Passing Time with Ellie Garratt

Passing Time: Nine Short Tales of the Strange and Macabre

Nine dark fiction stories that may just give you nightmares.

A man lives to regret Passing Time. A father will do anything to save his son in Expiration Date. An author finds out her worst nightmare is back in The Devil’s Song. A woman gets more than the claim fee when she takes out vampire insurance in Luna Black.

In Dining in Hell, the Death Valley Diner becomes the wrong place to stop.

A serial killer wants to add another file to his collection in The Vegas Screamer. In Eating Mr. Bone, an undertaker could meet an unfortunate end. A con man meets his first ghost in Land of the Free. And will truth finally be set free in The Letter?

Excerpt from Dining in Hell

I sat down and placed my head in my hands. I didn’t think the situation we’d found ourselves in could get any worse, but I was about to be proved wrong for the second time in one day.

“We should leave,” Callie said. She was staring at me and then at the other patrons of the diner. “They scare me.”

She had not touched the drink she’d been given, and I could see why. The glass may have been clear and shiny once, but now it was worn with age and dirt. It was difficult to see what it contained. It might have been the milk Oleg promised, but whatever the drink, a thin layer of mould floated on top, and it smelt putrefied.

“No,” I said, picking up the glass and placing it at the edge of the table. “We’re going to stay and find out what the hell is going on here because unless I’m very much mistaken these people do know what’s going on. What’s more they had something to do with it.”

“Damn Russians,” Hank declared.

“Okay. This place is like the arse end of a donkey, but I don’t see how these people had anything to do with what started on the other side of America,” Logan said. He was trying to reason and or placate me. It wasn’t working.

“If that is true and they don’t know anything about the plague, why did Oleg laugh at Hank’s questions?” I said.

“No disrespect intended, Hank. But perhaps he thinks we’re a little crazy?” Logan said. “I mean, who’d ever seen a zombie until this week? In a movie, yes, but not for real.”

“Okay. Then tell me why a hand-written message advertising the coming apocalypse is on the restroom wall?”

“A message?” asked Hank.

“Yes.” I recited its contents word for word, and then Hank did something none of us expected – he decided to turn heroic.

About Ellie Garratt
A life-long addiction to reading science fiction and horror, meant writing was the logical outlet for Ellie Garratt’s passions. She is a reader, writer, blogger, Trekkie, and would happily die to be an extra in The Walking Dead. Her short stories have been published in anthologies and online. Passing Time is her first eBook collection and contains nine previously published stories. Her science fiction collection Taking Time will be published later in the year.

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