The September/October EQMM takes readers on thrilling action-packed adventures. In “It’s Not Even Past” by Anna Scotti, WITSEC participant Cam Baker (whose identity is at risk) is on the road, and in “Green and California Bound” by Curtis Ippolito, one of this issue’s several car chases finds a couple attempting to start over in a pandemic-impacted world. William Burton McCormick’s “Balloon” finds Santa Ezeriņa in a life-and-death situation miles above the ground, while in “Five Hat Minimum” by David Knadler (Black Mask), a Marine veteran is at dangerous odds with a local gang.

The Siren: 1999
by Joyce Carol Oates

Shouts, laughter. A crashing sound of trash cans overturned in the street.

Some sort of dispute that spills into the vestibule of the rooming house at 229 East Union Street, Oriskany, New York. In his room on the second floor overlooking the street he is determined to ignore.

Twenty years old, just slightly older than most other first-year students at the State University at Oriskany, New York. He’s saving money by living not on campus (as he would have liked, would so have liked to seem like any other undergraduate with a stable family, any family at all) but at the seedy end of East Union in a neighborhood of old once-dignified single-family brick houses partitioned into rooms for low-income residents most of whom are foreign graduate students. READ MORE

Death and Omens in the Great Library
by Thomas K. Carpenter

The last time an eclipse haunted the skies above Magistrate Ovid, thirty-eight nobles had been slaughtered in the streets of Rome to appease the gods, so it was with some hesitation that Ovid found himself at the Great Library during the latest celestial event. As a young man at his father’s side, he’d been required to watch the soldiers strike the nobles in turn: The wet thunk of the hammer echoing through the streets, occasionally interspersed with the sobbing of family. The event was a firm reminder that even the lives of nobles were subject to the whims of gods and emperors. READ MORE