Stephen S. Schreffler
 
On the highway to Hell...
 
Barry and Lich are two high school outcasts living as much of a life as they can in the small town of Grafting, Michigan, circa 1995.
 
Life ain’t great, but it ain’t too bad either. That is, until the Grafting quake hits and a strange man heading a secretive organization shows up with an army of brilliant minds, highly trained mercenaries, and a monster that’s crawled straight from the realm of nightmares. As it turns out, reality is starting to tear, and things from another dimension are starting to pop up—things with really bad intentions. So, when a few popular jocks from the local high school fall victim to a series of brutal murders and all the evidence points to Barry and Lich, their already crazy world is flipped upside down once more. Now on the run from local law enforcement, a secret government agency, and the monstrous manifestation of their own dark desires, the two teens, with the help of some very unlikely allies, must find a way to prove their innocence and save their small town from an evil beyond imagination. 
 
THE BLEED is a direct, alternate-dimension continuation of the short story, "Barry & Lich," first published in the Bram Stoker Award-nominated anthology DARK MATTER PRESENTS: HUMAN MONSTERS.