LOVE AT FIRST STING

A short Splatterpunk story by

David Benton & W.D. Gagliani

Published by Tarkus Press LLC, David Benton and W.D. Gagliani

Copyright © 2012 David Benton and W.D. Gagliani

First published in SPLATTERPUNK HORROR ZINE (UK), Edited by Jack Bantry

First Kindle E-Book Edition May 2012

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

WARNING: This story contains extreme violence and is intended for adults only.

Published by:

Tarkus Press LLC

PO Box 214

Oak Creek, WI 53154

http://www.wdgagliani.com

http://www.williamdgagliani.com

http://www.facebook.com/wdgagliani

Twitter: @WDGagliani

     Also by W.D. Gagliani & David Benton:

Mysteries & Mayhem (Fiction Collection)

Also by W.D. Gagliani:

Savage Nights

Wolf’s Trap

Wolf’s Gambit

Wolf’s Bluff

Wolf’s Deal (2012 novella)

Wolf’s Edge

Wolf’s Cut (2013)

Shadowplays (Fiction Collection)

* * *

LOVE AT FIRST STING

.1.

Now

“I thought you killed her!”

Mr. Walker pulled the phone away from his ear. “What? Who is this?”

“You son of a bitch, I paid good money for a job you said you could do.” The voice paused to breathe, but it sounded like a train starting. “You were highly recommended by some fuckin’ big shots, asshole.”

He pictured the florid, jiggly man with the red face and veiny nose.

“You’d better recheck your number,” Mr. Walker enunciated slowly. “You’d better think hard before you continue.”

It was Mr. Fenning, all right. The bastard had lost it.

“I’m using a scrambler phone,” Mr. Fenning said. “And you–”

“But I’m not,” Walker said with a growl.

“That’s too fuckin’ bad! You botched the job, you fucker! She’s alive. I just saw her.” He was shouting now. “She’s fuckin’ stalking me. I’m locked in my house, you sonofabitch!”

Mr. Walker clicked the phone off, juggled it a couple times in his massive hand, wiped it on his shirt, then dropped it into a nearby sewer grate.

This was unacceptable.

No one accused Mr. Walker of poor work. No one shouted at Mr. Walker over the phone. No one compromised Mr. Walker’s anonymity with such openly furious stupidity.

No one.

The fifty grand had barely settled into his Cayman Islands account and here the guy was, what, asking for a refund? What was the asshole doing?

Botched the job?

There was no fucking way.

But…

 A tiny bit of self-doubt created by the surprise call scratched at his brain and squirted acid into his stomach. Could he have messed it up somehow? The wrong woman? He popped a Tums, chewed it to chalk, then popped a second one.

.2.

Then

Mr. Walker tied the knot and cinched it tight. The nylon cord was fastened at chest height around the white-barked trunk of a gnarled birch. He fed out the line with plenty of slack, uncoiling it out onto the ground as he walked backwards past the tree line, across the gravel bike path, and back into the brush cover on the opposite side. Then he kicked fallen leaves and loose gravel over the length of cord.

He checked his watch. He had a few minutes to kill.

A few minutes and – of course –  Mrs. Fenning.

Walker hated these small-time jobs. Solving family disputes with murder wasn’t a great idea, at least not in Mr. Walker’s mind. It always got messy and emotional. Of course, that’s why he charged more in cases like this. The job had to be worth the trouble.

It was unseasonably warm, what they called Indian summer, and Mr. Walker could feel the sweat crawling across his skin under his jacket. Nearby a pair of hornets buzzed aggressively, angry that the coming cool crisp days of fall would be their demise. He swatted at them, which only seemed to increase their futile hostility.

The sound of gravel crunching beneath narrow tires brought Mr. Walker’s attention back to the job at hand. He had positioned himself so as to have a good view down the trail, and presently he caught sight of Mrs. Fenning’s sleek athletic form pedaling her Trek mountain bike like an Olympian in training.

And damn, did she ever look good.

Mr. Walker had little doubt as to why Mr. Fenning had married her. Much like Helen of Troy, she had a face that could launch a thousand ships. And if her face could launch a thousand, Walker wagered that her ass – now clad in black spandex biker shorts – could launch ten thousand. It definitely launched his ship.

Mr. Walker twisted the nylon cord around his right hand and gripped it tightly in his left. Timing was going to be crucial. He focused on Mrs. Fenning’s approach.

Wait. Wait.

When the moment was right, Mr. Walker tugged the cord taut.

The cord caught Mrs. Fenning’s chin and  jerked her head down, and when her momentum pushed her head past the line, it struck her squarely in the shoulders, stopping her forward progress altogether. She flipped over spectacularly and landed back-first on the gravel with a ragged grunt. Her bike continued forward crookedly, finally tipping over on its side about twenty feet up the trail. Its bent wheel kept turning with a scraping sound until friction killed it.

Mr. Walker was already lunging out of the brush and striking Mrs. Fenning with a hard right, crushing her perfect nose beneath his fist and causing a thin spray of blood from the nostrils. The crack of the bone reached him as he struck her again, this time pummeling her left cheek. Her head lolled back and lay still.

He glanced around quickly, checking for some bystander’s intrusion, but there wasn’t any. The hornets, or whatever they were, seemed to be making a fuss, but other than that there was nothing.

He picked her up and threw her over his shoulder, fireman’s style, cupping one buttock in his hand.

Oh yeah, he knew why Mr. Fenning had married her. Clinically, he enjoyed the feel of her supple flesh under his hand.

Mr. Walker shuffled over and picked up the bike with his free hand. It was one of those expensive models, light enough to carry one-handed. He brought both of his prizes to the birch tree. There he gathered up the nylon cord and, after removing it from the tree’s trunk, used a length of it to secure Mrs. Fenning’s hands and feet. With his hunting knife he sliced off the remaining rope, then stuffed the tangle into his duffel bag.

After slinging the bag over one shoulder and Mrs. Fenning over the other, he hiked farther from the path and deeper into the woods.

Mr. Walker had no idea why Mr. Fenning wanted his wife removed from whatever picture he’d created for himself. And Mr. Walker had made sure of it. He never wanted to know. On these domestic jobs the clients always seemed compelled to explain their reasoning. As if Mr. Walker were a confessor and he would, or could, absolve them of their sins if their rationale were sound enough. Unlike the corporate, mob, and even sometimes political hits he’d made – which were always handled with the cold and calculated efficiency that particular business demanded – these passion crimes generally had their roots in emotion rather than profit, and feelings can change over time while cash is always cash. When Mr. Fenning had felt obliged to spill his guts, Mr. Walker had felt equally obliged to stop him in his tracks and move forward on a need to know only basis.

In this business when, where, and how were important; why was just extraneous information.

And only he would know the when, where, and projected how.

He kept pace with his pumping heart, walking through the growth farther and farther from the gravel trail where he had introduced himself to Mrs. Fenning. Even with less tree cover no one would be able to spot them. When he felt the first stirrings of the Mrs. returning to consciousness he dropped her on the ground, tossed the bike aside and checked his surroundings.

Late morning sun sparkled down through what remained of the canopy of orange and yellow leaves. In every direction the ground seemed to rise up in gentle swells like an ocean of grass, trees sprouting in the low spots. These must have been “The Mounds.” On a placard at the park preserve entrance, Mr. Walker had read about them. Apparently the whole park was centered on some prehistoric Indian burial grounds. They called the savage people who had built them the Mound Builders, amazingly. According to the sign, from above the mounds took the shapes of various animals but from where he was standing they just looked like lumps of earth.

Good story to impress tourists, but it meant little to him.

Mr. Walker reached into his duffel bag and produced a roll of duct tape. He tore off a length and secured it over Mrs. Fenning’s lips. As he did, her eyes flitted open – the left one a swollen black-and-blue slit. They were nice eyes, despite the damage.

“Good morning, darlin’. Glad to have you awake.”

Not that it mattered.

.3.

Now

Mr. Walker parked several blocks from Mr. Fenning’s house, a fashionable architect’s special in a ritzy neighborhood. It reminded him that he should have squeezed the asshole for a hundred large.

It was highly irregular, but Mr. Walker felt the need to snip his loose ends. Usually there was no need, because everyone was happy. But with Mr. Fenning daring to contact him with complaints… well, he wasn’t sure yet what the loose end was, but he would take care of it and clip the problem in the bud.

The neighborhood was wooded and even though he was walking, he felt somehow anonymous. A passing cop would probably finger him as suspicious, but it wouldn’t be his clothing. He was wearing Armani and carrying a fancy briefcase.

Some kind of hornet buzzed away in a fire-red bush, and it flew up and away as he passed, though he could hear it behind him. Loud motherfucker.

He had decided there was no choice. Mr. Fenning would have to disappear. That was why he had a small chainsaw in his trunk, replacement chains, and heavy-duty nylon bags. He knew where he could score a half-skid of bricks, and he knew where he could drop the packages.

It was true, Mr. Walker enjoyed the endorsement of several local big shots, but as far as he knew Mr. Fenning was merely a distant associate. No one would blink at the thought of Mr. Fenning chunks decorating the far reaches of the bottom of the bay.

Mr. Walker felt eyes on his back, but when he turned there was no one there. Nervous, because he hadn’t been driven to this extreme in a while, he continued down the sidewalk.

The fuckin’ hornets gotta be partying before death.

No other way to explain their insistent buzzing.

Now, where was this fuck’s house? It was time to make some hamburger.

.4.

Then

Mr. Walker knelt down and ran his hand slowly up Mrs. Fenning’s inner thigh. Her eyes gained clarity. Widened. She began to struggle.

With his free hand, Mr. Walker grabbed her throat.

“Listen,” he leaned heavily on her chest and whispered into her ear. She stopped struggling. “Your old man hired me to do a job. And I fully intend to finish it. But you are much too fine a woman to dispense with quickly, you’ll be glad to know. So let me explain the situation. Every moment you’re still alive is a moment that prince-fucking-charming could come walking through this forest and save your ass from the big bad wolf. Now, if you lie down quietly and allow me to do what I want, more moments go by. If you fight me, I’ll just slit your throat now.” He licked her ear.

She recoiled and moaned, but seemed to understand. Though tears now streamed down across her face from the corner of her eyes, she lay still.

He always enjoyed this moment of submission.

Mr. Walker rocked back up onto his knees, pulled out his knife and began to cut away Mrs. Fenning’s black spandex shorts starting at the bottom – right above the knee – and working his way up her legs. He cut slowly, savoring it. And he was careful not to mar her perfect sweet skin.

This had been his plan all along. Ever since Mr. Fenning had showed Mr. Walker the photos of his wife, he knew he couldn’t possibly just kill her without tapping the sugar. Dammit, he deserved some fringe benefits on the crap jobs.

He removed the shorts and, with a flick of the knife, her floral patterned panties fell away, revealing her wonderfully manicured mound. “Oh yeah,” he crooned to himself as he touched her there. Perfect place to explore a mound.

His fingers parted her skin and folds and explored her mound from the inside.

Mrs. Fenning sobbed. Her legs were trembling. Her nose exhaled snot and air in equal measure. Her eyes pleaded.

Mr. Walker sniffed his finger, then continued cutting until her t-shirt and sports bra were nothing more than scraps of fabric. He rubbed the growing bulge in his crotch while he admired her, lying there naked in the grass. Reaching down he began kneading her small, perfectly formed breasts with his right hand, while fingering her down below with his left again.

“Shhhhh,” he hushed her when her muffled sobbing grew too dramatic, and perhaps dangerous. He wanted her alive, for the moment. “Remember our deal,” he said, and then he brought his mouth down over her ripe nipple.

He repositioned himself, down where her feet were bound together and pushed her knees up and apart, spreading her legs. And after running his hands, one down each thigh, to her magic kingdom, he unbuckled his belt, undid the button and fly and dropped his pants, then stepped out of them.

His high level of excitement was evident. Her eyes bulged in their sockets as he stood over her, naked and erect.

He reached into the duffel and dug out the coiled nylon cord and the collapsible spade. He sized up an overhanging tree branch and dug a shallow trench under its umbrella. Done digging, Mr. Walker looped one end of the nylon rope around Mrs. Fenning’s already bound feet. He noticed a hornet perched on her thigh. He must have startled the insect when he pulled the woman’s feet, because the little beast had his back arched up and was stinging her in the leg. The woman didn’t seem to notice; maybe she was spaced from fear and shock. Mr. Walker watched it for a moment. A strange thought: the hornet reminded him of himself. Then it buzzed away, circling him once before vanishing in the woods.

Once the rope was secure, he tossed the other end over the tree branch overhead and with considerable effort hefted Mrs. Fenning off the ground. Her naked back scraped across the grass and picked up twigs, small rocks, and whatever else you find on a forest floor. The woman’s muffled cries of pain were cut off as he dragged her head through the crud while her legs flew up over her. Once he had her upside down, her hanging hair full of debris, she began bawling, but with less vigor now. Her spirit was broken.

The ultimate submission — bound and gagged, hanging upside down, naked.

Mr. Walker knelt down near her head, steadied her swinging, then leaned in and kissed the nipple of her drooping left breast. It was so sexy, hanging upside down like a pear. He licked around its tip daintily, committing her taste to memory.

Mr. Walker loved foreplay.

“I wanted to thank you in advance for the good times,” he said. And he was sincere. Mrs. Fenning came back to life and shook her head violently, quietly begging for mercy.

Well, he was being merciful.

He unsheathed his knife and in one swift stroke cleaved a massive gouge across her neck. He had a silenced Sig 9mm in the duffel, but the knife seemed more intimate. The knife just felt right.

He danced out of the way of the gusher, and before long Mrs. Fenning bled out into the shallow hole Mr. Walker had dug.              

He watched her legs twitch jaggedly and waited while the sun crossed the mid-point of the sky until her torrent had become a dribble.

Moving quickly now because he couldn’t wait any more, he jammed his knife into the swinging corpse right above the pubis and cut down to her ribcage. Then another slice horizontally, and – with a little help – her innards tumbled out, into the trench.

He swung the gutted carcass away and lowered it to the ground.

This was what he needed. Only rarely did a job lead to an outcome like this one. Oh, yes, he’d known Mrs. Fenning was special, based on where her husband wanted her whacked. The scenario had been handed to him.

Gloriously erect, he approached the carcass. He enjoyed the view of her glazed, dead eyes.

He loved dead eyes, almost as much as dead, empty things.

He lowered himself to her and found all her holes, made a few more, pumped away, and spent himself in due time. It was the ultimate sense of power — he had taken her life, and now he had fucked her very essence. He had turned her inside out and owned her. He was the master, he had taken whatever he wanted, and discarded it. He thought he knew how primal warriors felt, eating parts of their enemies. They were his kin. He understood the draw of the kill.

Mr. Walker rarely lost control of his emotions, but moments like this were an exception.

He had worked up a sweat by the time he climaxed, almost lifting her carcass off the ground and then collapsing into her yawning cavity again, none too lightly. He gave Mrs. Fenning’s earthly remains an incongruous peck on the marble-cold cheek, staring into her wide-eyed blank gaze.

“Well, darlin’, now I have to get back to work.” Mr. Walker stepped into his pants. “Looks to me like that old prince isn’t going to make it.”

Her carcass didn’t answer.

But then his eyes settled on his open duffel and a knot started to grow in Mr. Walker’s stomach. A deep sickening feeling. It wasn’t guilt over what he’d done, or any kind of guilt. It was the realization he’d let his animal side rule the human side (or was it the other way around?). He’d forgotten the condom, the package of which he saw in the duffel, unopened. For a few minutes of fleshy pleasure he’d slipped badly and allowed himself to leave damning DNA behind. Now he’d have to take extra precautions in disposing of the body.

Something caught his ear.

Mr. Walker surveyed the surrounding forest. He couldn’t see anything. He strained his auditory senses and picked up on… buzzing.

Damn hornets again.

For a moment he could have sworn he’d heard a human voice, too, in tune with the buzzing.

Crying.

.5.

Now

The front door was locked and Mr. Walker ventured around to the rear, where a leaf-clogged pool shone in the dappled afternoon sun. A Tums was turning to chalk on his tongue.

There was a wall around the entire property, and trees obscured sight lines to nearby homes. He blinked and surveyed the neglected lawn, wondering…

It felt like a trap.

“I thought you killed her!”

Well, fuck, he had.

It played out in his mind, almost giving him an erection.

He checked the back door and found it locked, too. Decisions. Should he break in? This whole job was skittering off the tracks anyway, so maybe an old-fashioned B&E fit right in. On the other hand, how did he know Mr. Fenning wasn’t barricaded behind a table with a cannon pointed at the door?

There was a buzzing at the edge of his field of vision, but when he turned his head he heard it switch to the other side. There were hornets hovering over the pool. He squinted. There were a lot of hornets hovering over the scum-covered water. He approached the edge slowly, still squinting. The insects seemed to be buzzing in tight little orbits. He lowered his gaze and thought he saw an air bubble burst on the surface. No, there was another. As if someone breathed out underwater…

Mr. Walker examined his dilemma. Leave, break in, or investigate the damn pool?

All right. Let’s see the water.

Slowly, ignoring the crazed hornets, he crouched on the tiles.

Another bubble burst on the scummy surface. Closer to the edge. He looked up.

Aren’t those damn hornets closer?

Another bubble, a bigger one. He heard the splash. The buzzing increased its intensity.

Mr. Walker squinted again. There was something going on here… and suddenly he felt somebody’s eyes on his back.

Even from a crouch, Mr. Walker whirled and faced the rear of the house, the compact Sig 9mm in his hand.

Windows and door stared at him blankly. The afternoon sun reflected glare at him, and he squinted again.

Another splash from the pool made him turn. This time the bubble had burst just a few feet from the edge. He stepped back, the pistol extended. Hornets buzzed in some kind of insect frenzy. Now he could see a shadow under the layer of scum. As if something below the surface were approaching, crawling on the bottom or something.

He backed away.

.6.

Then

He had planned on just burying the body in a shallow grave, then planting the bike and shredded clothes ten or twenty miles away, along the bike path but in the opposite direction from where Mrs. Fenning had parked. It would throw search parties off the trail for weeks, if not months. But now he wanted to move her even farther from the scene. He seemed to remember seeing a sign for a nearby marsh, probably right near the marker where he’d read about the native mounds.

Again he heard something. Whirling around he found nothing, nothing but an insect hum and the pounding of his own heart. He was spooking himself. Then bury the body, plant the evidence, and get the fuck out.

He bent over and started to throw spadefuls of loose dirt back over the woman’s guts.

But there, in the pile, something was moving.

Impossible.

But something did move. And make a mewling sound.

With his knife, Mr. Walker dug around the squishy mess and lanced something that twitched beneath a fold of small intestine. He held up the thing to investigate.

It was a fetus.

Certainly it couldn’t be moving – or crying, either – but blood bubbled up from around the wound like frothy pink foam.

A very tiny, barely formed fetus.

Mr. Walker wondered if this was why Mr. Fenning had wanted his wife killed. Or maybe he hadn’t even known. Either way, he’d just gotten a two-for-one deal. Maybe Mr. Walker could renegotiate. He wiped the tiny body from his knife’s blade, leaving it on the pile of gore, and finished covering it with loose soil.

.7.

Now

He could still see the pool’s surface under the cloud of hornets, and something shadowy was rising to the top like a fisherman’s bobber. He stared at the shape, recognizing it.

The damn thing was a body. A headless body. It gushed upward, surging out of the water as if it were about to climb out, leaves and muck sticking to its skin in clumps. It was a naked body, recently shaved or waxed. There was a tattoo on the right shoulder.

Mr. Fenning, the loose end, had already been snipped.

His neck ended with a bloody stump sticking out of a ragged wound that immediately put Mr. Walker in mind of a doll dismembered by a destructive child.

Still backing away, Mr. Walker swung the pistol around. Whoever had done the jerk in the pool might be looking for him.

Looked like a mob thing. Didn’t they used to use blowtorches and such? However they’d decapitated the guy, there was now an acid injection into his throat and esophagus. Mr. and Mrs. Fenning, both fucked up, and the only connection he knew was… Mr. Walker himself. Leave and take a chance that no one had seen him? Stay and… what? Clean up?

Hell, he had that chainsaw in the car…

The corpse bobbed closer. The cloud of hornets followed it, and he realized it was getting denser. It was growing in size, in number of flying insects. It was buzzing like an electrical transformer, hovering over the headless carcass like a pulsating balloon.

Mr. Walker stared at it, amazed to see it taking on a shape.

A familiar shape.

Jesus.

It was Mrs. Fenning, the way she’d looked when he first saw her on her bicycle. Then the hornets rearranged themselves in the cloud and she looked the way he’d left her, a gutted hulk, mouth open and staring. How in the fuck could he be seeing her?

He lowered the pistol, staring, not quite sure what he was seeing.

It was like… no, it was their multi-faceted eyes, reflecting or making the picture like winged pixels…

The picture was 3D, though, and he found himself stepping back because it was reaching the edge of the pool. The image formed out of hovering, buzzing hornets raised its arms and they spread out looking like a shimmery victim of crucifixion.

Fuck this, Mr. Walker said or thought. As someone who was more accustomed to causing fear in others than experiencing it himself, the sudden nausea that churned in the depths of his bowels and the hammering pulse that pounded his temples was an alien sensation. He raised his pistol and fired a round into what appeared to be Mrs. Fenning’s head. The shot was dead-on but absolutely futile as it passed through the swarm and left the insect horde unscathed. He fired again and again, hot brass tinkling on the tiles below. His slide locked, the gun empty.

No result…

The buzzing increased to a high-pitched crescendo and the Mrs. Fenning-figure’s arms folded down and the holographic hands reached into the yawning body cavity and rummaged around, finally emerging with…something. It took Mr. Walker a moment to realize that the insect-formed fingers had pulled a real solid object from the belly of the illusion of Mrs. Fenning. It was the salt and pepper hair that made Mr. Walker’s reeling mind conclude that the red lumpy mass was Mr. Fenning’s head, deformed by massive amounts of venom from untold numbers of hornet stings. Mr. Walker stared into the dead eyes and felt some kinship with what he saw there…

The insect cloud forming the hovering Mrs. Fenning now brought the head up to its gaping chest and rocked it like a baby, and the buzzing sounded like an atonal lullaby.

Mr. Walker’s brain overloaded. That was what it felt like, the buzzing lullaby piercing his ears and what his eyes processed finally reaching the point at which his feet took control and, mission forgotten, he whirled to run as far from the pool as he could.

But he tripped over something — the diving board apparatus? — and felt his legs go in one direction and, strangely, his body in another, and then he was flailing his arms, his useless pistol tumbling end over end into space. There was a loud crack, then the world was washed away with the din of buzzing wings, countless bodies blacked out the sun, and then there was nothing.

.8.

After

There was so much blood. The bottom of the dry pool, paint peeling and cracking, was coated with it. The crime scene investigators were on their way. The DNA would match the two victims, who lay splayed out on the concrete as if they’d fallen a hundred stories instead of ten feet. One was the owner of the fancy house. The other was unidentified, but they’d marked and photographed where the pistol had landed.

How had those wounds produced so much blood?

The uniformed officer who stood there surveying the scene had seen it all, but this was… different.

He swatted at a particularly stubborn hornet that had been hovering over the corpses. It flew straight up and disappeared.

He shook his head. Fuckin’ hornet.

END

* *

If you enjoyed “Love at First Sting,” don’t forget to check out

MYSTERIES & MAYHEM, also by D. Benton and W.D. Gagliani.

* *

About the Authors

David Benton is a published short horror story author and also the touring bass player for the heavy metal parody band Beatallica. His collaborations with Bram Stoker award-nominated author W.D. Gagliani can be found in the e-book collection: Mysteries & Mayhem, as well as anthologies such as Malpractice: An Anthology of Bedside Terror. Current projects include a zombie novel (co-written with W.D. Gagliani and Bram Stoker award-winning author John Everson) and a battle of the classic monsters (co-written with Gagliani and rising star Mark Zirbel).

W.D. Gagliani is the author of the horror-thrillers Wolf’s Trap (finalist for the Bram Stoker Award in 2004), Wolf’s Gambit, Wolf’s Bluff, Wolf’s Edge (Samhain Publishing), and the hard-noir thriller Savage Nights. Samhain has also recently reissued Wolf’s Trap as both ebook and trade paperback. He has published fiction and nonfiction in numerous anthologies, magazines, and online publications, and he has been an active book reviewer since 1986. With collaborator David Benton he has published the adult horror, suspense, mystery, and erotica story collection, Mysteries & Mayhem, and short stories in various anthologies including Dark Passions: Hot Blood 13. Recent publications include an article on Wilbur Smith in the book Thrillers: 100 Must Reads (edited by Morrell & Wagner), an article on writing zombies in Writing Zombies! (Rymfire Books), and an article on writing werewolf fiction in the October 2011 issue of The Writer magazine. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA), the International Thriller Writers (ITW), and the Authors Guild. He has just sold a 5th Nick Lupo horror-thriller, WOLF’S CUT, to Samhain Publishing.