Lost Ghosts: Stories 2012-2014

The first short fiction collection from Trevor Zaple, Lost Ghosts comprises the earliest published stories. Includes the first part of Interstitial Burn-Boy Blues and a follow-up novelette to Disappearance.

Disappearance

Digital Fiction Publishing

One moment Mark is shopping for chips; the next he is alone. After 95% of the population vanishes, Mark and his new friends have to struggle to survive between the dregs of the old world and the horrors of the new.

Interstitial Burn-Boy Blues

Across the Margin Publications

Tommy and Stuart are travelling to California for two very different reasons. Tommy has been chasing love across the dried-up, burnt-out ruins of the once-populous American Midwest. Stuart is hunting for his wife and daughter’s killer, a man he once called his neighbor, who fled the snow-choked corpse of New York City after a winter storm finally did the metropolis in. When a chance encounter on a passenger bus heading west strands the two in the forsaken underbelly of Las Vegas, Tommy and Stuart find that getting passage into the Golden State’s “promised land” is much harder than they ever imagined.

Prospero’s Half-Life

Richard Adams just wants to go to work and pretend that the world isn’t burning down with a wildly lethal hemorrhagic fever. When the world finally shows him how wrong he is, he battles savagery and loneliness. Pressed into service with a bizarre end-times cult, Richard finds a second chance at finding friendship and love amongst the ruins of the world. When an ominous evil bears down on them, however, will Richard be able to save those he loves? Caught between two overwhelming forces, Richard must choose, and the fate of everyone he cares for hangs in the balance.

Under Cover of the Night

High school in the 1980s meant cigarette breaks outside the doors, flirting in the parking lot, and endless afternoons at the mall. For Jody, Andy, and Brenda, the mall is their kingdom, until a stolen silk scarf drags them into something darker than teenage rebellion.

What begins as a petty act of shoplifting spirals into a midnight break-in, where the fluorescent glow of the mall gives way to shadows that don’t behave like shadows at all. In the dead corridors of an empty shopping center, something ancient and hungry stirs, something that moves to the rhythm of the music and won’t stop until it’s fed.