At Iron Cross Publishing, we publish a wide range of fiction, including young adult, science fiction, horror, and much more (ok, mostly just science fiction and horror). Below is our current catalog of novellas and novels available on Jack Stewart’s Amazon.com author page.
Loser Takes All
My name is Roberto Allen Ackerman, and I am a Loser. I wasn’t always a Loser. In fact, before puberty and the horrific, bodily betrayals that followed, I was one of the popular ones, one of the Elite. But I suffered the fires of biological change poorly and descended into the darkest regions of nerd-dome.
Life is hard when you’re a Loser, and you might think that being a Loser, I had hit rock bottom of the Social Ladder. You would be wrong. I was unwashed, unclean, and unwanted, but I had not completed my transition to an F5 Nerd, a Finger of God Nerd, just yet. It took the first day of school to take that last herculean step into complete rejection.
But no more. I have a Plan, and the Plan begins now. And it starts with Running. Oh, yes, you’re going to have to run again, Roberto. Run, Roberto, run! So, next year will be different. I will reach the top fo the social pyramid. I will be popular. I will be welcomed with open arms into the circle of the Socially Elite because I am a survivor. I am a winner. At least, that was the Plan until the aliens invaded. Or, more accurately, when they moved in down the street from me. In a big U-Haul truck. With their beautiful daughter, Hanna.
***
Stranded in the geek wastelands, banished to the farthest reaches of nerd-dome, betrayed by his own body, Roberto Allen Ackerman, lost in the depths of social rejection begins his long climb out of obscurity. For anyone who has ever been a Loser, this story is for you.
No matter how far you have fallen, there is always a way up.
Like what you see here? Want to read more? Read the first few pages free here or you can buy the book here!
The Great Wreck
Run. Hide. Survive.
Let me tell you about Los Angeles during the initial pandemic. When the infection swept through the major urban centers, non-infected fled to the suburbs, then the exurbs, then the outlands.
This is what it means when millions of people all at once clog transportation systems that were designed in the fifties to carry a few tens of thousands: a vast metal carnage that turned cars into glass-and-steel charnel houses. The resulting mega jam trapped the majority of those people in their cars, trucks, RVs, rattletraps, junk heaps, and whatever else they could climb into as they fled the terror flooding the city.
Let me tell you about the infected: At first, everyone bit was a sprinter. They never got tired, they never got distracted, and they never stopped. It was like they had this crazy radar in their heads, and they could follow living humans until they ran them to ground. Then the feeding would begin, and a new sprinter was born. And they ate their friends, and they ate their friends, and they ate their friends until eight million dead roamed the streets of Los Angeles.
I don’t remember how we picked up James. We survived by blind luck, managing to make it out of whatever house, hotel, gas station, or shack that was our temporary refuge until the dead found a way in. Then one day, through the Brownian terror of running and hiding, we picked up James.
James was a sociopath and a serial killer, the worst kind of human being—if he was human at all. But we had to get out of Los Angeles, the Great Wreck and assumed anyone living was better than the dead. We’d find out later how wrong we were. But we packed up our gear and headed into the vast open furnace of the Southwest, a burning, rotting graveyard, searching for a place where people had made a refuge from the horror of the Old World, somewhere that we could put our lives back together.
There in the Great Southwestern Outback, we heard of a place in New Mexico, high up in the mountains and far above the death, terror, and insanity below. It was called Sandia, and the only things that stood between us and it were 800 miles of the harshest desert in the world and about ten million dead. So we headed east, wondering what might kill us first: the dead or James.
Like what you see here? Want to read more? Read the first few pages free here, or you can buy the book here!
The Notice
Before the Notice, only two things mattered in a teenager’s social life: looking good and being popular. Sounds simple, right? Not so fast there, Mr. or Ms. Clearly-I’m-Popular. To look good, you had to have two things: good looks (duh) and good clothes. You could be born with good looks (lucky you), apply enough makeup to fake good looks (talking to the ladies), be so good at sports that people mistook you for having good looks (talking to the males now), or be so grossly rich and funny that your peers overlooked your Elephant Man-like deformities. But since we’re talking about teenagers here (aka social velociraptors), that last one is really, really unlikely.
Now, to have good clothes, you had to have money and a sense of style. Teens (especially males) rarely have either. They are therefore forced to rely on their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, paper routes, pet trafficking, Internet scams, or black market organ sales for money. To acquire a sense of style, the would-be Prom King/Queen must turn to teenage Pop Culture Oracles (Internet, movies, television, etc.), older and more style-conscious siblings, or whatever fashion sense he/she can absorb through social osmosis.
Not as easy as you thought, right? Still interested in being popular? Then let’s recap: Having good looks is the prerequisite for being popular. Having good clothes is also required, but might not get you to Popularity Nirvana by itself. Having a lot of money helps get both, but it is not an absolute guarantee of popularity. Having all three—good looks, good clothes, and lots of money—is the Trifecta of Good Fortune. God clearly has smiled upon you and guaranteed you popularity.
I was not good-looking. I did not have good clothes. My parents were not rich. So, in short, I was not popular.
But after the Notice, those of us still slogging our way through the Teenage Proving Grounds of junior high and high school found out that being popular might not be the Sole Defining Purpose of our young lives that we were taught to believe. The Notice showed us that the crucial things in life happened out in the adult world while we were playing in a safe sandbox as we prepared for adulthood. What would happen over the next few weeks would force us to grow up far faster than we ever had imagined.
Let’s start at the beginning.
Like what you see here? Want to read more? Read the first few pages free here, or you can buy the book here!
Titan Asylum
God, he hated Titan. Brown air, mudflats, and living machines everywhere you turn. The people who call it home were a chaotic mix of synthetic humans, cybernetic newborns, organic robotica, intelligent robots, and white trash mecha. You name it, and it walks, crawls, or rolls across the surface of Titan, a Rube Goldberg society of flesh and metal ruled by a minority of elite, pure humans called the Belet Monarchy.
And this is where Aján Damek Garrick finds himself, locked in a hospital room and wrapped in a straitjacket. What a fuck up. Trapped in a machine asylum surrounded by insane doctors and crazier nurses intent on tearing out his mind, stripping him down to his basic programming, and relieving him of his delusions of being a human. But he’d been here before, and he would escape. Easy peasy, Japanesy. Except the Japanese don’t exist anymore, and the way they went out was anything but easy. So maybe it would be easy peasy Siamese. Except they were gone
Seven times and counting, he had been here, and it had only cost him an eye, two legs, and his left arm. He guessed that his right one might be next. But that was the least of Garrick’s problems. He did not know what he was anymore. Was he a machine? Or was he human? He used to know. He used to be sure. Then he came to Titan. It all began here and, if he was sure of anything, it would all end here.
The doctors told him that he had post-traumatic stress disorder and needed to focus on his Ten Steps to Recovery. Admitting that he had a problem was the first step.
So fuck you, Titan, Garrick thought, I have a problem.
Like what you see here? Want to read more? Read the first few pages free here, or you can buy the book here!
Year of the Dead
Run. Shop. Survive. A girl has got to have her priorities, right? What did you think I’d do at the end of the world? Hide? Blow that. You can huddle up in your basement, find a bomb shelter, or God forbid, go to Burbank, all you want, but since all bets are off, I’m going to do things my way.
So first, I like to sleep in the nude. Having clothes on at night makes me feel itchy, dirty. And usually, my clothes are covered with the gore of the dead that I have killed. So there’s that. At the end of a long day of scrambling through the Great Wreck, of putting as many bullets in as many of the heads of the undead that I can, and swinging a bat until my arms feel like lead, I strip off all of my clothes and throw them out of the tenth story window of the small apartment building I’ve been using as my base. I have quite the pile at the bottom of the tower, but with all the trash and debris clogging up the streets below, I don’t think anyone will notice. And if they do, who cares? It’s just a bunch of tee shirts, skirts, and jeans that any of the hundreds of thousands of teenage girls used to wear before everything collapsed into a pile of rubble, technically dead, and flames. I wake up the next day, pull on a long sleeve shirt and jeans or sometimes a skirt if I’m feeling frisky and do it all again. For six months, I’ve been doing this. Six months from the day I turned sixteen.
***
Follow Cerra Romero, a teenage ass-kicker survivalist in this hilarious and dark spin-off of The Great Wreck as she chops, hacks, and shoots her way across the L.A. basin and into the hearts of zombie fans everywhere.
Like what you see here? Want to read more? Read the first few pages free here, or you can buy the book here!
Land of the Dead
Let’s start at the beginning—except this is book two, so we’re really starting in the middle, and since you’re probably part of the “want it all now, digital natives, don’t have time to read the first book, everyone gets a prize” generation, I’ll be repeating things that the Old Fuckers from Generation X (i.e., in their forties and essentially walking dead already but took the time to actually read the first book) have already heard.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, I turned sixteen just in time for the world to end and the dead to start walking. I spent the next year surviving in the Great Wreck that was the L.A. Basin, until a big fat earthquake convinced me that I should move to a place where the world was not conspiring to bury me under mounds of rubble and I only had to worry about the dead. So I grabbed my shit and started walking east hoping to find Sandia Station rapidly discovering that the Southwest is nothing but a vast, hot, fat, stinking load of desert.
Along the way to New Mexico I’d find Miss Dead Teen U.S.A., the strange dead holed up in a Piggly Wiggly, a “secret” military base filled with half-crazy soldiers, a cult of the dead, and the one and only Mr. Carl Spencer. And zombies. Lots of zombies. Fancy that.
Follow Cerra Romero, a teenage ass-kicker survivalist in this hilarious and dark spin-off of the Great Wreck as she chops, hacks, and shoots her way across the American Southwest and into the hearts of zombie fans everywhere.
Like what you see here? Want to read more? Read the first few pages free here, or you can buy the book here!