Dime Novels From Oblivion

Somewhere in the smouldering deserts where civilization was born and where it has gone to die an angry young man is crawling under barbed wire while a machine gun is fired just above his head. One wrong move and pieces of the young man’s skull will explode all over the dirt. Despite the fear, he continues to crawl. Where this young man is from death looms in the sky among the circling birds waiting to feast on the next batch of fire blasted corpses. Tanks lumber along the dusty old roads, smashing bodies under their treads and decimating homes with radioactive shells that poison the land wherever the explode. Caravans of armoured vehicles of sped through the village. The war-weary driver of the mechanized pack animals understood standing still invited death, so the columns stopped for nothing. The soldiers in the first Humvee must have seen her body disappear under their vehicle. They must have seen her crushed and lacerated body in the rear view mirror being smashed into the dirt b

The storm of fire had climaxed, and the thundering of then guns was petering out into sporadic thunder claps. The little village at the end of the battlefield sat fixed in time for nearly seven centuries,  Now in just four short years, the small collection of families that settled there were on the brink of extinction. All the husbands and sons were gone. They were carried away by iron rails that connected the grandest city with the remotest homestead. Now the town was flooded with strange men. Wounded soldiers lined the bars, they’re torn and shattered, The blood pouring from their wounds painted the golden wheat a dark red and their corpses filled the untilled fields like crops rotting in the sun. Chaos reigned in the wake of defeat. The soldiers fled into the woods and discarded uniforms lazily swayed in the wind on the dusty roads. The elderly, the wives, the mothers, and the daughters had been abandoned once again, and now they were at the mercy of the Eastern hordes, marauders k

Time became benign within the confines of the flying metallic fortress. The mobile command center spent the end of the world in the safety of the clouds. In a millionth of a second, a star was born on earth. The sublime white light silhouetted the shadows of the dead on the concrete ruins burning or hear the howl of the burning cyclones raging across the planet. Besides the humming of the cooling fans of the server banks, the plane was silent.  To the generals on board the global holocaust was presented as abstract data. The dead and wounded were just numbers the end of the world was just an ongoing thought exercise, but as more of the earth became engulfed by atomic light, the supreme commanders found themselves with less and less territory and fewer and fewer units to worry about. Soon all the digital links that tethered the airborne titanic to the world below were cut, and the plane was left to circle silently in the sky. The aircraft was part of the operation for the continu

To the little mongrel living a spartan existence in the bustling streets of Moscow, the towers of the old palace and the looming shadows of the monuments to the new system that supplanted the ancient empire had no meaning. They were simply part of a harsh landscape where survival was dependent on will, a little luck, and occasionally isolated acts of charity. The lonely hound had no one and came from nowhere. She was neither pet nor companion but living refuse. Even in the urban sprawl, survival was as uncertain as it was even in the deepest wilds of Russia. What were the odds that they would find her? Who in this world could trace the sequence of events that lead up to this unassuming stray being destined to meet her end at the edge of the final frontier? How could it be that fate had these designs for her to be the center of what humanity considered to be one of the most momentous events in its history? When they took her for a brief moment, she suspected she might have been sa

A cold late autumn rain pounded the green field into a soft muddy expanse. Craters filled with blood-infused rainwater churned it into a dirty pink soup, spotted with mounds of shredded human debris. Two boys, both just over 19, were wracking the field with machine gunfire. They kept count of the bodies they dropped in the dirt every time the trigger was pulled. "Oh fuck to the right!" Yelled the boy feeding the belt of bullets into their chamber. "Got it!" Yelled the lad swinging his gun to the right at a charging soldier as he leaped over a corpse. He was caught in the gun's sights, and before the soldier even heard the burst, he saw the muzzles flash. Then felt the hot lead punching through his chest and exploding out of his back, "Shit, that was a close one!" The ammo feeder celebrated His comrade breathed a sigh of relief. "Yeah, it was." "Alright, my turn to fire." "Charge!" Came the order, and a quietly waiting row

Only after it was far too late did Candice the cancer cell finally realize individuality is not all that it's cracked up to be.

Lang Grillman was taken from this life by a stroke at 68 years old. He had spent the pinnacle of those years as a celebrated football player. His triumphs included two super bowl rings, the MVP Award, and his induction into the hall of fame. This was the peak of his glory, the descent into obscurity was characterized by drug addiction and car insurance commercials. When he looked in the mirror and saw the deepening wrinkles on his face the loosening skin, and the graying hair he did not see a man who was aging he saw a fallen god in decay. He spent much of his last years in his memories. He knelt before his display of trophies as if it were an altar and beseeching the past to return, but he could only move forward. No matter how much he spent on skin treatments and hair dye these chemical remedies were not much better than a crumbling wrapper set around his flesh. Soon the gold no longer shined and neither did Lang. He died long before they lowered him into the grave. He was not

The human mind is always somewhere between the past and the future. Memories are part of sentient beings programming. Experiences set perceived precedence for reality that assists the brain in imagining a future. What we call the present exists somewhere between the two. Nothing forces the mind into the present like death; it is a final moment after which there is no future to rectify with the past, and so it ceases. “Nothing brings you into the moment like death,” said private first class Houten. He volunteered his services as a lab rat for an experiment being conducted by the neuropsychology, neuropathology, and neurophysiology departments of a university partnered with the Pentagon. PFC Houten was Dr. Shriver's test subject. The doctor hypothesized the brain could be physically reshaped relatively quickly with the bombardment of carefully selected stimuli. Houten's psyche was to be shattered by forcing him to experience death over and over again. Then he was to be res

The Dimona was just one component of the planet-wide network of orbital weapons christened as the “Pulsars.” They were a chain of nuclear reactors that orbited the earth. The atomic machinery that powered each station of this weapons platform powered a nuclear beam that could incinerate cities. The weapon had only been used in its infancy. Survivors recalled a blood-red star glowing in the sky before a pillar of light that burned as hot as the sun descended on the city. The highly concentrated beam of energy melted the steel skyline and incinerated the people the same way a ray of sunlight directed by child's magnifying glass incinerates ants. Intrigued by the weapon’s potential more and more were deployed to the edge of space. Before long there were so many Pulsars orbiting the Earth, that at any given time no fewer than 50 percent of Earth's “major population centers” were in the sights of their nuclear eyes, their apertures automatically readjusting their size to fit th

Like the monsters that inhabited children's imaginations, you were most vulnerable to them while lying in bed. That is when they came. Many went insane from sleepless nights spent listening to the heavy knock at the door. Like the monsters in the country'sitional folklore, these black-clad demons also dragged people away into the thick darkness of night, never to be seen or heard from again. These shadow men were appointed guardians of the state against enemies unseen. They could detect enemies anywhere, and they hunted them down with ruthless efficiency. They were paranoia-made flesh. These human hunters operated on the deeply cynical assumption that any threat, real or imagined, was best wiped out. They were like attack dogs, and their masters gave them free rein. Spengler awoke to the knock. His ears strained in the darkness, hoping the knock was the residual sound of a nightmare. The knuckles banging against the heavy wooden door ripped him from sleep, and panic instan