Showing results by author "Thomas Healy" in All Categories

Airship Lies is a steampunk/Western anthology containing five stories from the Age of Wonder, ranging from the Old West to the wilderness beyond the frontier to the very edge of space itself. 

When a talented new player joins the perennially losing sub-minor-league hockey team the Fighting Aardvarks, it marks the beginning of a winning tradition. But things aren't as they seem, and players begin to change. First-line center Hammie learns the truth: The Aardvarks are becoming vampires, and it's up to him to stop them before the infestation spreads beyond just the team.  

A collection of eight tales ranging from horror to superhero, science fiction to postapocalyptic, that examine the darker aspects of the world.

This collection, Muddy Creek Tales, includes both previously published and all-new stories: The Mighty Peculiar Incident at Muddy Creek - What starts out as something simple as a train failing to stop winds up as something mighty peculiar indeed. Clockwork Chloe - Bert Tillory can get any woman to say yes, but who is he really looking for? Posse - Sometimes when riding down a fugitive, it's hard to tell who's the hunter and who's being hunted.

Making the Cut is the flagship show on the FoodieTV network, giving recent high school graduates a chance to win a scholarship to a prestigious culinary school. Midori is from San Francisco, and grew up in a family that owns a restaurant. All she ever wanted to do was cook, but in Japanese culture, women are relegated to hostess and management roles. Nicole is from Denver, the child of a broken home who's been forced to grow up way too soon. She's been poor her entire life, and that prize package is impossibly valuable to her. These two girls become friends despite their cultural differences, and together with six more challengers, will be competing in front of the cameras.

When criminals are convicted, they go to jail. When they have parahuman abilities, they go to Deep Six, the most secure prison facility in the world. Six thousand feet underground, nobody has ever escaped from the maximum security facility. Until now. A parahuman terrorist called Misrule engineers a mass breakout, and it falls to a pair of prison guards to stop the world's most dangerous criminals from reaching freedom.

Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse. Such is the credo of the modern mercenary in the economic downturn of the late 2040s. Three such antiheroes are brought together by a billionaire for a unique search-and-retrieval mission. If they succeed, they'll walk away free and clear with a big fat payday. But if they fail... Well, things will go badly for them.

Steal big. The Crew: Olivia, the Director; Anjanae, the Artist; Pancho, the Techie; Kennedy, the Actress; Jerome, the Money Man; Vajra, the Thug. The Target: A painting of Anjanae's deceased mother, stolen from her and presented for sale by a professional artist. The Job: Steal it back and don't get caught, because high school is hard enough without facing hard time. 

High school reporter Sherri "Bax" Baxter is content being an outsider, with a reputation as a nosy busybody among the students of Jericho High. Instead of friendships, she focuses on objective journalistic integrity, because it will get her out of the dead-end Texas oil town and into a prestigious journalism school, and she's pretty sure she's found her big story. A new girl, Molly, has come to town with a mysterious sideways grin, a bolero hat, a well-loved guitar case, and the musical talent of legendary blues man Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Hope was playing five-card draw with undead Elvis when the world ended. Before the world ended, Hope was a down-and-out virgin stripper. Now she's pregnant with a baby prophesied to be the world's salvation. Undead Elvis promises her that Graceland is the only safe place left even though the rest of the world has become sand and ash. Hope must undertake the perilous journey across a broken, unfamiliar landscape to reach it.

Giele has spent 20 years fighting wars for the King of Aelfland, but when he makes the mistake of falling in love with the Princess of the Realm, he is stripped of his rank, his citizenship, and his name. His face is marked with the slivered moon, forever identifying him as an outcast. No longer will he find a home among his own people. He travels halfway across the world to seek a fresh start among the colonists of the continent of Verigo, but the troubles of a marked man seem to follow him wherever he goes.

A City in Darkness - Four Lost Souls Seeking a Light - July 13, 1977 - The lives of four super-powered people become irrevocably intertwined when the lights go out in New York City, plunging their world into chaos. The superheroes of Just Cause, grown soft and complacent without any supervillains to challenge them, must overcome their personal demons as well as uphold the law in a lawless land of rioters, arson, and murder.

Mustang Sally has some speedy shoes to fill. This young superhero has waited her whole life to join Just Cause - the premiere team of American heroes. Now she's hoping her super-speed will earn a spot on the same team to which her parents and grandparents belonged. A chance encounter with the villain who killed her father changes everything. Even though she's only an intern, Sally devotes herself to finding the man known as Destroyer.

The would-be Archmage has slain nearly all the magic-users in the world, taking their power for himself. If he succeeds in killing the Lucky Seven's own mage Stratocaster, the Archmage's power will become absolute and plunge the world into darkness under his cruel reign. But not if Mustang Sally and the rest of the Just Cause superheroes have anything to say about it.

1907: A world of steam and steel, of brass and bravery. Spaceships ply the lanes above the Earth, running on coke furnaces and a prayer, while the atomic-powered Circumferential Rail runs the route between Paris, France, and Houston, Texas. Where there is cargo, and passengers of means, pirates soon follow, and this is how Jonathan Orbital, heir to the Circumferential Rail finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy surrounding a kidnapped French woman with a valuable secret.

Free speech as we know it comes less from the First Amendment than from a most unexpected source: Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. A lifelong skeptic, he disdained all individual rights, including the right to express one's political views. But in 1919, it was Holmes who wrote a dissenting opinion that would become the canonical affirmation of free speech in the United States.

When Ava Zhang washes out of Just Cause Chicago, she figures her career as a superhero is over. Then she gets the opportunity to partner with experienced hero Detroit Steel, and the two of them work to halt the distribution of a dangerous new designer drug called Wool. And once again, everything goes wrong. Ava is accidentally dosed with Wool, and her ensuing loss of control results in major damage to an urban farm and sends a young farmer to the hospital with injuries she caused. When she goes to apologize, she discovers she's attracted to him.

Jackrabbit is stuck in a time loop, living the same day over and over again, and his only hope to free himself is to recover a mystical artifact called the Nick of Time. But first, he's got to survive long enough to find it against obstacles like a demonically possessed water heater, a vicious cat in a tree, and a team of supervillains headed by the dastardly Cheddarman.

La Capitana and the other teens of the neighborhood watch have spent their entire lives wondering why they have parahuman powers but not the genetic marker known to grant them. When their former rivals, the Arnold triplets, come to La Capitana with a lead on the source of their powers, she jumps at the chance to join Brittany, Brianna, and Brooklyn. Their investigation takes them across the country to New York City where the four girls discover their abilities have a more sinister origin than they could have imagined.