Double
A Short Story (or a Pocket Novel for holiday reading?)
By Maryanne Peters

Chapter 1

“I understand that you may have known Ivan Sergeivich Molonovsky,” said the man they simply knew as Grozny – the man in charge of deployments.

“We were not close, but I remember him,” said Kiril. It was a lie. He had known Ivan well. They trained together because the two of them were the smallest in the whole intake. But the rumor was that Ivan had betrayed the Soviet Union, and it was best to deny any association.

A group of people wake up in a video game world and are forced to work together to survive and find out how to escape.

The group follows the map searching for answers and things only get worse…

This is the last full chapter I had written before I started posting this, so future chapters will likely take a bit longer. However not too long as I have everything lined out already just not the in between moments.

Chapter 12

This story has no sex in it.

A slender figure walked out onto the wide bridge. The sun descending in the western sky cast a wide shadow from the west side of the canyon and bathed the east side in a reddish glow.

Cameron has feet in both worlds and continues to navigate what she ultimately wants next. Revelations about the transplant and not being able to return to her former self exactly as she was are news she wasn't expecting. And the question of Garrett may finally be put to rest...

South Pacific Island:
Cheshire spots a group of men torturing a group of people. Two of the prisoners were women in their mid-twenties and the smaller woman that was in between them looked to be a teenager. All three women were stripped naked and secured to giant Xs made of bamboo.

Their bodies had numerous cut marks where blood was dripping out of them. Their hand were nailed to the bamboo and so were their feet as well. She could smell their scent from her hiding spot and could tell they had been like that for several days.

"Mum I can't possibly do this. " Alex she told her quietly, horror evident in his voice. His mother standing next to him in their little combined kitchen and dinning room, snorted in rye amusement.

Looking Back from the Future
A Vignette
By Maryanne Peters

Back in 1999 when I was just 25 years old, I decided that I would enter the new millennium as somebody else. People make New Year’s resolutions every year, but I thought that a New Millenium resolution needed to be dramatic. I made sure that it was.

Charlotte and Michael continue with their lives and now, two years on it is Christmas time once more and change is in the air!

A Crumb Free Christmas - Two years on

Alma Mater
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

Oliver Furness came to me in 1898 – I remember that it was the year that the Spanish American War ended. He had a scholarship to the University, or thought he had. He saw that my boarding house and health clinic offered lower rates for “students with refined manners” and considered that described him well enough. He was a slightly built young man, seemingly ready to study, as I had been at the same age.

William Matson was a lost soul. Having always struggled with his identity, the loss of his parents, and the loss of his wife and unborn child, William made a sacrificial decision, to donate his perfectly healthy body to the Sacrificial Life Extension Project to give life to someone terminally ill. Christmas Eve is the day of the swap and Christmas Day is the day he wakes to find his reality altered in a way he never expected...
 

The Bridge of Souls

(formerly S.L.E.P. – Sacrificial Life Extension Project)