Live Wire - Paperback

by Kyle Toucher (Author)

A storm is coming...

In 1993 New Mexico, Black Magic and High Tech find common ground in Medusa Engineering's Project Dragonfire―and for one endless October night, a fissure opens between here and Elsewhere...

Live Wire, a horror thriller for science fiction fans, begins with four people sequestered in a desert filling station during a freak thunderstorm. Outside, one-hundred-foot electrical towers―miles and miles of them―uproot and stalk the desert. In tandem arrives The Signal, a dissonant machine language that subverts the human mind...harvesting old guilt, shame, and trauma.

Fifty miles down the road at the Very Large Array, the Medusa Engineering Corporation unleashes Project Dragonfire, a bold technological effort that has summoned a ravenous entity from the very fabric of creation-perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not.

Our ensemble includes Pale Brody and his son Caleb, en route to Austin to start a new life; Ken Lightfeather, an Apache trucker with a .44 on his hip; Kwik Gas proprietor Otis Thompson, who assumes the freak electrical storm has spawned the wandering giants; and fast-thinking Nikki Barlowe, who suspects a parallel, sinister operation―led by shadowy Medusa Engineering executive Armand Jenks―is in play.

High stakes and high octane fuel the incendiary action―mass murder and suicide, AC-130 Spectre gunships engaging the VLA in a brutal firefight, electrical towers pulverizing anything in their path, a massive gridwork of steel and feral energy blocking the only route of escape. Old ghosts and unresolved conflicts plague our characters as the signal interferes with their only task: surviving the onslaught.

The night wears on everyone as the electrical towers converge on the Kwik Gas, and only the end of the circuit reveals the nexus of their power. At dawn on Route 60, a final showdown pits human resolve against brute force and inner horror. Will an ancient, shadowless terror find dominion on Earth?

Live Wire is a tight, electrifying novel filled with action at a massive scale, terrors at the intimate level, and revelations of the Universal. If you like your fire hot, your blood red, and your metal mean, then this horror/science fiction hybrid is for you.

Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing-Tales from the Darkest Depths.