Featured Story

• "The Holes Where Children Lie" by Patricia Anthony
  "At his feet his wife digs diligently with the trowel. The yard is a dense pattern of holes, as if squirrels have been at war with tiny mortars. "It's raining, Mary," he says. "Come on into the house." "

Short Fiction

• "Ripples" by C. C. Parker
  "In Claire's opinion, it was an outrageous display of pure cruelty. She could still recall the scream of humanity and the smell of burning flesh . . . could see the eyes of children who had lost their moms, dads, brothers, sisters. And what did it matter where the bombs came from; it didn't . . . not really. Whoever was responsible was faceless; just as faceless as those on the receiving end."

• "Weird Scenes" by C. C. Parker
  "This is your ticket to an apocalyptic redneck party. Someone gave those rednecks l.s.d, turning them to lunacy; some skinny dude with a dirty New York Yankees hat screwed onto his head."

• "The Historian" by Hertzan Chimera
  "As always, before we depart this scorched planet core once called Earth, it is my solemn duty to switch off the little black box..."

• "London Bridge" by Damian Grace
  "Terrorists, tyrants, monsters and misfits. Enemies, enemies, so many enemies, so many centuries, so many wars. Countless dead generations slaying legions of external adversaries."

Series

• "Six Days In December: From the Journals of Jonathan Hemingway"
  by Justine Entrophe [Plain Text Version]
  [Part Three] -- "They marched straight down Main Street; almost three hundred of them, led by six refurbished army tanks and four armored personnel carriers. We numbered about a hundred, mostly armed with rifles and shotguns, hidden on rooftops and in alleyways."

• "Wasteland Blues" by Andrew Conry-Murray and Scott C. Carr
  [Part Six: Leggy's Story]
  "See boys, I was a man of ambition, and spear carrier ain't no job for a man of ambition. After a couple of KC runs I asked the road boss in Levvittown for a new assignment. Luckily, I was possessed of pretty good eyesight, so he apprenticed me to a couple of scouts. That was more to my liking. Scouts rode out ahead of the caravan to check for danger--bug nests, ambushes, road blocks, downed bridges, things like that. And the really good scouts could earn themselves a rifle."

• "To Drive the Cold Winter Away" by G. W. Thomas
  "My great plans of surprising someone while he took a dump or fell asleep quickly disappeared when I fell over a low box of beer cans. I tumbled onto the old carpet surrounded by empties. Someone had planted the box in a clever way as an alarm. Someone who stood over me with a shotgun. I didn't move."