Dystopian 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....

The story of The Scarlet Plague takes place in 2073 in the San Francisco area, 60 years after an apocalyptic pandemic called the Red Death or Scarlet Plague has depopulated the Earth. James Smith, one of the survivors, lives with his grandsons who are hunter-gatherers in a tribal world. He relates the horror of the plague to them, and tells them of the time when he was a professor of English, and of the start of the pandemic. His grandsons, who are of limited cognitive ability, refuse to believe him; they cannot believe that the disease was spread by germs.

This collection of stories from Goodreads bares the truth of the pandemic in 500 words and more. It exposes the ugly face of the epidemic and the havoc it unleashed on our collective minds. Enjoy the works of eight authors as they depict their version of the epic times we have lived in and survived to tell the tale.

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.

This original short story asks the question, "If eternal life came at the expense of love, would you choose death?"

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.

Kate Enrite lives in the near future where a person's influence score determines what society offers. These influence scores have pervaded social structures to the point that privacy has been outlawed as a hindrance to influence measurement. With nothing to gain from her true identity or lose as a fake, Kate fights to secure what she perceives as a better life. In the process, she will discover how long a person can pretend to be someone they are not before becoming the pretense.

When Sybil's father returns from off-world, he brings the children something they've never seen before, a tree...The Tree - a short story.

Laundrygate: Strange Stories About the Future is an unusual collection of short stories about the unimagined consequences of technology and the creation of new realities. Tery Spataro dreams up these wild, surreal tales and envisions the outcomes brought about by technological change and human curiosity, and imagines post-humanist worlds. The four heroines of Laundrygate experience many themes and challenges caused by these otherworldly environments.