Dime Novels From Oblivion

“He is speaking to you. Please hear him!” Terrance a red-faced somewhat hefty middle-aged street preacher in an old black disintegrating windbreaker implored the crowd of pedestrians. “How much time do you think you have to atone? God is infinitely loving, but he is not infinitely patient. You may not have tomorrow to finally seek his forgiveness!” They paid him no heed. Most deliberately avoided looking at him. They drowned him out with headphones or continued to focus on their digital handheld distractions. Devices Terrance referred to as the “Devil's Valium.” The light changed, and the crowd crossed the street unaware they were walking off into eternal damnation. The street preacher sighed and shook his head. He brushed the snow accumulating on his sleeves and tattered unraveling winter hat and continued to spread the word. Terrance Williams was a firm believer in fate. Everyone including himself was only following a timeline; each moment was another flash in a chain reaction that…

Lincoln Jandick was an established digital entrepreneur. The world’s insatiable appetite for pornography made it relatively easy for anyone with a little bit of seed money and absolutely no scruples to stake a claim in the omnipresent cyber economy. Content was the key, those generating a constant stream of content could find consumers for it somewhere on the global network. Viewing had become its own form of consumption, and that made Jandick’s business model that much simpler. Destiny or chance is a matter of perspective so because of the former or the latter Jandick found himself a resident of a city that was founded as a center for the mass production of fantasy.
The factory of illusion was powered by a never ending supply of forlorn people seized by the mass manufactured illusions that were continuously streamed into their consciousness. Dreams became delusions and hordes of people chemically disconnected from reality drifted into the city until it became a depot for human despe…

It was some time ago that NASA first detected the mountain-sized projectile molded from iron and rock that had been set on a terminal collision course with their fragile planet perhaps billions of years ago. While even the most technologically advanced societies of the world had no way of dealing with the threat, it seemed far enough off it was assumed a solution could be thought of and executed promptly.
Humanity procrastinated until the astroid's rough crater-pocked surface, and it's burning blue afterburn could be seen even hundreds of thousands of miles away. It wasn't until the apocalypse was nigh that the grasshoppers finally decided to start acting like ants. In a desperate bid, panicked people scurried into concrete-lined holes where they hoarded as many life-saving provisions the dimensions of their tomb sized burros allowed them.
The sudden surge in demand for the shovels, the cement mix, toilet paper, bottled water, and canned foods quickly emptied the shelves …

Perhaps it’s a small stroke of luck that the collection and burial of an army’s dead is considered an honorable practice. The world is littered with battlefields where despite the breadth and scope of the savagery and massacre there is scant evidence of what happened. Nature fills in shell craters, rusts away the metal, rinses the blood from the soil, but not before grave diggers like eleven-year-old Thomas dragged the bodies from the field and deposited them into a muddy slit they gouged into the earth.
Thomas had wide blue eyes and a slender frame whittled by hunger.  Like most of the others, he was plucked from the depths of the smog-choked plague-infested slums that were growing out from around the smoke-belching stacks like a spreading infection.  They were familiar with the site of a man that had been decomposing for some time and was starting to melt into the mud making a murky soup.
Winter exasperated the cruelties of burial detail. Thomas worked by torchlight in the moonless…