Here's a bloody hunk from Pandora, the sequel to the The Blackest Heart. Pandora will be available from Northern Frights Publishing in the fall of 2011.

Sissy coasted her Needle up the driveway to her housing dome, hoping to not disturb her son or her wonderful babysitter that had happily offered to stay late. Even as she pulled up she couldn’t help but look over and down the road she was on. It continued east toward the Great Black Forest looking menacingly in the distance. The Green home was also down the road, an empty, eerie reminder of the uneasy tension hanging over the settlement. Ever since the attack on the Green place, Sissy had been careful with her son playing outdoors, despite the capture of the supposed deadly school of ground sharks. But having made the choice of coming to Pandora, danger had always been a consideration. She hoped their routine would return to normal soon.

Tonight had been one of those mystical nights when a dancer made the kind of credits club pimps spewed about in their sales pitch to the new naïve dancers. You can make hundreds of credits a night if you work the customers just right, blah blah blah. But it had been one of those nights when every man and woman in the place wanted a piece of Sissy and were willing to tip generously for a little extra attention during a lap dance or a special trick or two during the nude part of her stage act. When she had checked her account at the end of her eight hour shift, she had to have the talent supervisor verify the funds. She had nearly doubled her previous one night record and didn’t even have to go skin to skin to earn it. When her shift originally ended at one a.m. she was doing so well that she’d called home and asked Nell if she could stay with Michael a little longer. The babysitter didn’t have classes until the afternoon the next day so she was happy to stay. Sissy was going to surprise her with a nice tip of her own.

The Needle settled quietly at the end of the driveway and Sissy noticed some house lights were still on despite the late hour. She would’ve figured both her child and Nell to be asleep by now but maybe the sitter was still studying. The exotic dancer slipped her long bare legs out of the vehicle. She stretched them, admiring the deep tan. Her face was pretty enough even without a ton of make-up and her breasts were okay, but her legs and ass were her meal ticket at the club. Another year on the stage and the private dance booths and she would be able to return to Earth, back to university, and out of the life before she completely forgot who she was. She rubbed the big muscle of each weary thigh then got out and headed for the dome, a small tote bag slung over her shoulder. As she approached the dome a light flickered through the window shade. Nell must be watching something on the televiewer. Sissy keyed in the security code, which played a short eight note tune, then pressed her palm to the identifier plate. The dancer heard the entrance lock disengage, and then the front door slid open. Sissy bounced into the shadowy entrance hall, immediately dropping the tote. She slipped a little in the dark hall, cursing under her breath as she glanced to her feet. She couldn’t see anything. Michael must have spilled something she thought.

"Nell," she whispered as she pulled her sweat top over her head. She dropped it on the tote and when she looked up, she froze. Her brain couldn’t quite process the sight. Foe several moments it was like she was looking at a surreal painting.

Her son Michael was down at the end of the hallway. He looked pale. No, he looked muted, almost out of focus. Sissy blinked several times trying to correct her vision but her son stayed in a weird murky hazy. He was also not standing right. His body wasn’t bent right to be standing. He wasn’t sitting either. It almost looked like he was floating. Sissy’s mouth yawned open in disturbed disbelief. She stumbled back a step, her back bumping against the closed entranceway.

Her son’s feet weren’t touching the ground. He was just...hanging in mid-air. Though she couldn’t see his face clearly his little mouth was open wide in a silent scream. It seemed like an eternity between when she thought it and when she heard her own scream filling the air. In the midst of her wail she managed to stop and shout out an instruction.

"Lights on!" The hallway light blinked on but the illumination seemed muted. The ceiling light, along with everything else in the hallway, was coated in a clear but shiny residue. Her eyes focused on an oozing drip from the ceiling light before finally seeing what was waiting at the end of the hall. Then she was screaming again, her mind battling to absorb the impossible.

It was a blob. A big gelatinous blob filling the entire end of the hallway. It seemed to quiver slightly and that motion alone made the dancer’s stomach turn inside out. That minuscule movement instantly told her it was a living thing. No hallucination made that type of motion. A hundred questions raced through her mind but she couldn’t process any of them. All she could do was stare at the horror of it, too frightened to take her eyes away. But there was also a morbid fascination...the thing was like nothing she had ever seen or imagined.

Sissy could see through the monstrosity, though the few odd items and her son floating inside it looked to be coated in petroleum jelly. To her right, another thing bulged into sight through the threshold between the corridor and the living room. The sight of Nell suspended inside it made her gag. Her knees buckled but somehow she didn’t fall to the floor.

Nell was there, encased in goo, body bent and twisted at impossible angles. Parts of her were simply gone. The babysitter’s arms and legs were melted to uneven stubs, flesh and bone almost seeming to dissolve away as Sissy watched. Most of her hair was gone, her ears melted off or melded to the side of her face. The skin of her face was disappearing, burning away, dissolving...but there was no smoke, no blood. It was as if the thing was...was...absorbing her. No...the truth sprang to her mind like a jack-in-the-box. The blob was digesting her.

Sissy’s stomach clenched like a fist as she collapsed to her knees. Vomit burst from her like blood from a severed artery, her frantic heaving almost slamming her head to the floor. For nearly a minute her stomach bucked and squeezed, doubling her over. The sudden agony almost blotted the creatures out of her mind. Her insides empty, pain stabbing through her skull, she forced herself upright to stare at the two things. Neither creature moved beyond the gentle quivering. She couldn’t help but watch as what happened to Nell slowly began to happen to her son. Gradually the skin of his face melted away until there was no longer a chubby cheek to caress or a soft forehead to kiss. His exposed, skinless skull was foreign to her. Alien. It was so wrong for a mother to see her child this way.

"Oh God, oh God oh God oh God," she jabbered mindlessly, eyes darting everywhere around the room but always flickering back across the deteriorating form of her son. She seemed to stop breathing as the creature feeding on Michael slowly extended a thin tentacle down the hallway toward her. Sissy continued to blubber but once her eyes focused on the probing stalk she was locked in on its clear, bulbous tip. As the tentacle grew closer she found herself trying to squirm backward, away from the alien thing, but only managed to wedge herself in the corner of the entranceway, her knees pulled to her chest.

It seemed to take forever for the creature’s feeler to reach her, but it stopped, hovering inches from her face. Tears rolled from her eyes as her body began to shake with uncontrollable fear.

"Please please please please pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease," she begged to the thing with no ears to hear her.

The probe shot forward, attaching itself to her left eye. She screamed, grabbing with a desperate strength at the tentacle but her hands couldn’t get a good grip, slipping around the goo of the slender limb. And then like a rainy downpour, countless probes fired down the hall and ensnared her. Her cries were count short with the probe that entered her open mouth and attached to her tongue. And in the shock of the next moment she was suddenly jerked from the floor and was airborne, flying down the short hall. Pictures and paintings blurred by and then just as suddenly she was engulfed, a sudden cold stunning her. Her mouth yawned, wanting to continue to scream but the coldness coursed into her mouth and down inside her, feeling her like an empty glass. She tried to blink but couldn’t, her eyes forced open and staring at the murky floating figure of what once had been her son, now dissolved to something unrecognizable. She tried to reached out toward it but her arm wouldn’t respond. She gagged, her body shuddering at the invasion it had surrendered to.

When the burning began she was nearly unconscious but she felt the ferocious sensation envelop her from the inside and out. Her flesh soon felt like she was one fire but there were no flames, no smoke. The little bit of light she had still been able to realize was quickly taken from her as her eyes seared into excruciating blackness. Sissy screamed in her mind one last long time as she felt herself slip away, becoming less and less what she had been just minutes before and more and more dead.