Best Post-apocalyptic Fiction Novels & Stories

He looked at the carnage around him, his face a blank slate of shock. And that’s when it hit me. The final, fragile illusion of society, of order, of help, shattered into a million pieces. This wasn’t a riot. This wasn’t a temporary crisis. The men in biohazard suits, the chained gurneys, the bloody cough, the biting… the gunshot executing the infected. This was the end. The world wasn’t going crazy. The world was gone. This island, this hospital, this room—this was the new world. Shit. This is the apocalypse.

Meanwhile, Esmeralda and Agatha followed by their side. “France is no longer the country of romance as it used to be.” Dorothy sighed lightly. What came into sight were the signs of ruin everywhere. Domestic garbage, tramps in tattered clothes on the streets, smashed doors of stores, crashed vehicles, and burned-out buildings were everywhere... Various signs showed that this was a post-apocalyptic place. After the powerhouses of the universe entered Earth, many people did not go to America. Instead, they had been searching for opportunities all over the world. Those people were reckless and did whatever they wanted abroad. In their eyes, the local regime was an existence that they could crus

She had begun to turn into them. “No, no, I can't be one of them. No, I don't want to.” She cried, thinking back to before this apocalypse began. Back to when things were okay. Her family was still alive. Except they had died years back before the apocalypse even began. She was just a lonely girl, who met Ryan and fell in love. Barely conscious and close to turning, Ara dragged herself toward the toxic river near the edge of the city. The black water churned violently below, filled with chemical waste, rotting corpses, blood, and dangerous liquids dumped there after the apocalypse began.

escalated—I was now the posthumous disaster manager: cleaning up after carnage, apologizing to neighbors, begging forgiveness, and still having to earn money. At 23, fresh out of college, I had been full of ambition, thinking I could make something of myself. Two years later, I had become the bottom of the food chain, feeling guilty for even stepping over a sewer rat. Looking back, I realized: the four of us, the family I had built, had survived together through every hardship. And now, the apocalypse was coming. With the apocalypse, there would come zombies. Strong, fast, countless. A single bite from those teeth, top and bottom, was lethal.

The apocalypse did not start with zombies right away. That would have been too simple. First came the drought. The heat was brutal, day after day, pressing down on cities until roads cracked, crops burned, and people started fighting over bottled water in stores that had nothing left on the shelves. The electricity could not keep up. Power grids failed in waves, hospitals went dark, cooling systems died, and people who had spent their entire lives trusting walls and machines suddenly understood how thin civilization really was.

I began to read and to train my body. Immersed in the ocean of knowledge, my heart grew fuller and calmer than it had ever been. A strong, healthy body was the greatest asset for enduring this long apocalypse. Occasionally, I would access the global surveillance network to glimpse the world being scorched by heatwaves. The traces of civilization were being erased at breathtaking speed. Skyscrapers grew brittle and collapsed under the relentless heat. Forests turned to scorched earth. The oceans evaporated, revealing jagged seabeds and countless skeletal remains of once-living creatures.

And then everything went dark. Present Day I’m lying down. Awake, but unwilling to move. I know I can’t stay in one place for long. Today’s refuge is an abandoned, water-damaged house, where the makeshift bed of cardboard and filthy pillows is at least dry. You’d think that a year after the apocalypse, people would have adapted. Nope. They just became worse. Men rule the world now. Most women were taken—by the demons of hell, as the survivors call them. The destroyers of our world.

At night, I could hear men wailing, women screaming, and children crying without end. As expected, the most terrifying thing in the apocalypse was still humanity. Weeks passed, and most people had completely run out of supplies. A group of people banded together to head out in search of food and supplies. However, they got into a bloody fight over a bottle of water. Meanwhile, another group of people gave in to their darker impulses and began robbing other households and killing people for supplies.

Bob adds "The important thing is what he told us" Hiraku clears his throat "the world I will send you to is dominated by beasts, magical beings and it's very perilous. Humanity is doomed to extinction. Your mission will be to save humanity and guide mankind to an era of peace and prosperity. This world is more advanced than yours, not in technology, but in energy. The presence of mana makes possible all kinds of phenomena that you will not understand, so it will be difficult for you to survive until you learn the basics.

That was also why our security was the best in the whole city. I only found out in my last life that, after the world was hit by the deadly heatwave, a lot of desperate people showed up. In the apocalypse, humanity meant little. Everyone answered only to themselves. But our community was the only one that never got attacked by any looters, all thanks to the top-notch security forces here. It stayed safe until the scientists finally managed to build weather bombs strong enough to fight off the deadly heat, and the heatwave finally ended. Everyone in our community survived.