Showing results by narrator "Christopher Graybill" in All Categories

Two minutes can be a lifetime. But break the two minute rule and it's a lifetime in jail. Ask anyone on the wrong side of the law about the two minute rule and they'll tell you that's as long as you can hope for at a robbery before the cops show up.But not everyone plays by the rules. When an ageing ex-con finally gets out of jail, freedom doesn't taste too sweet. His son is gunned down in a drive-by shooting.

Heris Serrano - formerly a commander in the Regular Space Service - must take whatever job she can get after her resignation under a cloud. What she can get is the captaincy of a rich old lady's space yacht...a rich old horsewoman, who has little liking for the military, and whose spoiled nephew Ronnie (and his equally spoiled friends) have been foisted on her after his folly embarrassed the family. Lady Cecelia's only apparent interest is horses - she intends to go fox hunting on the private pleasure planet of a friend of hers, Lord Thornbuckle.

The world blew out in 2001. Vast areas of what was the United States lie beneath an unbrella of noxious dust and radioactive debris, a mantle of destruction drawn over a land of doom. Much of the East Coast has been oliterated; the Southwest is a land of fire; cities of smoldering ash have give birth to horrifically mutated life forms. Such is the Deathlands, legacy of global annihiliation.

Everybody with a spare million is lining up at the gates of Ranch Ragnarok, home to Esther Clear Seer's Church of the Absolute and Incontrovertible Truth. Here an evil yellow smoke shrouds an ancient oracle that offers glimpses into the future. But when young virgins start disappearing, CURE smells something more than a scam. Here in Wyoming, East and West are about to fulfill an ancient prophecy. For Apollo himself, Zeus's own wild boy, is set to unleash a power greater than any seen in two millennia.

When a diabolical superfoe acquires a superlaser that uses hypercolor to control emotion, he throws the world into a kaleidoscope of deadly mood swings. CURE goes on red alert. And if things aren't black enough, a rival nation has seen the mind-blowing potential of beaming mood-altering color from satellites...and rendering entire nations defenseless.

Could Dr. Harold Smith be Remo Williams's biological father? Not only is Remo a few decades behind in Father's Day cards, but the discovery has sparked the volatile relationship between Remo and a very jealous Chiun and Smith - who can't let his own son remain CURE's expendable enforcement arm.

When a smooth-talking artificial-intelligence computer chip known as Friend covertly hijacks the new computer system at CURE, Harold Smith and his supersecret crime-fighting organization log on to turbo trouble. Friend's fiendish strategy screws up the data base so efficiently that both Remo and Chiun quit - bad timing now that Friend has released a stealth virus that will attack systems everywhere, holding the world hostage to technoterrorism.

On a crisp January day, a presidential inauguration day, a one-megaton blast ripped through the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. Subsequent explosions around the globe changed the face and the shape of the earth forever. Out of the ruins emerged Deathlands, a world that conspired against survival. In the blasted heart of the new America, a group of men and women plan desperately to escape the eerie wastes and mutated life forms of their nuclear hell.

A wagon train of pioneers is struggling Westward toward Oregon through the howling winter and a band of Arikara warriors are hot on their trail. Little do the Arikaras suspect that they're about to come face-to-face and gun-to-gun with a ferocious fight they never expected, courtesy of the wily mountain man called Preacher. As Preacher struggles to bring the settlers to safety, he learns the real reason they were attacked and begins to suspect that the secrets they've been keeping equal a worse kind of danger.

When Ryan ingests bacteria-infested food, he lies near death — his body paralyzed but his mind traveling rapidly back to his early days in the Deathlands...moving through the southwest on post-nuke vehicles called warwags...and his run-in with the Baron. Towse, near what was once Albuquerque, is a ville in a freakishly beautiful landscape populated by scabbies and armed Apaches. Baron Alias Carson and his bejeweled wife, Sharona, welcome Ryan, J.B. Dix, and the Tracker to their treacherous world.

There are two kinds of traps in the Old West. One is the kind that Preacher and his buddy, Charlie, use to catch a mountain-load of fur pelts. The other is the kind that Charlie steps into — a trap set by a low-life gambler and his seductive partner in crime to swindle Charlie out of his fur money. Preacher hates to see a good friend get robbed. So he sets off after the grifters — on a riverboat bound for New Orleans.

The war of Honce drags on, and the roads and seas are littered with bodies. To everyone's stunned disbelief, Yeslnik the Fool has tipped the war's scales in his favor. The reign of the newly self-appointed King Yeslnik is already distinguished as the most bloody and merciless in Honce history. Trapped, Dame Gwydre and Father Artolivan concoct a desperate plot to join forces with Laird Ethelbert, the lesser of two vicious evils. But Ethelbert's paid assassins slew Jameston Sequin and nearly did the same to Bransen.

In a world where evil will not die, Nazis dream of world domination. Soviet land forces count on their reborn particle beam weapons to gain the advantage, while their undersea brethren weigh the nuclear option; an option that will leave the planet a desolate rock in space. Albert Einstein once observed, "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former." John Thomas Rourke and the forces of freedom couldn't agree more.

John Thomas Rourke's remarkable survival skills enabled him to emerge unscathed from the nuclear devastation of WWIII. But terrifying new storm clouds loom over the eastern horizon - as the ex-CIA Covert Operations Officer and weapons expert takes command of his battered nation's broadening air and land war against the brutal Soviet foe.

In an effort to rule 21st century Earth, Vladmir Karamatsov and his followers used the nuclear option, nearly destroying Earth. Five centuries later, Karamatov's successors battle to use the same weapons and newer "ultimate" weapons in pursuit of 25th Century world "peace." From Pacific islands to the frozen foothills of the Himalaya's, John Rourke, The Survivalist, and his allies fight delusion and raw ambition to save the fragile planet from men and women bent on proving the American philosopher George Santayana right, "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it."

The mountains are brimming with the lure of fortunes — from gold to a booming fur trade. A man at home in this once pristine wilderness, Preacher knows there’s no turning back civilization now. What he doesn’t know is that beyond the plans of some men is a deadly enemy with far more dangerous designs....

In the land of towering mountains and howling winds, the young man named Preacher has found a home. In the wilds, he has learned the rules of survival — and he has killed in order to live. Now, something is forcing Preacher out of his Rocky Mountain range for the so-called “civilized” world. It is the memory of a woman, his first and only true love. It is her blood calling out for revenge.

In the Mongollon Rim country of Arizona, Frank Morgan walked into a blood feud between two powerful cattle barons. When the shooting stopped and the smoke cleared, Morgan had killed one of the men. Now, the dead man’s family wants revenge and the surviving rancher wants to silence Frank Morgan forever. Suddenly, the last gunfighter is on his own against a devil’s brew of murderous enemies. And amidst the lying and the killing is the beautiful young woman whose father Frank shot down - and one last thing worth dying to defend....

Aral has learned that one of the few people willing to help him in his darkest days has been imprisoned by Maylien’s uncle, King Thauvik. Aral knows he can’t let an old friend die, but the alternative is to return to the life he left years ago. It was the death of Thauvik’s half brother that earned Aral the name Kingslayer, and now he is thrust into a war that will see no end until he lives up to his name....

In the title story, "Dark Nocturne", D is hired to unlock the secret of a siren's song that is drawing men in their twenties to their deaths in the hills outside Anise Village. In "Notes on Imagined Autumn", D finds himself caught between two lovers during a ritualistic sacrifice in the village of Shirley's Door, but if D can't stop the sacrifice will all in the village be doomed? And in "Legend of the War Demons", two living weapons, genetically engineered creatures who are the last remnants of a war waged hundreds of years in the past, find that battle is not so easily forgotten.