Novels About Survival Novels & Stories

I looked at it once and turned away. My belongings had been thrown into two suitcases. Old medicine bottles were mixed with clothes, and a photo from my first remission had cracked down the middle. I took only my documents, my research notes, and the journal I had kept through treatment. Everything else could stay. When I came downstairs, the front doors opened. Dante walked in. His wedding suit had been changed, but he still looked like a man who had come from the wrong ceremony. His eyes found me at once, then dropped to my empty stomach. The color left his face.

Alex screamed from a stretcher, his face covered in dust and blood. Then he spotted Maddie and me standing there, both safe and on our feet. He went still. A second later, he broke down. "Kayla... I'm sorry. I should've listened to you. That corner wasn't safe. The ceiling came down on us. Rainee lied. She got us all hurt!" I looked at him coldly. They'd made their choice. They'd gambled with their own lives. "Over here! More survivors!" A rescuer's shout rang out from deep in the rubble.

HELENA By the gods, what had that man led me into? His words echoed in my head. “If you survive the next stretch” he had said. “You will reach places where you stop needing help from strangers.” Did that mean I had to survive whatever was in that damned village? Just what in the gods name was in that village, what did I have to survive by accepting help from this stranger?

He thought of the architecture of survival he’d built and dismantled, the quiet corridors of resilience and avoidance. “The foundation and the novels are the same thing,” he said finally. “They’re both about making visible what was invisible. The novels make visible the interior experience of people who’ve been trapped inside wrong things and found their way out. The foundation makes it possible for more people to make that journey.” He looked at Elian. “And both of them exist because of the specific life we’ve built, and the specific person I built it with.” He held Elian’s gaze. “I want to say that. Plainly.”

Not even after death. Ten years in the apocalypse were brutal. Surviving alone was hard, but running from an obsessed brother with powers was another kind of hell. Vera learned to sleep lightly, hide her tracks, lie with a straight face, fight dirty, and leave before anyone could decide she was useful enough to trap. She killed zombies, mutants, mutated animals, and people who had stopped being better than the dead. She survived heat, cold, hunger, poison rain, infected wounds, broken shelters, and nights when she had to stay awake because the scratching outside the walls did not stop.

People were overly dependent on modern systems—electricity, gas, and the like—which was why they had been caught so off guard. But once they adapted, survival was inevitable. History had seen cold catastrophes before, yet humanity had never gone extinct. Back then, people had been in far more primitive conditions. Now, at least, many modern tools still remained. And there were… ability users. So within a year or two, new life would surely be born. And those born into such a harsh world—those who survived—would all be exceptional. Still, Kirk wasn't among them. Ray was about to leave. He lifted his foot, then set it back down.

“I thought keeping quiet was loyalty. But it was fear. And it cost me everything.” Natalie’s eyes shone with unshed tears. “You left me with strangers. I bounced from one couch to the next. I lived in borrowed houses and ate cold food and lied about why my mom wasn’t around.” “I know.” “No, you don’t,” Natalie snapped. “You can’t know what it’s like to wonder every single night if your mom’s even alive. Or if she just forgot about you.” “I never forgot you,” Meekey said, voice cracking. “Not one day.”

She hadn't expected the authorities to collect books from survivors, sort them, then offer them for trade again. With one disaster after another making even three meals a day uncertain, books were little more than firewood to the poorest survivors. Nobody would waste precious credits or supplies on them, so hardly any of them had sold. That worked out perfectly for Nicole. There were books on physics, math, chemistry, technology, biology, and all kinds of academic subjects, along with relationship magazines, novels in every genre, and even paintings. They were cheap, too. Nicole kept checking boxes and circling items with her pen. Once the apartments were sold, all of it would be hers.

The oceans evaporated, revealing jagged seabeds and countless skeletal remains of once-living creatures. Humanity—once the ruler of Earth—proved pitifully fragile in the face of absolute natural force. Perhaps, in some corners of the world, there were survivors like me, hiding within their own arks, waiting for the planet's next cycle. Perhaps, hundreds or thousands of years from now, when the heat finally receded and glaciers returned, new life would sprout again from this burned wasteland. But none of that had anything to do with me. I picked up the journal on the table, turned to a pristine new page, and wrote the first line.

She wrote until there wasn't a fairy tale lie she couldn't expose anymore. "The End," she wrote at the last page of her novel. Cathedra climbed atop her desk chair and hung a noose over the beams. She tied a knot firmly, making sure it was strong enough to fulfill its purpose. She slipped the knot over her head. She jumped and kicked the chair off. For a few minutes she struggled and fought for breath, the way humans were normally programmed to do. For a few minutes, she had enough time to reflect on her short-lived life.