Vaporware (43 page)

Are you laid
off, downsized, undersized?

Call us. We
employ. 1-800-555-0606

How lucky do
you feel?

So
reads the business card from Limbus, Inc., a shadowy employment agency that
operates at the edge of the normal world. Limbus’s employees are just as
suspicious and ephemeral as the motives of the company, if indeed it could be
called a company in the ordinary sense of the word.

In
this shared-world anthology, five heavy hitters from the dark worlds of horror,
fantasy, and scifi pool their warped takes on the shadow organization that
offers employment of the most unusual kind to those on the fringes of society.

One
thing’s for sure – you’ll never think the same way again about the fine print
on your next employment application!

William
(Billy) Burke and William Hare were two real-life, beer-swilling, fist-fighting
lowlifes who managed to stumble their way into infamy in Edinburgh, Scotland in
the late 1820’s. Step by step, they graduated from the unemployment line to
petty thievery, to grave robbing, and then on to cold bloody murder –
ultimately becoming Britain’s first documented serial killers.

What
history doesn’t know about, or consider is the possibility that Burke and Hare
may not have been acting on their own; and the blame for those heinous crimes
might not entirely be theirs. Two mysterious strangers have arrived in the city
– an old sculptor and a stunningly beautiful actress – both of which use their
money and influence to manipulate the young Irishmen into searching for an
ancient artifact rumored to have the awesome power of Heaven and Hell combined.

Seized
by the vicious killings of Jack the Ripper, Victorian London’s, East End is on
the brink of ruin. Elizabeth Covington, desperate and failing to follow in her
beloved father’s footsteps, risks practicing medicine in the dangerous and
neglected Whitechapel District to improve her studies. News of a second brutal
murder spreads. Elizabeth crosses paths with a man she believes is the villain,
triggering a personal downward spiral taking her to a depth of evil she never
knew existed. Only she knows the truth that drives the madness of a murderer.