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“The owner as he crosses the board floor, moving between shelves, past stacked crates and burlap sacks bulging with sugar and flour. “Jessup? It’s Brady! You in back?” The twelve burros crane their scrawny necks in his direction when Brady emerges from the merc. He reaches into his greatcoat, pulls out a tin of Star Navy tobacco, and shoves a chaw between lips and gums gone blackish purple in the last year. “What the hell?” he whispers. When he delivered supplies two weeks ago, this little mining town was bustling. Now Abandon looms listless before him in the gloom of late afternoon, streets empty, snow banked high against the unshoveled plank sidewalks, no tracks as far as he can see. The cabins scattered across the lower slopes lie buried to their chimneys, and with not a one of them smoking, the air smells too clean. Brady is a man at home in solitude, often spending days on the trail, alone in wild, quiet places, but this silence is all wrong—a lie. He feels menaced by it, and with each passing moment, more certain that something.”
― Blake Crouch, Abandon

“The ship lowered.  But whatever the healthy-seeming Meyer didn’t know or couldn’t see about the Astral collective, it didn’t extend to the details of connecting their shuttle to a pit in the ground, beneath the stone arch.”
― Sean Platt, Annihilation

“Sonja!” David called around the hall. “Switch with me.”
― A.G. Riddle, The Atlantis World

“Keep your voice down!’ I warned. ‘The house is asleep.’ ‘Come quick,’ he repeated, though in a lower tone. ‘And bring gun.’ ‘Why?”
― Robert Masello, The Jekyll Revelation