The shores and waters of the East River are the "DMQZ," the uninhabited area that separates uninfected Manhattan from the slowly dying borough of Brooklyn.Jacob Hale is a Manhattan police officer rising in the ranks of the Safe Zone military government until a bank heist gone wrong lands him on suspension and under suspicion. On a quest to clear his good name, Hale finds himself drawn into a web of conspiracy, terrorism, and revolt - and into the orbit of a mysterious woman who may be the key to it all.

    Kathryn Railly, who begins to believe his wild story.

    The results are individual glimpses of a shared vision, and a reading experience unlike any you've had before.A strange man comes to an even stranger encampment...a bouncer becomes the linchpin of an unexpected urban movement...a courier on the run has to decide who to trust in a dangerous city...a slacker in a "zero-footprint" town gets a most unusual new job...and a weapons investigator uses his skills to discover a metropolis hidden right in front of his eyes.Welcome to the future of cities. Welcome to Metatropolis.Contents:Introduction (METAtropolis) - essay by John ScalziIn the Forests of the Night - novella by Jay LakeStochasti-city - novella by Tobias S. BuckellThe Red in the Sky Is Our Blood - novelette by Elizabeth BearUtere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis - novella by John ScalziTo Hie from Far Cilenia - novella by Karl Schroeder

    No life form stands a chance, but Clyde Jackson is tougher than most. He's seen war and he's been in plenty of foxholes. Now he's living through the end of the world one day at a time in a panic room that has become his only refuge.Originally featured in The Absent Willow Review, "Dust" is the haunting meditation of a man recalling the final days of a once mighty and hopeful planet now quickly eroding to nothing under drifts of gray.

    With her coworker weakened by cancer treatments, her sister still imprisoned, and the dead looking for an easy meal, Sarah’s only plan, if she can pull it off, is Survival. Survival is a 14,000 word (approx. 45 pages) short story and was originally published in the Let's Scare Cancer to Death anthology.

    What comes is a blinding blizzard, and a mass disappearance of nearly every person Robby Pierce knows. He and his family flee, trying to escape the snow and the invisible forces stealing people right from the street.Miles away, Brad Jenkins battles the same storm. Alone, he attempts to survive as snow envelops his house. When the storm breaks, Brad makes his way south to where the snow ends and the world lies empty. Join Brad, Robby, and the other survivors as they fight to find the truth about the apocalypse and discover how to live in their new world.

    The world itself has turned against the handful of survivors, as one by one they succumb to despair and suicide or, even worse, are transformed by otherworldly pollution into hideous Gray Men, cannibalistic mutants driven by insatiable hunger. Into these desperate circumstances comes an amnesiac teenaged boy who names himself Ethan—a boy who must overcome mistrust and suspicion to master unknowable powers that may prove to be the last hope for humanity's salvation. Those same powers make Ethan a threat to the warring aliens, long used to fearing only each other, and thrust him and his comrades into ever more perilous circumstances.A major new novel from the unparalleled imagination of Robert McCammon, this dark epic of survival will both thrill readers and make them fall in love with his work all over again.

    As she dreamt she let her mind wander back to the year 2073, when the world collapsed in a hail of nuclear destruction never before seen.Volume 1: Episodes 1-9

    Her grueling all-day Examination has just begun, and if she passes, she’ll be admitted into the Academy—the elite governing institution of her utopian society. But Anax is about to discover that for all her learning, the history she’s been taught isn’t the whole story. And the Academy isn’t what she believes it to be. In this brilliant novel of dazzling ingenuity, Anax’s examination leads us into a future where we are confronted with unresolved questions raised by science and philosophy. Centuries old, these questions have gained new urgency in the face of rapidly developing technology. What is consciousness? What makes us human? If artificial intelligence were developed to a high enough capability, what special status could humanity still claim? Outstanding and original, Beckett’s dramatic narrative comes to a shocking conclusion.

    But it hasn't saved anyone yet, not even her little brother.The disease has claimed countless lives in the last hundred years, and the government is working hard to find a cure through human testing. Testing that has killed nearly as many people as the disease.At sixteen, Macey has better things to think about than saving lives and submitting to any rule other than her parents'. As a budding artist, she has her whole life ahead of her, at least until she faces her own testing.Questions plague Macey. Questions that make everyone else nervous. How can death be justified with more death? What's the point of all this?Answers evade her until she's left with only one question: How much will she sacrifice in the name of the cure? If you liked The Hunger Games or Divergent, you'll love The Cure!

    And you're paralyzed from the waist down apparently, but you don't remember that either.A man claiming to be your friend tells you your services are required. Something crucial has been stolen, but what he tells you about it doesn't quite add up. You've got to get it back or something bad is going to happen. And you've got to get it back fast, so they can freeze you again before your own time runs out.Before you know it, you're being carried through a ruined landscape on the backs of two men in hazard suits who don't seem anything like you at all, heading toward something you don't understand that may well end up being the death of you.Welcome to the life of Josef Horkai….

    The horror she discovers amongst the ruins is far worse than she could have imagined. The masked warriors of the Venganza clan chase Katy through the post-apocalyptic landscape, forcing her to decide between her past or the survivors’ future — a decision that could determine the fate of the human race. *For a limited time, the exclusive short story prequel BARREN: Blood Moon is included for FREE

    It detailed our culture, accumulated mathematical knowledge, and the finer points of human physiology. Now, years later, they have finally received a reply... The Western Hemisphere is plunged into chaos, as exposure to the alien radio signal transforms millions of ordinary citizens into savage lunatics, their re-programmed minds relentlessly driving them to spread mayhem and death. From the southernmost point of Chile to the farthest reaches of Northern Canada, the day dawns upon a desperate struggle for survival. Fleeing from raging fires, disastrous havoc, and the murderous rampaging of the infected, the survivors must try to overcome the odds and survive to see tomorrow - but, with a mentally unstable President contemplating full-scale nuclear war on the East, will there even be a tomorrow? Originally published as a condensed serial on Reddit.com, in the SubReddit Library of Shadows, 99 Brief Scenes From the End of The World is a taut, adrenaline-fueled excursion into the darkest depths of the human id. It takes the reader from the embattled streets of suburbia to a besieged church in a Texan border town; to top-secret government facilities, where powerful men play a game of political chess, using people as pawns. Will the alien transmission succeed in destroying us all - or does salvation lie within the extraordinary mind of a catatonic little girl?

    The end of the world is a distant, distorted memory called “the Age of F***ed Up Shit.” A sentient glacier has wiped out most of North America. Medical care is supplied by open-source nanotechnology, and human nervous systems can be hacked.Abby Fogg is a film archivist with a niggling feeling that her life is not really her own. She may be right. Al Skinner is a former mercenary for the Boeing Army, who’s been dragging his war baggage behind him for nearly a century. Woo-jin Kan is a virtuoso dishwasher with the Hotel and Restaurant Management Olympics medals to prove it. Over them all hovers a mysterious man named Dirk Bickle, who sends all these characters to a full-scale replica of Manhattan under construction in Puget Sound. An ambitious novel that writes large the hopes and anxieties of our time—climate change, social strife, the depersonalization of the digital age — Blueprints of the Afterlife will establish Ryan Boudinot as an exceptional novelist of great daring.Blueprints of the Afterlife alternates between a richly imagined future in which the apocalypse is a distant, hazy memory, and a present in which a man recounts his search for a secret organization bent on harnessing the brightest minds to control human destiny and life on earth. There are giant heads that appear in the sky. The world's greatest dishwasher. Over 600 clones of an ancient pop singer's backup dancer. Red carpet events. A mystical refrigerator.

     Survival. Murder. Snow. Winter is here. The cold spreads over the land, shriveling and choking out all the plant life. Harsh. Unforgiving. The first winter without electricity will surely claim more human lives as well. The isolation may do more damage than the cold, however. Too much time alone drives people to unthinkable acts.