Apocalyptic Short Stories

THE DARK ROUTES A young boy’s best friend disappears into a fast-food restaurant playland ball pit never to be seen again. Something is stolen from a secret government lab that will quite literally change everything. Donned in a trench coat, a disgruntled youth grabs a bulky duffle bag and drives into the fierce storm of his destiny with an unwanted passenger. Two cowboys are tasked with finding the rustlers responsible for missing cattle. What they find in the harsh Wyoming mountains is anything but a rustler. Two boys run into a dark evil on the back streets of a Jamaican tourist town. ...

No communication. Limited power. An unbreakable will to survive. A violent blast of solar magnetic radiation plunges much of Earth into darkness. From the decaying orbit of the powerless ISS to a devolving Southeast Texas neighborhood and a secret doomsday bunker buried deep underneath the Colorado Rockies, The SpaceMan Chronicles tells the story of a stranded astronaut, his family and friends on the ground, and a shadowy conspiracy to rebuild the world in the shape of a new society.

El sol se está muriendo, y la Tierra, consumida por los últimos suspiros de esta estrella, también desaparecerá. Pero la humanidad, en lugar de abandonar el planeta, construye doce mil grandiosos motores de fusión para desorbitar la Tierra y propulsarla hacia Próxima Centauri en un viaje que durará siglos....

William and his friends have battled scores of the diseased and left communities behind them on their journey to find what lies south of the wall bisecting the country. They’ve lost loved ones and overcame many challenges, but they’ve never faced an obstacle as great as the one before them: the wall, steel, sheer, and 200 feet tall—an insurmountable barrier designed to separate the north and south. Their dream should stop here, but the group has a plan to get to the other side, and it might just work.

This collection from grand master Robert A. Heinlein includes five short stories sure to please science fiction fans everywhere. The title story tells the tale of a young man who meets a time-traveling bartender whose origins - and relation to the young man - are more complex and stranger than the Ouroboros ring on the barkeep's finger.

The living dead are more alive than ever! Zombies have become more than an iconic monster for the 21st century: They are now a phenomenon constantly revealing as much about ourselves - and our fascination with death, resurrection, and survival - as our love for the supernatural or post-apocalyptic speculation. Our most imaginative literary minds have been devoured by these incredible creatures and produced exciting, insightful, and unflinching new works of zombie fiction.

Broken Stories is a compilation of short stories and novelettes that accompanies the Broken World series. From California to Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Colorado, listeners will get a glimpse at what other people went through before, during, and after the zombie virus outbreak. Some of the characters featured in these stories have close ties to the main characters in the Broken World series, while others are brand-new.

The complete Phase Titan series in one collection. Ethan didn’t choose to sleep through the apocalypse. He didn’t ask to be bioengineered into a Psy-wielding warrior or for the unexpected allies destined to bond their lives to his. He faces an alien infestation run amok and an extermination order that would kill all life on Earth just to stop him from growing stronger. In a changing world rife with threats, Ethan needs his strength and the wits of his beautiful companions if he hopes to save humanity.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. George Orwell once wrote of a world where abuse of power begins with an abuse of language and a bastardization of truth. Some of today's most exciting voices in speculative fiction explore the ramifications of those ideas in Ignorance Is Strength.

The world has been brought to its knees by the “zombie virus”. Nations have fallen, cities have been overrun by the infected, and the human race has come perilously close to extinction. But with the first winter come and gone, the infected have been reduced to not much more than a background nuisance, and survivors around the world are taking stock and vowing to rebuild and rise up stronger, better, and unafraid.

A glittering landscape of twenty-five speculative stories that challenge oppression and envision new futures for America - from N. K. Jemisin, Charles Yu, Jamie Ford, G. Willow Wilson, Charlie Jane Anders, Hugh Howey, and more.

Famine. Death. War. Pestilence. These are the harbingers of the biblical apocalypse, of the End of the World. In science fiction, the end is triggered by less figurative means: nuclear holocaust, biological warfare/pandemic, ecological disaster, or cosmological cataclysm. But before any catastrophe, there are people who see it coming. During, there are heroes who fight against it. And after, there are the survivors who persevere and try to rebuild. THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH will tell their stories. Edited by acclaimed anthologist John Joseph Adams and bestselling author Hugh Howey, THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH is a series of three anthologies of apocalyptic fiction. THE END IS NIGH focuses on life before the apocalypse. THE END IS NOW turns its attention to life during the apocalypse. And THE END HAS COME focuses on life after the apocalypse.

A shopping mall where droids sell organs harvested from street trash. A murderous imaginary friend. A psychotic composer drafting music from pain. All in a day's work for the Lawman of the Future. Edited by and with an introduction by Dredd veteran Michael Carroll, Judge Fear's Big Day Out and Other Stories gathers the very best short stories from more than a decade of the Judge Dredd Megazine, including stories by legends Alan Grant, Gordon Rennie and Simon Spurrier, among countless others.

The new post-apocalyptic collection by master anthologist John Joseph Adams, featuring never-before-published stories and curated reprints by some of the genre's most popular and critically-acclaimed authors. Whether the end comes via nuclear war, pandemic, climate change, or cosmological disaster, these stories explore the extraordinary trials and tribulations of those who survive.

You can't kill the dead! Like any good monster, the zombie has proven to be ever-evolving, monumentally mutable, and open to seemingly endless imaginative interpretations: the thralls of voodoo sorcerers, George Romero's living dead, societal symbols, dancing thrillers, viral victims, reanimated ramblers, video-gaming targets, post-apocalyptic permutations, shuffling sidekicks, literary mash-ups, the comedic, and, yes, even the romantic.

A bounty hunting survivor. A Galactic dark elf. A woman who has given up her humanity to become something more. These stories and more are available in the first short story anthology for the System Apocalypse, covering year one on Earth. When the world ends, humanity steps up, finding new ways to survive in a world with classes, magic, and monsters. The anthology features exciting, new stories by five new writers and a new, never publicly released short story by Tao Wong.

If it wasn’t for bad luck, some of us wouldn’t have any luck at all. Old saying, sure, but boy is it true when it comes to Adrian Ring’s zombie apocalypse. Welcome to Dead Lucky; an anthology of 12 tales set in the world of Adrian’s Undead Diary.

Famine. Death. War. Pestilence. These are the harbingers of the biblical apocalypse, of the End of the World. In science fiction, the end is triggered by less figurative means: nuclear holocaust, biological warfare/pandemic, ecological disaster, or cosmological cataclysm. But before any catastrophe, there are people who see it coming. During, there are heroes who fight against it. And after, there are the survivors who persevere and try to rebuild. "The Apocalypse Triptych" will tell their stories.

Three audiobooks from the Coilhunter Chronicles: Coilhunter, Rustkiller, and Dustrunner. Welcome to the Wild North, a desolate wasteland where criminals go to hide - if they can outlast the drought and the dangers of the desert. Or the dangers of something else.

In this 2024 re-release, the apocalypse has ended for Adrian Ring, and the rebuilding of the world has begun. But have all the stories of the old world's death been told? Elsewhere on Earth, there is a plane filled with innocents, and a criminal could wipe it from the skies with a tide of undeath. A young man in Manhattan is going mad with hunger and fear. A veterinarian races to save her animal patients, and their owners, one by one. A drunk lunatic is driven to self-destruction, craving the undead horde and the absolution they will give him.