The crumbs of potting soil trailed from the patio door through the living room, up the carpeted stairs, and down the hall to the back bedroom. The door was open, but inside it was more dark than light, from the closed curtains.
"Hafs?" Chaz called. "Can I come in?"
His heart rate jumped and sweat prickled under his arms. But not because It might be lying in wait for him. He strained his ears for breathing, for movement. He wanted to use the mirror, but he'd made a promise. Even now, he wouldn't use it on her without cause, without telling her.
"Herbs" - Arlington, VA, February 2012
Barry Petrewski lived in a hole in the ground. It was a fairly nice hole, as such things go, with many books, comfortable furniture, and a good kitchen--by Russian standards, a very good kitchen.
An American would have thought it ripe for replacement.
A house stood over Barry's hole, but it was just camouflage for the neighbors who would have thought it odd if Barry lived in a hole without a house over it. Not that the neighbors were close by. Barry's camouflage rose from a sweep of rolling countryside, tangled unworked fields and rows of battered windbreak trees. A tan van with a green plumber's logo occupied the cracked driveway. The bright chrome of its bumpers was pitted with rust, but the engine ran perfectly.
Once upon a time the hole had been a bomb shelter, but the Cold War was as dead as the Soviet Union, as dead as the automaton doctors who had made Barry an automaton too. The irony amused him--how wonderful that he should escape from the Russian automatons and come to rest in a shelter designed to protect people from the excesses of Kruschchev. Now it was Barry's shelter: a place to keep him safe.
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News
February 14, 2010 -We've added a Getting Started page to orient new readers.
February 7, 2010 -Season 3 has begun!
In addition to the regular episode format, The Unicorn Evils is available on the Episodes page as a PDF, a Kindle file, and an epub file that's supported by most ebook readers. We expect to have official Shadow Unit ebooks of all the older material in the next two weeks.
March 29, 2009 - Season 2's extras now have their own page here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), with the Peter Watts provision: Please don't change, remove, or add to the actual prose, at least not without asking first. We put all these words in a specific order for a reason.
The FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit hunts humanity's nightmares. But there are nightmares humanity doesn't dream are real.
The Behavioral Analysis Unit sends those cases down the hall.Welcome to Shadow Unit.
