Cooley has been invisible for five years. He knows which benches to sit on, and how people's eyes slide off the space where he is, and he's made a kind of peace with being a ghost in the shadow of the towers.

Then, on a road he had no business walking, he hears something moving in a vacant lot off Sugar Creek — and finds out what it costs to be the one person who stopped.

A short story set in a near-future Charlotte, where the ambulance doesn't come until somebody's account clears.

Written and read by Seth Ervin.

Exile

In the world outside, survival isn't salvation.

Two years after his family's farm fell, a boy and his hound survive alone in the mountains — foraging, hiding, and carrying the weight of everything that was lost getting out. Then something falls from the sky that shouldn't exist, and the world he's been hiding from comes looking for him.

A story about grief, faith, and what it costs to keep going when the people who taught you how are gone. Written and narrated by Seth Ervin.

Part of Strange Country — speculative fiction from the edge of the familiar. New stories monthly, every one narrated.

A trader works the floor of a market where memories are the only commodity that matters — bought, held, shorted, resold to anyone wired in. The job is a windfall. The apartment, the lover, the luck: all of it arrived at once, like a gift. A near-future story about gratitude as a product, and the long con of getting exactly what you want.

Contains war content and strong language.

A long-haul trucker drives the night shift on I-85 with a dead friend riding shotgun and a war starting back up on the radio. Max has pills for the panic attacks, an audiobook on meaning, and a phone call home he's not ready to make. Then a stranger dies in his arms at a truck stop, and the bill for someone else's kid comes due.

Four years before the Turning. A story about debt, ghosts, and the math of going back.

Faithful has been tending the dead at Memorial Acres for longer than most people have been alive. He digs the graves, witnesses the grief, and protects and keeps the grounds. The world and its grief continue to change, and so does Faithful.

John Franklin has surrounded his farmhouse with homemade landmines. In the post-Turning, only one thing matters - survival. The Union has fallen and Amity has arisen with its mutated human-hunting drones. John has done all he can do to prepare. To survive. To watch the road for what might be coming.