Search Results for: trapped

Former assassin Raena Zacari thinks she’s left the past behind. The Imperial torturer who trained her is dead, the human empire is disbanded, and she is finally free.

But Raena is troubled by a series of nightmares that always seem to end with her shooting an ex-lover in the head. She needs to get her mind clear because there’s a flaw in the most commonly used starship drive-and the band of media-obsessed pirates she’s fallen in with is right at the heart of the controversy.

With humanity scattered across the galaxy, she’s going to have to rely on the alien crew members of the Veracity to help her put the pieces together. It doesn’t help that the Templars- wiped out in a genetic plague while Raena was imprisoned-have left booby-trapped biotechnology scattered across the galaxy.

In a world stripped bare of digital images and promotainment, unveiled with the audiovisual overlay of the ImmaNet, in an exposed world, a naked world, Amon Kenzaki awakens, lost and alone. He must now travel deep into the District of Dreams in search of Anisha Birla, the one person that might help him unravel the mystery of jubilee. But deprived of the apps and informational tools he’s depended on his entire life, traversing the largest bankdeath camp on Earth is no easy task.

Inside an ephemeral labyrinth of slowly-dissolving disposable skyscrapers clogged to the limit with the bankdead masses, Amon soon finds himself face to face with two dangerous groups: a luddite cult called the Borginans, who preach bizarre superstitions about electronic banking, and a supposedly humanitarian army called the Charity Brigade, whose mandate of protecting the bankdead conceals opportunistic motives.

Taking refuge in a hospital that strives to improve conditions in the camps, Amon begins to work towards its cause and reconciles himself to his newfound poverty. But when political forces threaten the community’s existence and the lives of its members, he is forced to team up with a vending-machine designer, an Olympic runner, a fertility researcher, a corporate tycoon, and many others to expose the heinous secret festering at the heart of the action-transaction market he once served.

In book two of the Jubilee Cycle, Eli K. P. William delves beneath the surface of his cyber-dystopian Tokyo to unearth the fate of outcasts trapped in its depths and shine a light on the financial obstacles blocking one individual’s efforts to help them.

The story of Dr. Hartwell (Reanimators) continues, but now he has company. Weird company: a witch, a changeling, a mad scientist, and a poet trapped in the form of a beast. These are not heroes but monsters…monsters to fight monsters. Their adventures rage across the globe, from the mountains and long-forgotten caves of Antarctica to the dimly lit backstreets of Innsmouth that still hold terrifying secrets. The unholy creatures released upon the world via the ill-fated Lake expedition to Antarctica must be stopped. And only the weird company stands in their way.

Continuing in the fashion of Reanimators, The Weird Company finds Lovecraft expert Pete Rawlik taking some of the most well-known of H. P. Lovecraft’s creations and creating a true Frankenstein monster of a story-a tale more horrific than anything Lovecraft could have imagined…

Remember what it’s like to last an entire night without sleep? That dull but constant headache. The feeling of your brain on edge. How easily irritated you were. How difficult it was to concentrate, even on seemingly menial tasks. It was just a single restless night, but everything felt just a little bit harder to do, and the only real comfort was knowing your head would finally hit the pillow at the end of the day, and when you awoke the next morning everything would return to normal.

But what if sleep didn’t come the next night? Or the night after? What might happen if you, your friends and family, your coworkers, the strangers you pass on the street, all slowly began to realize that rest might not ever come again?

How slowly might the world fall apart? How long would it take for a society without sleep to descend into chaos?

Sleep Over is collection of waking nightmares, a scrapbook of the haunting and poignant stories from those trapped in a world where the pillars of society are crumbling, and madness is slowly descending on a planet without rest.

Online vigilantism turns social media into a deadly gamble.

A freelance journalist grapples with the ethics of turning in footage of mass suicide.

A kidnapped hypnotist is held hostage by those at wit’s end for a cure.

In Sleep Over, these stories are just the beginning. Before the Longest Day, the world record was eleven days without sleep. It turns out most of us can go much longer.

Vitus Adamson is falling apart. As a pre-deceased private investigator, he takes the prescription Atroxipine hourly to keep his undead body upright and functioning. Whenever he is injured, he seeks Niko, a bombshell mortician with bedroom eyes and a way with corpses, to piece him back together. Decomposition, however, is the least of his worries when two clients posing his most dangerous job yet appear at his door looking for their lost son.

Vitus is horrified to discover the photo of the couple’s missing son is a picture-perfect reproduction of his long dead son. This leads him to question the events of his tormented past; he must face the possibility that the wife and child he believed he murdered ten years ago in a zombie-fugue have somehow survived . . . or is it just wishful thinking designed to pull him into an elaborate trap?

Elinor has spent her life being bullied and abused by her uncle, aunt and cousins. Her mother missing, her father dead, she has been left her adoptive family’s not-so tender mercies. The prospect of a holiday to Dartmoor seems like just a chance to experience the same awful life in a new location.

It’s worse than Elinor could have predicted.

Forced to sleep in the smallest, darkest room with its musty, curtained four-poster bed, Elinor finds herself retreating into the life of another Elinor – Nell the nurserymaid, whose tragic story from three hundred years ago is at first intriguing, then horrifying.

When she becomes trapped in what was once her escape, Elinor faces forever stuck in a nightmare, unless she is willing to commit to the horrifying price of freedom.

You can find out more about the fiction Gwyneth Jones wrote as Ann Halam here: http://www.gwynethjones.uk/HALAM.htm

Jessica Raven’s brother is going to die.

She dreams of finding a cure for Adam’s illness, but that isn’t going to happen.

While on holiday in France, she encounters a strange band of children, mysterious and ragged, who seem to urgently want HER help. Who are they? And who is Jean-Luc, their leader?

As she learns more, Jessica realises that the game they’re playing isn’t a game, that Jean-Luc is a prisoner, and the children aren’t children but nightmares, guarding a priceless treasure. Adam is the only one who could help them, but Adam is dying.

And his cure is trapped in the ghosts of a horrifying past . . .

Award-winning author Gwyneth Jones, writing as Ann Halam, delivers another terrifying story for teens that raises the dead and spans time, from the modern day back to WWII. You can find more information on the writing Gwyneth did as Ann Halam on her website: http://www.gwynethjones.uk/HALAM.htm

A teenager in the late 21st century discovers a way to travel in time as a way to escape the dystopian world he inhabits, only to learn that time travel introduces dangers of its own.

Orejas de ellos, the things who listen, whispered the superstitious fishermen when the strange occurrences began off the Philippine coast. How else could you explain the sudden disappearance of a vessel beneath a mysterious curtain of foam? The writhings of thousands of maddened fish trapped in a coffin-like area of ocean? An alien intelligence gorged at the bottom of the Luzon Deep and made its plans. Radar expert Terry Holt and the crew of the Experance had to devise a weapon against the horrifying creatures which threatened mankind with extinction.

When experimental drilling on the pacific sea-bed breaks through the earth’s thin mantle, vast quantities of nitrogen, trapped for untold millions of years, are released into the atmosphere. As a result, the oxygen in the air becomes dangerously diluted. Whole areas of America are thrown into chaos as the inhabitants literally fight for breath. Two men and two girls put to sea in a yacht in a desperate effort to escape the terror, but terror, in a different and no less deadly form, pursues them relentlessly.

After rescuing Marianne Cadogan from an incoming tide on a lonely and forgotten part of Britain’s coast, ex-con Ryan O’Donnell is cornered into helping her escape a supposedly abusive father to reach the safety of her mother.

Too late, he finds himself compromised, the subject of a trans-European manhunt while he struggles to deliver the child and prove his motives pure/

The deeper in he gets, the more trapped he will become.

When Shadow received a message that Shylar needed his aid, the master thief and his three companions, Allerum – now an elf swordsman but once a twentieth century American soldier – and the two Dragonmages, Silme and Astryd, immediately set out for Shadow’s hometown of Cullinsberg. For Shylar, town madam and high in the thieves’ underground, was all the family Shadow had. But Cullinsberg was an armed trap waiting to close on the four adventurers. For they had slain the Chaos Dragon, and in so doing unleashed a force of pure Chaos, a force which then bonded with the single greatest surviving Dragonmage. Driven by Chaos-induced madness, this master of powers far beyond those of Silme and Astryd would now use anyone and any means to take his deadly revenge on those four warriors of Law.

His father wrongly executed when he was a child, Taziar Medakan had turned to stealing for his survival. He was the Shadow Climber, skilled at remaining one with the shadows, unseen in the midst of his enemies. And he stole not for profit, but for the challenge of it, donating most of his booty to those in need. But though Taz could defeat any trap, he wasn’t prepared for the treachery of Ilyrian, a cunning politician ready to sacrifice the Shadow Climber to gain power himself. So Taz found himself in the baron’s dreaded dungeons from which even a master thief’s only escape might be death! There he met Moonbear, a prince among barbarians, a swordsman beyond compare, and Taz’s last hope for salvation. Together the two sought their pathway to freedom. But it was a pathway that would set a whole kingdom on their trail in a pursuit led by Ilyrian and a Dragonrank sorcerer on his own mission of magical revenge.

He has been known by countless names and terrifying deeds throughout the lands of mankind-thief, magic wielder, swordsman, assassin, adventurer. But chief among those names and perhaps the most dangerous of his personae is that of Nightfall, a man-or perhaps the legendary demon himself-gifted with unique powers which any sorcerer would kill to possess.

Yet though Nightfall has always escaped his pursuers by moving on to new realms, new identities, and new enterprises, even the cleverest of beings must occasionally slip. And when this master of the night finally falls prey to a royal trap, he finds the consequences beyond even his ability to evade. Bound by sorcery and oath to guard and guide a young prince on his quest, Nightfall will need every trick and talent at his command to keep both himself and his idealistic young charge from death at the hands of unknown betrayers.

Tamison is a flightless falcon: a worthless man who cannot even work to feed his family. Once a miner like the rest of his family, he lost his nerve after a cave-in trapped him and killed his father and brother. Discovering his wife and children have vanished, stolen away by the Brotherhood, he renames himself in their image: Sueldan. A ratty stray dog joins him, then a fortune teller with a magical ability, a guard whose own sister was lost to the Brotherhood and a mysterious conman who knows more than he¿s letting on. But if Tamison/Sueldan is to rescue them from slavery, he must discover his own wings and take flight.
A man with nothing left to lose must discover his own hidden strengths if he is to save all those he holds dear

Sweetly are the secrets told
wrapt in crystal,
limned in gold . . .

On a planet of barren beauty near the edge of the civilized galaxy, two religions are practiced. Both sects worship the same goddess – the Triumphantes in joy and splendour, the Fideles in solemnity and selflessness. As different as day and night, sun and shadow, joy and grief, the two sects are now bound together in death . . .

A serial killer is stalking the priestesses, killing first a Triumphante, then a Fidele, in turn. Six women are now dead, and the planetary authorities are at a loss. Enter Interfed Agent Cowen Drake. A cunning professional, he must immerse himself in an unfamiliar world of stark spirituality to catch the killer. A world that will trap him between opulence and sacrifice, between duty and desire and between two extraordinary women – one who could become the killer’s ultimate victim . . .

OF WISHING RINGS, OGRES AND OTHER MAGICAL THINGS

Callipygia the Amazon and her stalwart knight Mandricardo had had more than enough. All they really wanted to do was avoid the perils, both swordlike and sorcerous, of the many fabled lands of Terra Magica and win their way back home to Tartary to settle down in wedded bliss.

But a realm of roving monsters and wild enchantments is not so easily traveled through unscathed, and when Callipygia and Mandricardo find themselves trapped on a spell-run flying island from which no one has ever escaped, it signals the start of a madcap romp of magic and menace that will lead them into far-distant kingdoms and dangers undreamed…

In a galactic culture that extends from quasi-Utopian worlds like New Alexandria to vermin-infested slums like Old Earth, the Star-Pilots that link the cosmos are the great heroes of the day, and Grainger has become a legend in his own lifetime. The atmosphere of Mormyr is so dense that the surface is unreachable, which made it the ideal place for the alien Gallacellans to hide an ancient spaceship. Now they want it back. Grainger refuses, but when the Hooded Swan answers a mayday call, Grainger and his crew are trapped by a madman, who forces them to pursue the salvage anyway. Success will mean Grainger’s freedom from Titus Charlot, owner of the Hooded Swan; failure will mean the death of the inhabitants of an entire planet. And then the Gallacellans appear!

The Vampyre: A Tale is based on a fragment written by Lord Byron in 1816 during a gathering of author friends who, trapped inside due to bad weather, decided to write ghost stories. It was the first vampire story in English prose, and as such had a wide-ranging influence, almost single-handedly creating the now-popular image of the vampire as an aristocratic seducer.

‘Suddenly out of the darkness, out of the night, there swooped something with a swish like an aeroplane. The whole group of us were covered for an instant by a canopy of leathery wings, and I had a momentary vision of a long, snake-like neck, a fierce, red, greedy eye, and a great snapping beak, filled, to my amazement, with little, gleaming teeth.’

Desperate for adventure, journalist Ed Malone joins a scientific expedition to the South American jungle led by the larger than life figure of Professor Challenger. But you should be careful what you wish for. After climbing to the summit of a mysterious plateau in the Amazon rainforest the explorers find themselves trapped in a world lost in time, inhabited by carnivorous dinosaurs, giant fish-lizards and murderous ape-men.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s thrilling tale of adventure and crypto-zoology became a template for an industry of creature features that came in its wake.

THE DEMONS HAD TO STOP JOHN BRAVAIS

His secret assignment was simply – to save mankind from the savage dog-like ‘things’ that used their hands like men. Yet an unknown number of apparently ‘human’ beings were against him too.

First transformed by surgery into a superman, John Bravais probes ever more deeply into the secret nightmare world of the ‘things’. At last, when only his mind remains – trapped in a vast robot war machine on the moon – only by an immense act of will-power can he give humanity a future.

ABE LINCOLN IN AFRICA?

He was seen – and photographed – in a Tunisian bazaar. And an ancient Spanish galleon, fully crewed with ancient Spaniard, was taken in tow off Tampa by the Coast Guard…and a few luckless people found themselves living the same day over and over and over…

Something was badly wrong with Time – but Roger Tyson didn’t know it until he met the lovely agent from elsewhen and started on a mad chase through the dimensions, plagued by a motley bunch of temporal castaways, and pursued hotly by Oob the Rhox!

A Wall Street trader leaves the bulls and bears – and comes face-to-face with hungrier dinosaurs. A Roaring ’20s gangster gets roughed up – by real cavemen. A pioneer hitches up his covered wagon on the Oregon Trail – and winds up in a modern shopping mall. And Roger Tyson, who thought the space-time continuum had finally settled down to normal, is flung helplessly from the distant past to the far future, and back again.

Superbeings from the end of time are struggling for control of the universe with aliens from another galaxy. And if a few random humans get caught in one of their time gates, they don’t much care. So Roger and his friends find themselves facing everyone from the cast of the original Mutiny on the Bounty to real pirates of the Spanish Main in a wild quest to their own time and bring everything back to insanity as usual…

‘TWAS BORING IN ARTESIA

…or so thought Sir Lafayette O’Leary, ex-craftsman from Earth, and now seemingly ex-interdimensional swashbuckler extraordinaire as well. His battles were all won, his dragons all slain and life was just the same boring round of riches, royal hunts and regatas. Boring, boring, boring; until he walked past the azalia…

Suddenly Artesia was gone, and O’Leary was trapped in Melange, a world of giants and pirates, karate-chopping hags and electronic flying carpets, a world where goons and harlots are the spitting images (literally!) of his own aristocratic Artesian associates. And because they think he’s his double, lots of his new friends want O’Leary dead.

Unless he can get through the interdimensional gate and find the continuum path back home, O’Leary’s life will never be boring again. Just short.