Author Archives: James Pyles

The Day After Thanksgiving

thanksgiving

Image: greatest.com

It’s the day after Thanksgiving and I’m exhausted. The holidays wipe me out, especially when I have to spend them with family.

I really wasn’t looking forward to that flight from Chicago to Oakland. Couldn’t get a direct one of course since I waited until the last minute, so the whole trip took nearly seven hours.

I really hoped Mom would have just accepted my excuse that I had too much work to do to take the time off, but she knows how to get her way. She’s always known how to manipulate me. She uses guilt, that’s a favorite. What about my ailing father? What about my sister and her obnoxious husband who never get to see me? What about all the snotty-nosed nieces and nephews who miss their Uncle Jerry.

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Thankful

wraithMick knew he only had a few minutes left. His son Tyler couldn’t stop the bleeding from his throat. Mick looked up and smiled. He wished he could tell him how much he loved him, Tyler and his little boy Jimmy.

Mick knew tomorrow’s Thanksgiving meal would taste like ashes to them, to Tyler’s wife Jenny, three months pregnant with their second child, a grandchild Mick would never know.

He knew they would find it hard to be thankful, but Mick was thankful.

He was thankful he’d stopped the son of a bitch from taking Jimmy.

The bastard had been preying on children all over Orange County for a year and a half, sneaking into houses at night, forcing a window or coming in through an unlocked patio door. He’d been taking children, probably followed them home from school or spotted them playing in front of their houses, cased their homes, set up a plan so he could kidnap them, rape them, and murder them.

Not this time.

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Adams Without Eves

baby boy

Image: MomsWhoThink.com

The disease, or whatever it turned out to be, was highly specific in targeting anyone with XX chromosomes. Within a year, every woman, every little girl, all of them had died. The XY chromosomes didn’t get a free pass either. Over 75% of them…of us died as well. .

It was that cloud the Earth passed through. It defied chemical and radiological analysis, so at first we didn’t realize how devastatingly fatal it was. It had drifted into our solar system, and our planet had the misfortune of being in the portion of our orbit with which it intersected. The first deaths occurred only weeks after contact.

A world population of over eight billion reduced to just less than a billion, all male. The last time the Earth held just a billion people was at the beginning of the 19th century.

But most people probably thought that moot since without women, the human race couldn’t reproduce and repopulate. The little boys born before their mothers died would be the last generation. That’s what most people thought.

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Trying to Wake Up

dreaming

Image: alghad.com

Jeremy woke up from the nightmare that was rapidly vanishing from his memory. He meant to stay up late enough to find out the election results, but after pulling a double-shift in the E.R., he was exhausted.

Turning on the coffee, he opened his Macbook and searched the national news. What a relief. The 45th President of the United States was going to be Olivia Marsdin. She was originally considered a long shot that had little chance of beating her political rival Charles Remington, but as one scandal after another surfaced to plague the Remington campaign, Marsdin steadily rose in the polls.

Marsdin was an outsider, a moderate fiscally and a liberal socially, so she appealed to a wide audience. Remington was conservative both fiscally and socially and while he appealed to the Washington insider crowd, he also was the early favorite among college educated voters, especially white males.

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In Sunlight

sunlight

Image: Fox News

From the Unlife and Curse of Sean Becker

I can’t sleep.

I know that most people occasionally have to deal with insomnia, but I’m not most people. My name is Sean Becker and I’m a vampire.

As near as I can tell, vampires are severely allergic to natural sunlight. One of the effects of this is that I become lethargic as the night wanes and dawn approaches. By full day, I’m out, you should pardon the expression, like a light.

Except I fell asleep in my little shelter fashioned in a crawl way of an abandoned warehouse four hours ago, and now I’m wide awake.

Stranger than that, I’m hungry.

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The Monster That Got Benny

divorce

Image: Huffington Post Canada

“Can you sleep in my room tonight, Grandpa?”

Little Benny was visiting his Grandparents for the weekend and sleeping in the same spare bedroom at their house he’d slept in since he was in diapers.

“Why do you want me to sleep with you, Benny?” Grandma had already said good night to the seven-year-old, but Benny liked Grandpa to say good night last because he told such good bedtime stories.

“Because a monster might come in the middle of the night and get me.”

“No monster has ever gotten into our house before. Why would you be afraid of that now?”

“I just am. Please Grandpa?”

Grandpa knew Benny far too well not to realize what he was really afraid of.

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The Mysterious Mr. Franks

Boris Karloff

Boris Karloff

From the Unlife and Curse of Sean Becker

I drained enough blood from that carjacker to slake my lust for one evening, but had to get out of there and across the Bay to avoid the police the old woman called. You’d think she’d have been a little more grateful that I saved her from being beaten and her car stolen, but I must have been as terrifying to her as her would-be assailant.

Glad I found this all night diner. Blood with a coffee chaser. Just what every vampire needs.

Past 3 a.m. according to the clock on the wall. Only one other guy in the place, also nursing a cup of java. I know it’s cold outside, but he’s bundled up like the Invisible Man. Of course given that I’m a vampire, maybe I’m due to meet another Universal Studios monster.

I see him reaching for a napkin and his sleeve rides up. Nasty scars on the wrist and across the back of his hand.

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Prey and Prayers in the Night

alley

From the film “Red Fog” (2013)

From the Unlife and Curse of Sean Becker

Heaven help me, my name is Sean Becker and I’m a vampire. I figured I’d better write all this down. Maybe it’ll help someone else facing the life or non-life I have now. Maybe it’ll just help normal people understand that we’re not all monsters.

I’d been casing the Red Cross blood bank for days. I figured out their schedule. They ship blood out by all kinds of methods including car, bus, and plane depending on the need and the distance it has to go. Blood shipments are sent day and night. It was the night I was interested in.

But in the end, I couldn’t go through with it. Sure, stealing from a blood bank means I don’t have to attack anyone. It would be a victimless crime, right?

Wrong.

Blood being shipped somewhere means a hospital or other medical facility has requested it. If it didn’t arrive, it would mean I’d taken blood that was meant for someone else, someone who could die without it.

Attacking people for their blood is reprehensible, but I don’t kill for it. But I hate preying on the innocent.

So I’ll prey on the guilty.

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Why Don’t I Trust You?

trust“If you trust me, why are you so upset?”

“Are you out of your mind? Just look at what’s happening to me? How could you do this?”

They were sitting together on the edge of Mallorie’s bed in the dark. It was just after two in the morning but she couldn’t sleep. She barely ate. She hadn’t been to class in a week. She just stayed in her bedroom in an apartment she shared with two other girls, toggling between mind-numbing despair and panic.

“I never said bad things wouldn’t happen in your life, Mallorie. I just said I’d be here to help you deal with them.”

The young college student wiped tears from red, swollen eyes and tried to compose herself.

“I do trust you.” She started sobbing again, then forced herself to stop.

“I don’t know. Maybe I don’t. I mean if I did, why are my emotions so out of control? Please, please have mercy. I need to heal. My Daddy’s throat cancer need to heal and only you can help.”

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