Three hard-boiled short stories of crime and violence set in the technological excess of the 22nd century.Angel: A cybernetic hit-man escapes prison with the help of two strange men and a mysterious benefactor.Gift Horse: A mutiliated criminal kingpin returns to power in the Regional Atlanta Metroplex.Money is Everything: Street gangs hunt a deposed crime boss carrying a case of cash.Mocked. Scolded. Smeared. Betrayed.From an early age, shy nerd girl Autumn Blakewood didn’t know how to fend for herself. Teased and bullied her whole life, she’s withdrawing more and more. Not even her broken family can help her get through high school.Her only friends, Brody and Evie, are both social recluses too, and they seek comfort in each other's support. However, Autumn’s friends can’t always protect her from her malicious classmates who seem set on destroying what’s left of her heart.When Autumn thinks her life can’t get any worse, devastating news rips her family apart. It’s up to her to pick up the pieces of her life and find a way to fix everything. Will she find the courage to fight?

Noose, a genetically engineered dwarf mercenary, is caught in an explosive terrorist attack on a neohuman dance club in Atlanta. Stumbling alone and injured out of the flaming carnage, he embarks on a relentless and violent pursuit of the perpetrators, determined to exact his own brand of 22nd-century vengeance. The year is 2134. The nations of previous centuries are gone, consumed by the United Globe government. Citizens are confined to vast metroplexes while the rest of Earth is restored to wilderness. Neohumans are grown in vats, each type genetically engineered to serve humanity – flawless pleasers for gratification and ecstasy, hulking goons for war and violence, accidental psykers wreaking havoc, and more of any shape and size imaginable. Across the squalid underbelly of the Regional Atlanta Metroplex, through the desert wasteland of the not-so-pristine wilderness, and to the peerless towers of elite society, Noose’s brutal quest for vengeance leaves a wake of destruction and death.**