Scott White

The air was heavy with soot and heat, and it tasted like ash, and dirt and lost hope. I drove the four-wheeler up to the top of the mesa to get a look. The sun was just setting into the smoke and the blaze of the grassfires that stretched across the horizon. For just a moment, the flames seem to feed off the blazing orb, turning the smoke clouds orange. It was mesmerizing. Just then a Chinook helicopter passed overhead, so low I could feel the slap of the rotor blades.

Samuel Engelman

The flesh tore easily from the dead longhorn steer. It was a slaking meal for the scavengers gathered around the carcass, and the coyotes ate gluttonously. They looked up only for a moment to see the stagecoach pass them by, only a few hundred yards away, carrying two passengers, a driver, and a man carrying a scatter-gun.

Tim Tobin

Life happens despite our best efforts at planning the future. From his earliest childhood Paul O’Reilly wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. He had toy rocket ships and his own designs for new spaceships. He scoured the Internet for information on the Apollo program and read about Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins and the other moon walking astronauts.

Lowell “Zeke” Ziemann

A fitful night of sporadic napping passed. Before sunrise Bret McNulty rose and hurried down the long hall. Maybe Jim came home quietly during the night and would be in his room. Bret frowned at the sight of the empty bed. Hope dwindled. His stomach knotted. Jim should have returned home from Laramie two days ago.

Samual Engelman

My right index finger pulled the card slowly across the table towards me, and my face remained like stone when I turned it over, although inside my heart beat slightly faster. The King of spades almost grinned at me when I slipped it into place among the other five cards in my hand. I would not say it was my lucky card, I did not believe in luck, but ole King David sure as hell had won me some money over the years since my overdue retirement.

Laura K Johnson

He rode in from the East.

With his hat lowered and his body slumped on his horse, he looked like a puppet, his head bobbing haphazardly on his shoulders. We watched him from the frozen mud packed road, three people familiar with his evil black heart.

If there was a way, I swear I would have stopped myself from looking at him straight on. But there was no help for it. His entire being nearly pulled my eyeballs out of their sockets. It was like he carried a divining rod made of his bones and aimed it right at me.

Tracy Thurman

Willy Brooks had fifty dollars in his pocket when he walked into the Silverton bank. It was the most honest money he’d ever had at one time and for the first time he felt an inkling of responsibility. He dusted off his worn clothes, stuffed his shaggy blonde hair under his hat, squared his shoulders and walked up to the teller’s window. “I’ve got some money I’d like to put in your bank.” He stated to the man behind the bars.

George Steven Jones

Arizona Territory - 1869
It was a hot day in the Mule Mountains, made cool by a sudden wind that seemed to come from another dimension - a memorable wind, lingering and laden with trouble. Beneath orange, grey skies, the Arizona landscape seemed calm, peaceful even. But just over the mountain tops a fierce storm threatened to overtake the quiet afternoon.

Claine Tanner

It was one of those afternoons when one would like time to stop. It was warm and the combined smell of leather, a sweating horse, as well as sage and cedar filled my nostrils. I had trailered my horse to the mouth of the cedar draw where the jeep road narrowed. Buck stepped out of the trailer and swept the country with his eye setting his internal God given GPS.

Lone Wolf Thunder

Introduction:
Welcome to Texas, the mid-1880s, and a tiny incidental desert hamlet named Crossroads. It's a little known, seldom spoken of frontier town, snugly nestled beneath majestic mountains along the southwestern border between Texas and Mexico, and morally poised between virtue and corruption. It's a mundane community barely on the maps of this vast region, a unique shade of gray in this harsh black and white world.