Paul Stiles is spending his Saturday morning mowing his lawn, when his next door neighbor dies a peculiar and spectacular death on Paul’s front lawn. Paul knows something terrifying is happening, but he doesn’t realize that it’s the beginning of a war of survival for humanity.
Islamic terrorists have paid rogue Russian scientists to create a plague of genetically created “bugs”, and have turned them loose on the free world, intending to kill the “infidels” of the world. But they didn’t take into account the unintended repercussions of these new creatures, like rapid breeding, or massive growth, or…using humans as both food and reproductive incubators.
As the world is quickly taken over by these “bugs”, Paul leads a group of survivors into the Rocky mountains, hoping against hope to find a way to combat the creatures…as long as they can stay away from those that have empty eyes.
But will that be enough to save humanity?
Find out in T. M. Bilderback’s first non-song-inspired novel, Empty Eyes.
Genre: FICTION / HorrorBook released October 24,2014. This is the first story that I've written that wasn't based on a classic song.
This story has already been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian.
I cannot express the deep, incapacitating horror and loss of hope that I feel right now. The situation in which I find myself is terribly troubling, and may spell the end…perhaps not the end of humanity, but the end of all things normal.
I’m sorry; I’m beginning this story at the end. Let me start over.
I don’t know when it all started, but I know when I encountered the first signs. I was at home on a Saturday morning in September, mowing my lawn. We have no gated community, nor do we have a homeowner’s association. It’s a good thing, too, because they wouldn’t like me very much. I don’t worry about keeping my grass a quarter inch high, and I don’t make “stripes” in the lawn when I mow it. I just wait until it’s shaggy, then I cut it back a little to make it fairly presentable.
My neighbor, Ralph Johnson, is just the opposite. Ralph obsesses over his lawn. Crabgrass is nonexistent on his lawn, and daffodils don’t dare to spawn new bulbs anywhere except a flower bed. I’ve actually seen Ralph on his hands and knees, ruler in hand, measuring his front lawn. He spends hours each Saturday with a lawn mower, a weed eater, and a pair of pruning shears. I’ve never seen anyone else as concerned over his lawn.
Ralph and his wife live on the corner of Maple and Oak. My family lives next door to them, on Maple Avenue.
We are not close.
Ralph and I have had “discussions” over my lawn care habits that have reduced themselves to carefully crafted witty insults regarding everything lawn related, including the one I zinged him with concerning going back and fertilizing his own lawn with the bullshit he was spitting out.
