Dime Novels From Oblivion

Cannon fire was their rooster's caw that morning. The shells exploded among the camps and left row upon row of burning blood-soaked tents. Hundreds of half-dressed soldiers scurried away from the eviscerating plumes of smoke and steel.
The percussions of the bombardment were subtly felt by the diligent Captain Charles Magnus in another camp.  He confirmed the massacre through the lens of his battlefield glasses and hurried off to inform Marshal Anosognosia.
Charles hadn't had much face to face with contact with the highly revered military hero, and he relished the chance to be the one at his side in so perilous a moment.  There was no better career booster than association with the Anosognosia name.
Charles’s diligence could sometimes devolve into simple impulsivity. He brushed past the security detail and burst into the old man’s tent. “Sir forgive me bu-” The Captain's words lodged in his throat.
The eighty-six-year-old nationally renowned the illustrious Marshal Oscar Adlo…

The little house sat, cloaked in the shadow of London’s leviathan towers. It was just another neighborhood at the outskirts of the fortress of wealth where the residents lived under the heel of the lords and merchants who lived as their rulers and used their blood to spin the gears of their machines. Death and pestilence were the neighbors of everyone who lived on this damp foggy street. The house sat along the Thames close enough to be constantly immersed in the vile water’s stench of feces and sulfur. The two story house was a like brick box adorned by a broken window that was covered with torn frilly drapes.

They were on the second floor in a tiny brick cell with no window. The little space was furnished a child’s bed standing on a floral pattern throw rug. It had once been Henry’s bedroom. He had turned eight just twenty-one weeks ago, but somewhere along the line it became apparent he wasn’t going make it the thirty-one more weeks to see nine. His frail malnourished body was overt…

Deep within the concrete catacombs of Gabor Labs, a renowned research institute just outside of Boston Professor Gilbourne was working feverishly on his new obsession. It was a project that eclipsed anything else in his life in its importance. The thirty-nine-year-old professor was conducting a series of experiments meant to bring back the dead by illuminating the alleged metaphysical forms said to inhabit a plane of existence inconceivable to the living. For the last seven months, he spent every waking hour he could locked away in the lab. Breathing the sterile air and constantly immersed in the electrical buzzing emitted by the menagerie of machines he was working with. He had recently lost his mother to cancer. His friends and fiancee thought this was just him avoiding grief by burying himself in work.  This was partially true. Gilbourne was a jovial and often playful man the glare from his glassy blue eyes when his mind lost itself in the cold void of its cold logic. Medical doctors a…

“Ichika, Ichika wake up!”
The six-year-old girl was jolted away by her father’s hands. Her mother was standing in the doorway clenching her little brother Reo against her chest.
The majority of Ichicka’s short life had been against the backdrop of total war. She dutifully kept her boots and shelter knapsack ready go at the foot of her bed and made sure never to let go of her father’s hand in the crowded shelter. Reo was even more accustomed. The desperate stampedes to the overcrowded shelters were becoming his earliest memories.
Her father grabbed her by the hand, and they rushed out into the street. Ichicka’s father was walking too fast for Ichika to keep up and the girl stumbled. Without a word her father picked her up and started walking faster than before.
“Please hurry,” he urged his wife who was also struggling to match his pace.
Despite her father’s panic, the city seemed peaceful. The streets were virtually empty, and the sirens were silent.
“Hideshi!” Aiko called to her husb…

They unleashed a fire that devoured the world in a flash. The sound of air-raid sirens heralded the end of the world like the trumpets of angels. Everyone still alive was left to experience the death throes of a planet that now resembled nothing more than an animal doused in gasoline and set ablaze by a match. The raging infernos raced across the continents leaving a charred, cold, and decaying shell.

There were only two kinds of people left, the dead and the dying. The bomb’s fires had unleashed pillars of smoldering acrid clouds which quickly spread across the sky, blanketing the earth in an ebony death shroud, forever blocking the sun from the sky. Ash constantly fell from the clouds like snow quickly blanketing the entire planet, plunging the world into eternal winter.

The great cities of the world were now vast plains of twisted steel and concrete, the only human remains the radiation sickened living corpses who with their last bit of strength were hemorrhaging from the orifices le…