They said giants were a story. Something from before the walls, before the world got small and safe.
But the ground still ticked at night. The walls still shook when the wind blew from the north.

Mara had grown up believing the Basin was the last place worth saving, that the Watch kept them safe because the monsters were gone.
Then she climbed the Wall and saw what the stories had left out.

The earth wasn’t empty. It was sleeping. And the people inside the city weren’t survivors.
They were feed.

A man waits for his execution, speaking his last words to a silent priest. In a voice stripped bare, he recounts the trail of violence that followed him from boyhood; the bird he broke, the bar fights that turned fatal, the strangers who crossed his path and never walked away. There are no excuses here, no pleas for mercy. Only the blunt rhythm of confession, the weight of memory, and the certainty of the end waiting down the hall.

She sat barefoot on the sagging couch, hands folded neat as bones, antennas trembling in the stale air. Beside her, the radio hummed like something alive.

I thought of leaving. The voice inside the radio told me I couldn’t.

“You will listen,” it said.

And I did. I heard the air itself remembering. I heard prayers and screams, laughter and lies, all pressed into the silence like teeth into wood.

The woman never blinked. The radio never stopped.

And the road outside no longer felt like a way out.

In the ashes of Jericho, survival is not just about food and water. It is about what you are willing to keep alive when the world says let it die. Richard carries the weight of his fever-ridden sister and his mutated mother while hunter gangs stalk the ruins, chanting for the “Broodmother.” What follows is part horror, part love story, and all nightmare.

The world didn’t end with a bang. It ended with silence, whiskey, and a bar in Boulder where survival still feels like a bad joke. Meet Ray, Gus, and Lila—a broken man, a stubborn mechanic, and a girl with a guitar—holding out against the kind of evil that never really dies. If you ever wondered what happened after The Stand, this is the story of the last bar, the last songs, and the choice between fear and hope when the road brings trouble back.

“If you’re out there,” Mickey said, voice cracking through the static, “this is 98.7 The Blaze. The airwaves are still open. I’m still here. You’re not alone.”

The studio smelled like mildew and old vinyl. His only listener was a dog named Joplin, and maybe—just maybe—the cowboy with burning eyes who kept showing up in his dreams.

Outside, the crows circled over Gainesville. The I-75 was a graveyard of cars and silence. But Mickey?

He kept talking.

Because someone had to.

He woke up in a bunker. No memory of getting there. Just the stale hum of machines, a glowing screen that said WAIT, and the taste of old coffee still on his tongue.

Outside? Nothing but ash, silence, and a sky that watched like it remembered something you didn’t.

And when the screen changed to RUN, it was already too late.

He stripped his shirt off slow, like it was a ritual. Hands taped. Forearms carved out of scarred wood. No smile. No words. Just movement.

“You want the title,” he said, voice low and steady, “you finish when I finish.”

I don’t remember finishing.
I just remember waking up in the corner, shoes gone, hands torn open, whispering apologies to the rig.

The belt’s still there.
But no one reaches for it.

Not twice.

What if your thoughts weren’t just yours anymore? In Next-Day Delivery, a man’s life unravels when packages start arriving on his doorstep—items he never ordered but definitely thought about. Slippers. Childhood mementos. A tooth. Each box digs deeper into memories he’d rather forget, until it becomes clear: something is inside his head, rewriting reality one delivery at a time. Creepy, surreal, and disturbingly plausible, this horror story peels back the packaging on convenience culture and exposes the cost of always being connected. Because when your past is prime-shipped to your door, what shows up next might just be you.