Dime Novels From Oblivion

Private Stuart Breyers had joined the marine corps during peacetime. The plan was to use his two-year hitch as a transition period into becoming an independent young man. Not six weeks after his 19th birthday the boy’s limited term of existence had been significantly curtailed. He had no more years to look forward to only mere moments. He walked in a single file line with his comrades under the darting eyes of their Japanese captors. His fingers were laced behind his head, and he didn’t dare move his hands to shield his eyes from the blinding tropical sun or the salty sting of his sweat. Breyers had spent his life in the vast cornfields of Middle America where the grey skies of winter lingered for months on end. The Pacific sun turned his flesh a pulsing red. The Japanese fleet loomed ominously in the still crystal blue waters. The massive steel barrels of their guns had returned to their resting position. Occasionally a grenade blast in the thick jungle rattled the birds out of the tr…

"As more and more people come to terms with just how tenuous all of this is the faster and faster, it will all break down.  Paradoxically informing people of the danger of our position will not produce a solution instead we will see a self-fulfilling prophecy come pass where people, trying to fortify their personal positions to weather the chaos will be in actually precipitating and compounding the destruction."
Dr. Werthers V. Lepizid

Shelly Stone’s life had come to an end some time ago there were still some residuals of her corporeal existence scattered around a pocket of isolated ruins, remnants of a civilization that was in the early stages of its terminus during Shelly’s life. In those days Shelly had been an author of modest acclaim. Her relative obscurity never bothered her though. Of course, she craved the praise and notoriety all artists desire, but she took solace in the fact her providence had been the written word. The pages her voice were printed on would long outlast her, and in that way she had contributed something to the collective cultural wealth of society and species at large and it was this knowledge that was her final comforting thought.
The forgotten place Shelly spent the latter half of her life was withered by time and neglect. The abandoned structure that had been her home was a gutted corpse made of brick. The empty window frames faced the world like a hollowed skull with a quiet emptiness…