From "Cryoskip's Footprints" by Jason G. Anderson

While searching the complex they had spent several weeks traveling to, Derek and Butch make an unexpected discovery...

Derek stared with mixed emotions at the room Butch had found. It was a room all too familiar to him. To both of them.

Four large coffin-shaped containers sat in cradles on one side of the room. Vats of chemicals connected by snaking tubes to the enclosures sat behind each cradle. Unlike everything they had seen so far in the complex, the equipment in this room had power. Lights and readouts were visible on the ends of three of the coffins.

“Those sons-of-bitches. I can’t believe it. They did it again. They screwed with more people’s lives!” Derek stormed toward the nearest cradle.

“Wait! Don’t touch anything! If there are people inside, we might be able to revive them.”

Derek turned and stared at Butch for a few more moments. Memories flooded through his mind, memories of waking in a room filled with coffins like the ones in front of him, alone, unsure of where he was or what had happened to him. Memories of his wife and son. After a few moments, he shook his head to clear it, then turned back to the cradles. His face softened.

From "After The Virus" by Meghan Ciana Doidge

He closed the tailgate just as he heard the passenger door slam. She buckled up, then sat, clutching her sack and staring straight ahead. He might vomit. He wasn’t sure if it was the fear of hurting her further, or the trust she’d so readily placed in him, that made him ill. He ripped open a box of granola bars and climbed into the truck. He placed the bars on the seat beside him and shifted the truck into gear.

“Might be stale,” he warned, then he ate one anyway.

She reached a tentative hand, caked in dirt and blood, to press play on the stereo. He’d been listening to this on the drive over, but now, the third verse of Paul Simon’s “Call Me Al” hit him in the gut. He finally got it. He clenched his jaw to quell the rising emotion. The girl bobbed her head along with the bass line. He’d never had an epiphany before. In this moment, he chose to become the man he’d always wanted his father to be.

From "The Judas Syndrome" by Mike Poeltl

Days after the Apocalypse ravaged the earth, Joel finds Gil staring into the abyss behind their house...

 “Don’t know how much longer I can keep it together.” His voice was hollow. “I don’t know. The sadness, everyone’s sadness… I hear them, their cries in the night, the walls can’t contain it. I can’t listen to it anymore.” He began to jerk as emotion overwhelmed him and the tears came. “It can’t go on like this, Joel, I know I can’t.”

I joined him at the glass door and watched the darkness distort all that I loved, all that we were...  The sky was as the earth, muddied, wretched and dark. You could suffer a case of vertigo from staring for too long.

Standing there, remembering all that this view once offered- the beautiful vistas in the fall, the lush greens of the summer foliage, the crisp whites of winter snow- I realized that memory was all that remained of this place. In my mind’s eye I saw the sun come out and cleanly sweep over the trees and the lawn, the field and the pool; all that I knew were there, but could no longer see through the thick black rain falling hard from a bitter sky.