RYAN MILLER

The Skills
That Pay the Bills

Writing

Short Stories

The Wolf In Fetters

Read the first chapter of my debut novel, The Wolf in Fetters, a gripping and emotional sci-fi thriller for which I am currently seeking representation!

Read Chapter One

The Wolf In Fetters

"Ill fares the wolf who shall ever await
In fetters the fall of the gods"

- Poetic Edda

Galen Brelings knows a thing or two about monsters. He’s slain countless on the battlefield, and now he wrestles his inner demons as he tries to raise his daughter, Mia. Yet nothing prepares him for the monsters he encounters when he takes a job investigating a mysterious military black site: rabid beasts that look like wolves but walk like men. When the operation goes wrong, it releases the creatures and the viral infection they carry. Now, Galen must race to escape the collapse of civilization around him. As he struggles to survive, he must protect both himself and Mia from not only the darkness that consumes the world...but ultimately, the darkness that lurks within himself.

Chapter 1

The nightmares were getting worse. They slithered into Galen’s mind as he laid in the darkness, unable to do anything except see what they forced him to see, feel what they forced him to feel. It always started in Sanaa, in the Old City, on the roof of the casbah overlooking a familiar wasteland of dirt and dead bodies. Galen’s left leg was painted crimson red with clusters of thin slashes scattered everywhere from his ankle to his groin. Every inch of his body shrieked in pain, and as he sat on the rooftop awaiting an extraction, the pain took on a life of its own. It possessed him with a singular focus that drowned out all else: he was going to find the people who did this to him, and he was going to kill them.

He was going to make it hurt.

Galen gripped his Mk 12 rifle with fingertips left cracked and bleeding from the arid desert air. Sweat stung his eyes as he peered through his scope, rotated his head, and desperately searched for a target somewhere in the clutter of sand and wind and fire and corpses. A figure in a balaclava emerged in the distance. Without thinking, Galen fired a round. It struck the figure in the head.

Another emerged, and he shot again.

It didn’t alleviate his pain. It didn’t make him feel any safer. But it did, for a brief moment, scratch the never-ending itch to strike back at the harsh, unforgiving world that wished him dead.