Winery Bay is a quiet, seaside town, until the morning that Dr. Cole receives a strange patient into his small private office. His medical assistant, after taking the patient's pulse, experiences a sharp drop in body temperature and leaves for home, along with all the other employees, inexplicably disturbed by this new mystery patient.
Before long, the whole town starts behaving weirdly. For some odd reason, everyone becomes addicted to smoking. This is the beginning of a bizarro alien invasion.
Stephen Beam is a native Californian. For many years he was a video game artist, starting out freelancing, then later employed full time at Interplay Entertainment. He created game art as diverse as Nintendo's Mario Brothers to realistic Star Trek worlds. He moved on to work as a graphic artist and web designer, creating games and presentations for various government services such as the Long Beach MWD and many VA hospitals around the country. He is now writing bizarre mixed genre fiction.