Apocalyptic Short Stories

Jennifer Benton has made it through the zombie apocalypse and has fallen in love with Mark, the charismatic leader of a group of fellow survivors. He's brought them from Illinois to hoped-for shelter at his family's Texas ranch, only to discover it destroyed. The survivors have one more chance when Mark befriends Todd in a nearby refugee camp; he invites the group to fly with him to his wealthy family's home in Oklahoma. But what's inside Todd's house may be worse than the zombies outside. And now Jennifer has more than Mark and herself to worry about....

One year after the Shattering and the great collapse, survivors in Columbus, Ohio, are barely holding things together. Then, on December 24, when all seemed lost, a new hero appears, and he is determined to protect all the children of the Earth.

Safety lights are out, oxygen production has halted, and her partner is out of reach on the nearby moon. Shannon is stuck on this frozen, lifeless rock 4.2 light-years from home, on a planet known simply as Proxima g. She’s racing against time to repair the broken life-support system so her wife, son, and all the other refugees from Earth don’t arrive to a useless habitat that’s succumbed to the harshness of space. But there’s more to this situation than meets the eye, and with each step she takes the mystery only deepens.

Some said the world would end in the cold. Some said the world would end in a fire. Some said when there was no more room in hell the dead would rise up to devour the living. Nobody thought it would be because of the corn.

Existence Augmented is a dystopian sci-fi novelette and psychological thriller. The world outside is cold, hostile, and virtually lifeless. Human existence depends on sophisticated, technological living compounds. The people who don’t have them, once driven to theft and murder, are believed to be long since dead. Alden, a genius of physical and computer engineering, spends his time tending his hydroponics garden, maintaining and improving the complex systems critical to survival, and, in turn, continually refining the pleasant life he’s created with his wife, Laurel. Everything is following Alden’s plans until the power begins to fail....

It was well after dark when Matt Matthews got back down to the headquarters camp, and saw the city stranger sitting there before the fire. He knew he was a city man after a single glance at the shiny, low-topped shoes and the reminiscence of a crease in the dusty trousers. Matt tossed the gophers and the two small coyotes off his broad shoulders to old Moe Arhelger, across the campfire, staring in suspicious silence from the stranger to Moe and back again. "Who's he?" he asked finally.

She's a hacker with a disabled son, living in a martial state. The future looks dark, with no promise of relief from the tyranny, and when her son's life is threatened, the mother must fight back using whatever means necessary.

A small group of survivors battle a post-apocalyptic landscape that is void of plant life. Hunger plagues the few remaining human survivors. The world has been pillaged and scavenging for food has become the lifeblood of survival, but starvation is now on the horizon for these fellow travelers. Many have taken to cannibalism, but this group has managed to survive without going quite so far. While scavenging, they first come across a woman, and shortly after, her child. They capture them and debate their options. In order to satisfy their burning hunger, they must first lose their humanity. Some will win, all will lose.

Sergeant is my first name, and it happens to be my rank as well. I was born into - and because of - this war...but that's another story. My particular interest in the military hovered near zero for most of my life, but like everyone else in my , we were drafted into service. There was never a time during the war that I didn't want to stay alive, either, so I fought. At first, I fought selfishly for my own life, and then for my squad and platoon, and finally for the individuals I served with. It was a circuitous route, and probably just a little self-centered, but it led me here.

In this short story, meet John Chase before the V Plague apocalypse. He is part of the US Army's Delta Force. In Crucifixion: V Plague, Book 2, he mentions a flashback to running through a Central American jungle with Spetsnaz in pursuit. This is that story. Note that this is a short story and does not need to be listened to in any particular sequence with the V Plague series.

The new coronavirus, which originated in China, has spread to Japan. An American expatriate journalist residing in Tokyo, Japan finds himself caught in between the zombies, as he catches up with his military expatriate buddy. The American expatriates, William and Cooper, overcome the sudden surprise of deadly zombies and also makes an encounter with the Japanese mafia.

Generations after a bloody nuclear civil war, the United States is not as we know it. The inhabitants of the Northern states live as normal, but the South, after being decimated during the Second Civil War, are a changed people. Nuclear fallout has stolen any vestige of humanity. When the aircraft carrying the President of the Northern United States takes an erroneous detour, it is shot down somewhere over the south.

Bill Stein and his wife Mary had just recently moved back to Germany on Bill's parent's farm due to their passing. Little did Bill and his wife know that the lake on his parent's farm contained a small army of Nazi soldier's that met their fate during World War II on the farm, and that their final resting place was at the bottom of the lake Bill's father never told his son about the dead Nazi soldiers in his lake because he didn't want him to have nightmares, but days after moving into his parent's farm Bill noticed a green foam on the surface of the lake.

This is a short story about two people in love at the end of the world and the beginning of another. It was written on the last day of the year 2014.

In desperation, mankind constructs a rescue spaceship to escape a doomed planet. But will it save them? Or will they discover a secret that unravels everything they've ever believed to be true? A science fiction short story that will challenge you and have you thinking for days after you listen to it. Originally part of the anthology A Plague of Dreams, and it exists in a forest I call "Dreamwood Tales".

During the 1700's, Blackbeard's ship, the Queen Anne's Revenge ran aground at the entrance to Beaufort inlet and wasn't discovered until hundreds of years later. During an expedition of the sunken ship, something went terribly wrong, but the effects of that incident would not be felt until years later when a barrel of an unknown substance was tossed overboard during the expedition. The barrel took several years to erode, but when it did that's when all hell broke loose.

Life is but a dream, a construct, an illusion of our minds. Space monkey to earth, over. No response, it's all inside my head. The moment before the moment, when I decided to be someone else, someone better. It's all a lie...Natasha is my witness. My head hurts, where am I? I don't remember how I got here. Perhaps, this is just a dream or something else. Perhaps a nightmare? Wake up, wake up little man. Reality is about to smash you against the wall.

Only Alpha can fix this. Alpha and Kyle have toiled all day to carefully construct the perfect dinner date for Tina, whose crippling depression has bedridden her for months. Why is Tina so miserable, and why does she place so much blame on Alpha, whose dominance of humanity has solved all of the world's problems? Throughout the course of the evening, logic clashes against depression. Rationalizations against uncompromising morality. Love against revenge.

A woman who has resorted to becoming an escort to survive in the year 2013 - after a nuclear bomb has wiped out about 40 percent of the city's population - has bad dreams of a phantom killer who attacks her in her sleep....

Twin brother and sister Hugo and Lila sit on the corner of Main Street while the world around them burns.