 at twenty-one and has had four more tales published since in small press magazines, twice in Greg F. Gifune’s The Edge, Tales of Suspense, and in webzines, including the speculative fiction webzine Ideomancer. He lives in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he’s a father, a ticket clerk at the local bus station, and a student. And, like every other writer out there, he’s working on many projects. His current home on the web is http://www.geocities.com/gauthic2001.

  DARREN O. GODFREY spends his weekdays making things go bang that should have gone bang on their own and his weekends and holidays making his head go bang against his writing desk until stories fall out. Darren’s fallout has appeared in various anthologies (Borderlands 2, The Midnighters Club, The Museum of Horrors, and Quietly Now: A Tribute to Charles L. Grant), genre magazines (Black October, Gorezone, The Scream Factory, Black Petals, Demontia, and Aberrations) as well as a few offbeat publications (The Art Times, The Goofus Office Gazette, and Cracked). He and his two daughters divide their time between Idaho and California, depending upon their financial needs and the need for sanity.

  BARRY HOFFMAN is the author of four dark suspense novels; Hungry Eyes, Eyes, Eyes of Prey, Born Bad and Judas Eyes. All but Born Bad are part of Hoffman’s “Eyes” series. Hungry Eyes was nominated for both a HWA Stoker and International Horror GuildAward for Best First Novel. Hoffman was also nominated for the 2001 PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award, for his fight against censorship of Born Bad. He is editor/publisher of Gauntlet magazine, the only mass market magazine dealing with censorship and exploring the limits of free expression; and he is the publisher of Gauntlet Press through which he has published signed limited books by Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Poppy Z. Brite, F. Paul Wilson and numerous others. Gauntlet won the 1999 HWAAward for Best Small Press and the Ben Franklin Award in 2002 for Abu and the 7 Marvels. Hoffman is using his recently-penned Young Adult dark fantasy novel Curse of the Shamra in public schools as part of an Authors In Residence Program. He has completed the 4th and 5th book in the “Eyes” series and is currently working on a sequel to his YA novel. He is the father of three who recently relocated to Colorado to spend time with his two-year-old granddaughter.

  BENTLEY LITTLE is a prolific writer who has penned over 11 horror novels, over 100 short stories and nearly 300 articles and essays. His novels include (but are not limited to) The Mailman, The Store, The Ignored and his most recent release, The Association. His short stories have appeared in such magazines as Cemetery Dance, Eldritch Tales, The Horror Show, New Blood and many more. They have also appeared in many anthologies such as 999, Bad News and Quick Chills to name a few. He currently lives in Fullerton, California with his wife Wai Sau and their young son. He divides his time between Southern California and his “writing territory”, Arizona.

  BARBARA MALENKY, originally from Georgia, currently lives and writes in Texas. Her non-fiction has been published in national crime magazines and anthologies. Her fiction has appeared in over 300 publications, including a six-story chapbook entitled Human Oddities She has received honorable mention for two years in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She has recently completed her first novel and is an active member in the HWA.

  JOHN MCILVEEN has a wife named Lisa. He has five daughters and a stepdaughter. He is grossly outnumbered. He purposely leaves the toilet seat up. John works at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. He lives in Bradford MA. He commutes route 495 daily. John is very tense. John writes in his spare time. He has had more than twenty short stories and numerous poems (when depressed) and articles published, but he hasn’t written a novel. John has little spare time.

  JON F. MERZ is best known for his hard-boiled Lawson Vampire series from Pinnacle Books (The Fixer, The Invoker, The Destructor, and The Syndicate). Jon has written full-time for several years. He has written non-fiction articles, monthly columns, short fiction, and his advertising copy has been used by corporations like Polaroid and Red Lobster Restaurants. Jon has several other supernatural and mainstream thrillers coming out soon from major publishers. He operates his website at http://www.zrem.com. When not enjoying life with his wife and son in Boston, Massachusetts, Jon continues to study martial arts—something he has done for the past twenty years.

  HOLLY NEWSTEIN is a relative newcomer to horror fiction. She co-authored the novel Out of The Light (Xlibris, 2000) with Ralph Bieber, and their short stories have appeared in the anthologies The Witching Hour, Music Horror Stories Extremes 3: Terror On the High Seas and the forthcoming In Laymon’s Terms. She has also collaborated with Glenn Chadbourne on a story entitled “Deep Six,” and has appeared solo in The Best of Horrorfind, Volume 1 and Twilight Showcase. Holly lives in southern Maine with the author Rick Hautala. Visit her website at www.darkscribes.com.

  GENE O’NEILL lives in the Napa Valley with his wife Kay, a substitute primary grade teacher at St. Helena Elementary School. They have been married for thirty-seven years, their grown children, Gavin and Kay Dee, living in Eugene, Oregon and San Diego. Gene has two degrees (Sac State, U. Of Minn) neither having anything to do with writing (or much of anything else). Gene describes his employment background as “rich, varied, colorful.” His brother-in-law, the president of the above plant, describes Gene as more of a “disgruntled ne-erdo-well.” After surviving the Clarion Workshop in writing in 1979 Gene has seen over 80 of his stories published. A number of these reprints are now being posted at Fictionwise.com with excellent sales and ratings. Several of his stories have garnered Nebula and Stoker recommendations. Some of these stories have been collected in Ghosts, Spirits, Computers & World Machines, released by Prime books in 2001. He has completed two novels, The Burden of Indigo and Shadow of the Dark Angel that will be published by Prime Books in 2002/2003 along with another collection, The Grand Struggle in 2004.

  TOM PICCIRILLI is the author of eleven novels, including The Night Class, A Choir of Ill Children, A Lower Deep, Hexes, The Deceased, and Grave Men. He’s published over 130 stories in the mystery, horror, erotica, and science fiction fields. Tom’s been a final nominee for the World Fantasy Award and he’s a three-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, given in the categories of Novel, Short Story, and Poetry. Learn more about him at his official website www.mikeoliveri.com/piccirilli

  JOHN R. PLATT has published fiction in anthologies like Horrors: 365 Scary Stories, Crafty Cat Crimes, Bell Book & Beyond and 100 Menacing Little Murder Stories. His first book, the short-story collection Die Laughing, was published in 2002. John served three terms as President of the Garden State Horror Writers.

  WHITT POND was born in Lubbock, Texas, shortly after a famous UFO sighting, which explains a lot. He has at various times in his life been a Boy Scout, a West Point cadet, an MIT graduate, and a Peace Corps volunteer; and he currently resides in Massachusetts, two blocks from a really good Chinese restaurant. He likes to write horror because “It’s easier than screaming all the time.”

  LON PRATER is an officer serving on active duty in the U.S. Navy. Along with his wife, Angie, and their two daughters, he has lived primarily in Hampton, Virginia, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and Athens, Georgia. He enjoys writing speculative fiction and edits the bi-monthly webzine Neverary. This sto
ry was initially written aboard the USS Nassau during a wartime deployment to the Persian Gulf. It is his first professional sale.

  BRETT ALEXANDER SAVORY is a 29-year-old Bram Stoker Award-winning editor. His day job is also as an editor, at Harcourt Canada in Toronto. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Chiaroscuro/ChiZine, has had roughly 30 stories published in numerous print and online publications since 1998, and has written two novels, In and Down and The Distance Travelled—both of which are currently with his agent. In the works are a short story collaboration with China Miéville, a dark comic book series with artist Homeros Gilani, and an anthology to benefit the West Memphis Three, which will surface in the fall of 2004 through Arsenal Pulp Press.

  WHITLEY STRIEBER is the author of over twenty books, among them the Hunger, The Wolfen, The Last Vampire and Communion. His website, www.unknowncountry.com is the largest website in the world offering daily news of the edge of science and current events

  DAVID J. SCHOW German-born American writer. At once inheritor of the Californian weird tradition of Richard Matheson and Dennis Etchison and leading light of splatterpunk movement, Schow’s powerful, sometimes witty, sometimes strangely sentimental stories are collected in Seeing Red (1990), Lost Angels (1990), Black Leather Required (1994), Crypt Orchids (1997), Eye (2000) and Zombie Jam Breaks Scissor Cut (2003). He is author of the novels The Kill Riff (1987), The Shaft (1990), Rock Breaks Scissors Cut (2003) and Bullets of Rain (2003). In 2001 he won the International Horror Guild’s award for Best Nonfiction for Wild Hairs (2000) his collection of essays from Fangoria magazine. As editor, he has assembled and annotated Silver Scream (1998), three volumes of The Lost Bloch (collecting the pulp novellas of Robert Bloch) and John Farris’ Elvisland (2003). His screenplays include The Crow (1994) and he wrote the definitive book on the eponymous TV series, The Outer Limits Companion (hugely revised into an elaborate second edition in 1998).