Pamela Love
“Let me show you this recently renovated Victorian.” Ms. North started scrolling through photos. “It’s in great condition and priced to sell. You could move in by—”
“I told you, I need a new build.” I shuddered. “My last apartment was haunted by a murdered tenant. The rent was cheap because her ghost still walks through the place, moaning.”
My realtor gasped. “How terrible! I assure you that nobody has been murdered in any house that I list.”
I shook my head. “You can’t know what’s happened behind someone’s closed doors. Now that I can afford it, I’m going to make sure I’ll never be haunted again.”
I wound up buying a lot and ordering a custom home. My builder had the best safety record in the state. His workers muttered and glanced over their shoulders whenever I showed up to watch the construction, which was often. If only they knew that I didn’t want any accidental deaths on my property, either.
Once the paint was dry, I moved in. I went to bed early, feeling secure at last.
Wailing voices woke me from a deep sleep. Frantic, I switched on my lamp. The yellow walls were throbbing. It turns out you can’t know what’s happened behind closed doors in a paint factory, either…
Pamela Love worked as a teacher and in marketing before turning to writing.
My feet pound across the permafrost, enraged mammoths thundering behind me. Just ahead shimmers the portal. In a swarm of snowflakes, I leap through this doorway back into my time, stumbling as I land.
The scientist throws a switch, cutting off the Ice Age from his lab. He’s saved me from the herd’s vengeance, but I am no safer with him.
“Did you get it?”
Gasping for breath, I try to warm the frosty air in my lungs. Somehow, I find the energy to nod.
He snaps his fingers, a sound I’ve learned to dread. “Well?”
“Sir, I beg you, don’t do this.” With a shudder, I clutch to my chest the package I brought back. Inside is a blood sample I risked my life to take from a woolly mammoth, one containing a disease endemic to that species. It’s a potential bioweapon, one that could kill millions of people.
“Are you defying me?” His voice is more frigid than the era I just fled.
Tears well up in my eyes. I set the package by a row of test tubes. So many people will die, all coughing up blood, which will be on my hands. My own blood runs cold at the thought.
Nevertheless, I obey the scientist. Only the heart he built that pumps within me enables my blood to run at all. He holds its remote control.
Pamela Love worked as a teacher and in marketing before turning to writing.