Those of us who survived the subsequent wars that decimated the world as we know it, throwing us back into a pre-industrial era are the lucky ones. Those of us who survived are the lucky ones.Except… Some of us are different. Some of us are changing. Some say the virus mutated. Some say it is a result of genetic warfare. All I know is that I can see better in the dark, I can hear from further away and I am stronger now than I ever have been before. And I have claws.We may not be the lucky ones after all.Photo Description: A person stares out at you, someone clearly no longer human. His hair is white, his skin is dusky purple, and his eyes are the color of honey. He’s scarred, a cut spanning his face from cheek to cheek, and he’s looking at you like you might be lunch.This story was written as a part of the M/M Romance Group's "Love is an Open Road" event. Group members were asked to write a story prompt inspired by a photo of their choice. Authors of the group selected a photo and prompt that spoke to them and wrote a short story. This story may contain sexually explicit content and is intended for adult readers. It may contain content that is disagreeable or distressing to some readers. The M/M Romance Group strongly recommends that each reader review the General Information section before each story for story tags as well as for content warnings.

    That is until videos start appearing online, claiming to be footage of real undead outbreaks. Can their knowledge of once fictional creatures help them against the real thing? They soon realize that the undead aren’t the only threat they face. With their supplies running low and armed raiders attacking everyone, they will need to take their survival plan to a new level. How much will they sacrifice to survive, and who … or what … will they become when it is all over?

    Not with a bang, but a whatever.The whateverpocalypse. That’s what Touré, a twenty-something Cambridge coder, calls it after waking up one morning to find himself seemingly the only person left in the city. Once he finds Robbie and Carol, two equally disoriented Harvard freshmen, he realizes he isn’t alone, but the name sticks: Whateverpocalypse. But it doesn’t explain where everyone went. It doesn’t explain how the city became overgrown with vegetation in the space of a night. Or how wild animals with no fear of humans came to roam the streets.Add freakish weather to the mix, swings of temperature that spawn tornadoes one minute and snowstorms the next, and it seems things can’t get much weirder. Yet even as a handful of new survivors appear—Paul, a preacher as quick with a gun as a Bible verse; Win, a young professional with a horse; Bethany, a thirteen-year-old juvenile delinquent; and Ananda, an MIT astrophysics adjunct—life in Cambridge, Massachusetts gets stranger and stranger.The self-styled Apocalypse Seven are tired of questions with no answers. Tired of being hunted by things seen and unseen. Now, armed with curiosity, desperation, a shotgun, and a bow, they become the hunters. And that’s when things truly get weird.

    It would take two and a half centuries to construct. Its announced purpose: to carry humanity away from its ruined world, from the world that had become a perpetual purgatory.To build this vast ship would require the undivided activity of an entire nation and would mean carrying out a ruthless program of war and conquest, of annihilation and reconstruction, and of education and discovery.But was this starship really what it was claimed to be? Or was there a greater secret behind its incredible cost - a secret so strange that no man dared reveal it?

    Find out what happens to Josh's family when the zombie apocalypse shambles into Savannah, Georgia! Will thirteen year old CJ understand what is going on? Will he believe it? Will his family get out of the city alive? Added bonus! Two FREE chapters of A New Death included!

    Banks shut down under the weight of their bogus investments, and the financial sector failed. People looked to the government to make it all better. They couldn't! Hyper-inflation, mass unemployment and infrastructure started to breakdown. The food trucks didn't show up at the stores and the shelves went empty.Things turned ugly fast when there was no power for long parts of the day... then forever. Cops, doctors, and trash collectors just stopped showing up for work when the paychecks were delayed too often, or just never came. Things started falling apart quicker after that. Whole regions declared a "State of Emergency" in an effort to maintain order and civility, but it wasn't always enough. Starvation, looting and murder became the norm. Then, our American civilization collapsed completely.The Fall of America: Book 1 Premonition of Death is the beginning of a new series, about an average man who's life goes downhill fast, once society breaks down. Set in the rural south, a scorched-earth showdown with some local thugs leaves John and his wife homeless, and on the run. He hears rumors of a survivalist group made up of former military personnel, and finding them may be his only hope. Just basic survival becomes vicious, resistance at any cost, as the devastated country comes under new siege—invading Russian troops.

    He had to get away, from the rioting, the lawlessness, the killing. Away from the brutal gangs that ruled the highways. Then there was the boy that he found along the way, an orphan with no place to go. He couldn’t leave the child behind; that would be murder. Together they had to make their way across the razed landscape of post collapse America, west to where there was safety, a chance to begin again. If only they survived the journey.

    A few humans carry on, living in outposts such as the Sanctuary-the remains of St. Louis-a shielded community that owes its survival to its militant defense and fear-mongering leaders. Then a rider comes from the wasteland beyond its walls. She reports on the outside world: west of the Cascades, rain falls, crops grow, civilization thrives. But there is danger too: the rising power of an army that pillages and enslaves every community they happen upon. Against the wishes of the Sanctuary, a small group sets out in secrecy. Led by Lewis Meriwether and Mina Clark, they hope to expand their infant nation, and to reunite the States. But the Sanctuary will not allow them to escape without a fight.

    Vaccination and treatment are widely available, not held in reserve for the chosen few. There are still monsters left to fight, but the old ones, the simple ones, trouble us no more.Or so we thought. For with the reduction in danger comes the erosion of memory, as pandemics fade from memory into story into fairy tale. Those old diseases can’t have been so bad, people say, or we wouldn’t be here to talk about them. They don’t matter. They’re never coming back.How wrong we could be.It begins with a fever. By the time the spots appear, it’s too late: Morris’s disease is loose on the world, and the bodies of the dead begin to pile high in the streets. When its terrible side consequences for the survivors become clear, something must be done, or the dying will never stop. For Dr. Isabella Gauley, whose niece was the first confirmed victim, the route forward is neither clear nor strictly ethical, but it may be the only way to save a world already in crisis. It may be the only way to atone for her part in everything that’s happened.She will never be forgiven, not by herself, and not by anyone else. But she can, perhaps, do the right thing.We live in an age of monsters.

    These stories describe the fall of civilization, the destruction of the entire Earth, or the end of the Universe itself.Contents:When we went to see the end of the world - Robert SilverbergThe End of the World - Sushma JoshiThe Clockwork Atom Bomb - Dominic GreenBloodletting - Kate WilhelmWhen Sysadmins ruled the World - Cory DoctorowThe Rain at the End of the World - Dale BaileyThe Flood - Linda NagataThe End of the World Show - David BarnettFermi and Frost - Frederik PohlSleepover - Alastair ReynoldsThe Last Sunset - Geoffrey LandisMoments of Inertia - William BartonThe Books - Kage BakerPallbearer - Robert ReedAnd the Deep Blue Sea - Elizabeth BearThe Meek - Damien BroderickThe Man who Walked Home - James Tiptree JRA Pail of Air - Fritz LeiberGuardians of the Phoenix - Eric BrownLife in the Anthropocene - Paul di FilippoTerraforming Terra - Jack WilliamsonWorld Without End - F Gwynplaine MacIntyreThe Children of Time - Stephen BaxterThe Star called Wormwood - Elizabeth Counihan

    The remaining survivors hide desperately, for all hope seems lost... until an armored fortress on wheels plows through the ghouls, crushing bones and decayed viscera. The vehicle stops and two men emerge from its doors, armed to the teeth and ready to cancel the apocalypse. This is K. Michael Gibson's "Dead Pulse RISING."The story follows the onset of a mysterious disease that infects the populace of Baltimore, turning many into flesh-eating zombies. Whether it is a manifestation of Mother Nature's wrath or a new form of biological warfare remain unknown. What law enforcement officer and ex-USAF special operator Kyle Walker and his partner Marvin Winters know is that they have to use their fighting skills, their massive armored vehicle, and copious amounts of firepower in order to survive and protect those dear to them. Their struggle is further complicated when spooks from the United States Department of Homeland Security arrive and display an unwanted interest in something Kyle has aboard his vehicle. The Homeland Security agents are also hell bent on keeping the Baltimore situation a secret, and are prepared to use any means to keep the greater public in the dark of what has happened to the city.The author combines social anxieties about doomsday scenarios, threats of bio-terrorism, and unwarranted government intrusion to craft an original take on the zombie apocalypse genre. Cannibalistic monstrosities, special forces operatives, tactical combat action, and the end of the world await readers in the pages of "Dead Pulse RISING."

    In subtly nuanced language suggestive of each of these writers, Oates explores the mysterious regions of the unknowable self that is "genius"—for Edgar Allan Poe, a belated encounter with bizarre life‑forms utterly alien to the poet's exalted Romantic aesthetics; for Emily Dickinson, resurrected in the twenty-first century in a "distilled" state, a belated encounter with blundering humanity and brute passion of a kind excluded from the poet's verse; for the elderly, renowned Samuel Clemens, a belated encounter with impassioned innocence, in the form of "the little girl who loves you"; for Henry James, an aging volunteer in a London hospital during World War I, a belated encounter with the physicality of desire and the raw yearning of love long absent from the master's fiction; and, for Ernest Hemingway, the most tragic of these figures, a belated encounter with the "profound mysteries of the world outside him, and the profound mysteries of the world inside him."Wild Nights! is Joyce Carol Oates's most original and haunting work of the imagination, a writer's memoirist work in the form of fiction.

    A stunning collection of the kind of fiction that has only one source--the unparalleled Ray Bradbury.

    Until all hell broke loose.  In a single day, my best friend and business partner threatened to fire me, I’d hit a stray dog with my car and the cute vet with the stunning eyes friend-zoned me on sight. Now my beloved BMW convertible is in the shop and I’ve become a reluctant dog owner. The only bright spot? Meeting the sexy vet, Dr. Dahlia Kent. Although we’re opposite in every way and she’s clearly immune to my charm, it only makes me want her more. If I were smart, I’d find a home for the dog, lose Dahlia’s number and get back to what I’m good at — looking for the easy win. But for some reason, I can’t seem to walk away from the dog — or her. Am I ready for a big change? Or am I taking on more than I can handle? Roses are red
 Violets are blue 
Flirt Club has a sexy new collaboration
 Just for you! Join twelve of the Flirt Club authors in this hot and steamy spring collection where our May Flowers bloom faster than a hothouse rose under the touch of our sexy heroes. #mayflowers #FlirtClub

    I drive a tow truck. I know I’ve got no business chasing a girl like that, but I can’t keep away. And when we have an amazing first date, I know she’s the one for me. But there’s something she’s not telling me…Then she shuns me. Maybe she is just another girl looking for a rich ticket out of here.HarrietHe was going to tow my car, and agreeing to go on a date was the only way to get out of it. I’ll let him take me out once, and then get on with my life. Until it turns out to be the perfect date, and I realize Billy’s the perfect man.But I’ve been pretending to be someone I’m not, and falling for a bearded, tattooed tow truck driver is definitely not part of the plan.Billy is book one in The Carter Family short romance series, sweet and steamy stories about siblings finding love. Each book is a standalone, and they all end with a happily ever after. No cliffhangers.