Showing results by publisher "Hobb's End Books" in All Categories

Now that the smoke had cleared, she saw that the bulge had burst open, and was hollow. Reams of tree sap dribbled from its fracture. She stared at it as piano music tiptoed up the hall - Maggie's radio, no doubt - resonating eerily amidst the sterile walls. In addition to strands of weeping willow leaves, there were flowers, ferns, lilies, mushroom stools - she knew they hadn't been there before. Taken together, the branches almost formed a human shape - with shaggy shoulders and a mane of green hair - in profile.

After a devastating time-storm called the Flashback eliminates most the population and recolonizes the world with prehistoric flora and fauna, three boys bearing a powerful talisman set out on an impossible quest. This is an all-new post-apocalyptic adventure for mature young adults set in the same world as Flashback, A Survivor's Guide to the Dinosaur Apocalypse, Ank and Williams, A Reign of Thunder, and The Lost Country.

First came the time-storm, which erased half the population. Then came the Dinosaur Apocalypse...How did it all begin? That depends on where you were and who you ask. In some places it started with the weather - which quickly became unstable and began behaving in impossible ways. In still others it started with the lights in the sky, which shifted and pulsed and could not be explained. Elsewhere it started with the disappearances: One here, a few there, but increasing in occurrence until fully three quarters of the population had vanished.

By the time I’d established a camp in the covered breezeway of the Luxor obelisk - “Cleopatra’s Needle” it was called, at least according to a bronze placard on its wall - and bound her hands and feet, the sun had set and a slight rain had started to fall; something I fully welcomed after so much time in the desert. As to whether the girl welcomed it also, who could say.

The exciting all-new prequel to Flashback and Dinosaur Apocalypse...She slowed, peering through the rain and water running down the glass, noticing something strange amongst the gas pumps - some kind of jib, poking between them like a knife. It was funny, because she hadn’t noticed it earlier - like a black pennant pinned to space itself - its single light showing red, blinking, before lightning flashed and it turned - it, the animal, the thing in the rain - as others just like it turned also, skewing their heads like Egyptian dancers, seeming to focus on her.

It was all too much — the car that had been buried for 52 years yet started right up, the flashback to the 1960s and the ghostly girl, the bugs the size of dogs whose stench filled the cab and caused me to retch. I gripped the door handle instantly — even as the little chrome knob dropped, locking me in. Then we were accelerating — abruptly, powerfully — whipping around the cars in front of us and blasting through the intersection: the girl vanishing, just winking out of existence, the bugs making a sound like crickets but magnified a hundred fold.

There were six of them in total, more than had been present in the bar (not that it mattered, they would have rounded up others, I was sure). The important thing is that it was them — the MAGA crew — of that I had little doubt. Three of them were crowded into the cab while three others rode in the payload — all of them wearing crudely-stitched burlap hoods — and each brandishing some form of weapon, whether that meant a pistol or a rifle or a rusty pitchfork.

“Well, now we are getting somewhere,” says Sula, glancing him up and down, appearing victorious. “But she was not a witch like me, else she would not have done what she did. For that is exactly what happened, isn’t it? Jadis became infected by M24 and slew her own son, and your son too."

I wish I could say that when Benson and his gang showed up we drew on some previously unknown strength and kicked their Rich Kid asses; that we chased them all the way back to their fancy cars and tucked and rolled seats and kicked in their doors and fenders; although we really would do that later, not to them personally but to guys like them, in those dog days immediately after high school - when Orley had yet to join the army and I’d yet to lose my mother, and LA was just a twinkle in Kevin’s eye.

“You don’t remember...do you?” His brown eyes suddenly twinkled, and he shook his head. “No? You don’t remember calling on me in the depths of those first awful nights, when you were at your most exposed, when you were at your most vulnerable?” He stroked her long, brown hair with an almost impossible gentleness; it was as though a cool-warm breeze rifled it rather than his fingers. “When it was just you and the boy...alone, scared. Cold. Hungry?"

Five new tales from the Flashback, from its initial outbreak to its effects months down the road. Featuring characters and situations that will feature prominently later in the saga, Tales is both a prologue and supplement to Flashback Twilight. Essential for fans of the saga....

“Go away!” Williams hissed. He peeked around one of the machines and saw the raptors lined up in the gathering dark, waiting to make their move, waiting to rush the snack bar and overwhelm them, waiting to kill them or worse, to turn them into creatures like themselves.

Naaygi found them waiting for her - as she somehow knew they would be - as the cage doors opened. She even knew somehow what they were: a breed of carnosaur the “evolved” humans had called nanotyrannosaurs, the “Pygmy Tyrants”. And thus she bowed to them and touched her forehead to the pavement, a pavement which ran red with blood and was strewn with the dismembered, disemboweled corpses of at least 50 men and women. And then whispered to them in a language older than words, "Follow me."

The wagon ground to a halt, and there was no time to feel anything, much less fear, as Jeremiah unbuckled and piled out with the others. And yet, as he paused momentarily to take in the building, a strange thing happened. He thought he heard a voice - a woman’s voice, a witch’s voice. And it said to him, as faintly as the cymbals at the start of the music, "Why have you come for us, witch doctor?"

Naaygi found them waiting for her - as she somehow knew they would be - as the cage doors opened, their forward-facing eyes glinting the same hue as the lights in the sky and their dark, storm-colored bodies held absolutely still (even as another animal joined them and brought their number to four). She even knew somehow what they were, that they were a breed of carnosaur the "evolved" humans had called nanotyrannosaurs, the "Pygmy Tyrants", and that one of them, the one with the brand upon its tail, the leader, even had a name - Napoleon.

I stared the thing in the eye and squeezed the trigger. It threw back its head, rising up. It gasped for breath, spitting more blood. It barked at the sky. Then it fell, head thumping against the deck. Its serpentine neck slumped. The rest of its blood spread over the boards and rolled around our boots and flowed between the planks.

He picked up one of the fur coats and helped her into it, then stroked the hair next to her temple, laying his head slowly back against the pillows. He gazed up at the gondola's steel ferro (which loomed above them for the ship was right behind him and the flat-bottomed boat's prow rested well above the waterline), and said, "Take hold of my ship's ferro, Shekalane. And hold on tightly." She looked at the great black and gold ferro, which pointed like a scimitar at the ceiling of the cavern, and its comb of seven tines, six pointing forward and one back, then back at Dravidian.

It’s the dawn of the 1970s. Enter "The Kid", a panic-prone, hyper-imaginative boy whose life changes drastically when his father brings home an astronaut-white El Camino. As the car becomes a catalyst for the Kid’s curiosity, his ailing, over-protective mother finds herself fending off questions she doesn’t want to answer. But her attempt to redirect him only arms him with the tool he needs to penetrate deeper - a pair of novelty x-ray specs - and the Kid comes to believe he can see through metal, clothing, skin - to the center of the universe itself, where he imagines something monstrous growing.

Shekalane looked at him with something akin to pity. "You speak as if Ursathrax were a person. A lover, perhaps." Jamais laughed. "I suppose that's true. It is the hallmark of lonely people, to anthropomorphize. They do it to their pets quite frequently. But that is just one of her secrets...for while not a person same as you or I, she is, I believe, sentient. She is self-aware. Surely you have felt it, on those days when the leaves of the trees rustle even though there is no wind? She is alive...."

It's the dawn of the 1970s, and everything is changing. Enter "The Kid", a panic-prone, hyper-imaginative boy whose life changes drastically when his father brings home an astronaut white El Camino. His birthday arms him with a pair of novelty X-Ray Specs - and as the Camino muscles them through a decade of economic and cultural turmoil, the Kid comes to believe he can see through metal, clothing, skin - to the center of the universe itself, where he imagines something monstrous.