Apocalyptic Short Stories

From the author of the Hugo-winning Six Months, Three Days, a new wrinkle on the old story of three wishes, set after the end of the world.

Five tales of dragons are included within this special Young Adult fantasy collection. The overall theme is dragons and features a sample of J.E. Feldman’s work. There are no triggers. Inferno A time traveling grandma and her granddaughter discover the true cause behind the burning of the Library of Alexandria. The Loch Legend An orphaned teenager harboring a secret of her own discovers the Loch Ness legend is real, but can she trust her new family with the truth? Instinct Vaccines made from dragon shifter blood turns the world into apocalyptic chaos and there’s no promise of surviving ...

The Event causes the failure of every electronic device in the town. Suddenly, the ageing Vietnam War veteran Jimmy Spears doesn’t seem as crazy as many people had assumed him to be as he built a life around concepts of self-sufficiency and minimal dependence on state support structures.

By the 22nd century in the African nation of Kenya, polluted cities sprawl up the flanks of sacred Mount Kirinyaga. Great animal herds are but distant memories. European crops now grow on the sweeping savannas. But Koriba, a distinguished, educated man of Kikuyu ancestry, knows that life was different for his people centuries ago - and he is determined to build a utopian colony, not on Earth, but on the terraformed planetoid he proudly names Kirinyaga.

Origins of the Outbreak follows the chain of infection from one person to another after a university researcher in a small Texas town unwittingly develops a disease that turns its victims into zombies and threatens to destroy the world as we know it.

An errant encounter with a passing star has flung Earth away from its old Solar System into the dark and cold of deep space. With the entire atmosphere frozen as chemical snow dozens of feet deep, one last family struggles to survive. But what are they to think when they see figures moving in the city ruins? Are Earth's dead coming back to life?

Following the events of Planet of the Dead, survivors of the expanding outbreak take shelter in homes and bunkers and apartment complexes. Across the world, armed police and military struggle to maintain safety. Tensions mount as the worst imaginable comes to pass when nuclear weapons are used on civilian populations overrun with the living dead.

It's 2085, the time of the Great Affliction. Continents are burning, land is disappearing, and humanity is destroying itself as mass shootings and suicides wipe out the population. To Marjaana Salonen, the solution is found in high technology. By integrating the human brain with a sophisticated computer chip, she believes she can bring new hope to society. Her invention was supposed to fix it all, but Salonen's daughter has her own ideas. To Laura, her mother's invention is an opportunity to impose her own vision on the world—the promise of a new reality that is far more sinister.

A man and a dog walk through a ruined world, fighting monsters. Is everything as it seems?

Earth as a new Dungeon World means opportunities and dangers galore. One of the enduring aspects of the System is the Shop, an interdimensional series of stores that compete for the opportunity to service clients and make a profit doing so. New clients on a new Dungeon World mean rare and heretofore unseen items and massive profits. No surprise that the vultures have arrived, searching for easy marks.

Van Dorn is 18 and running solo, dodging the bloodthirsty hordes and militias that have emerged since the country went haywire. His dead father's voice rings in his head as Van Dorn sets his sights not just on survival but also on an old-fashioned system of justice. Meanwhile, a leader has risen among the gangs - and around him swirls the cast of brawlers from Donnybrook, with their own brutal sense of right and wrong, of loyalty and justice through strength. This is not the distant post-apocalyptic future - this is tomorrow, in a world Bill has already introduced us to.

The Philip K. Dick Award-winning debut short story collection from Sarah Pinsker, author of the Nebula Award-winning A Song for a New Day. Pinsker has shot like a star across the firmament with stories multiply nominated for awards as well as Sturgeon and Nebula award wins. The baker's dozen stories gathered here (including a new, previously unpublished story) turn listeners into travellers to the past and the future, and explorers of the weirder points of the present.

A collection of short, disgusting, and mentally disturbed zombie stories for the Internet age. Concise, bittersweet, and stomach-churning, this collection of disgusting, horrifying, and psychological thriller-based zombie stories is the result of a challenge. One night, Kyle Clements and I decided we should write a novella. We came up with the idea of writing stories based on a weekly challenge. The stories that came out of the challenge are the most terrifying, depraved, sincere, and utterly unreadable works we could have hoped for.

A hundred years ago, there was a cataclysm. Maybe a biological weapon was set off, or a parasite evolved...honestly, no one really cares any more. What matters is that the parasite was airborne, infectious, and could live in any warm-blooded creature. Those affected are driven insane and mutate, becoming a threat to those around them.

They thought the superflu that was attacking the nation was bad until they realized the state-mandated vaccine was worse! Joshua Miller is not what you would call "a nice guy." Having served fifteen years of a life sentence for multiple homicides during a bank robbery "gone wrong", he finds his freedom following a state-mandated vaccine which is supposed to eradicate the new superflu is flawed and ends up turning people into blood-hungry beasts. During his escape from the prison, he promises a friend that he will find their daughter and keep her safe. Worrying about the creatures as well as...

Jim travels to northern Michigan to decompress and deal with his feelings in a rustic log cabin owned by his deceased girlfriend's family. Not only is the cabin off the grid, it is a place of peace and solitude, that is, until the Ebola virus is unleashed upon the USA. In a panic, the CDC and the FDA release a vaccine that's only just started testing.... Now the infected roam the world, and even in northern Michigan, Jim isn't safe. He eagerly awaits Janie's family to join him; they are preppers, who may be the key to his survival, and they are the only family he has left.

To be born underground, in the dark, never to see the surface. That seemed to be Loreto’s fate. Born nearly half a century after the world had been destroyed by total, global, nuclear war one young man must find his destiny. He must learn what it means to be himself. Destined to become a Topsider, will he walk upon the surface? Will he be one of the brave few who work to usher humanity back to Earth’s population? Find out in Loreto: An Earth Has Fallen Short Story. See Loreto Rucker’s humble beginnings as he grows into the young man we will meet in Servidio’s Earth Has Fallen Post-...

This collection of five short stories touches on themes and topics throughout the genre including zombies, superheroes, artificial intelligence, and the changing role of birthdays in the future. "Billy and the Zombies" is a story about a boy who spent most of his life preparing for a zombie apocalypse and now has to deal with one in real life. "Mom's Special Day" talks about an indeterminate future where birthdays have a much different meaning than they do today. "The Trial of WLQC-73" discusses what happens when we create computers that are as human as we are with all of our faults and failings. "The Heist" is a story about a future where Superheroes aren't as clean cut as our comic books show them to be. "Chance Encounters" describes what happens when a simple misunderstanding spirals out of control.

For years, writers and filmmakers have speculated about the possibility of the Earth being invaded by aliens from another planet. But what if the aliens have been watching us, infiltrating us via human collaborators or even surgically altering themselves to look human?

The survivors of a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that has devastated the electrical grid are trying to cope in a darkened world as society collapses. It's the morning of day seven in this post-apocalyptic world and from the news on the radio it appears WWIII has already begun. How long until the batteries in the radios and flashlights fail? How long until a light in the night or the sound of a generator running signals not hope and coping but a target for the desperate and unprepared?