Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 19 short novels in Survival/Apocalypse
"I saved the image." I said it to my phone and to no one else, thumb trembling. "Why?" Fraser laughed over my shoulder two seconds later. "Because I'm curious," I lied. I am Elias Jenkins. I'm seventeen. I was supposed to be asleep, but I was scrolling through a forum at 2:00 a.m. when a post made my stomach go cold. "Guys, save your shoes. Don't add me. I quit," the top line read, then the doctor started typing like someone trying to outrun a storm. "It was delivered to our...
"Don't open the door. Whoever comes—don't open the door!" "Emersyn?" I murmured into the phone, then heard the scream that killed the rest of her words. The line filled with ragged breaths, a torn-off moan, then a wet, metallic tearing sound. "Tear—" the sound ended in a busy tone. I looked at the clock: 4:01 a.m. I yawned, wrapped the quilt around my shoulders, and tried to fall back asleep. "Bang!" Something hit the ceiling like a fist. I shot upright. "It's nine o'clock," I...
"They said we should eat the big one tonight." "They said the small ones are tender," the other one hissed. "The old woman can wait." "Don't—don't eat—my girl!" the scared voice broke. I snapped upright, hands clamping empty air. "Don't you dare," I said before I even knew I spoke English in a different year. They froze with the knife halfway down. I smelled rot, fear, and sweat. I pushed up, and the oldest of the two kidnappers watched his grin die: "She's awake." "You—" the...
"I can't breathe!" I shouted, because my lungs felt full of cotton. "Carmen! Help her, help her!" a woman screamed beside me. I blinked and the world tilted. My hands were rough, my clothes were coarse, and my belly was hard and round. My head burned. The woman beside me had a voice like a bell and hands like river stones. She cried so loud the moon seemed to flinch. "Carmen?" I said, and then remembered I had no right to that name. Yet my mouth knew it. "Adelyn?" she answered, but...
I never planned to go abroad. I was bored in a small town, bored in a cheap internet cafe, bored enough to click the tiny flashing ad that promised work and five thousand a month. The sky that day felt too wide for my life, and the promise sounded like air that might lift me. "Five thousand a month," I told the screen. "That's more than I'll ever make in a year here." "Come to Yunnan for the interview," the girl in the chat said. "We will set everything." "Who's your boss?" I...
I am Lakelyn Abdullah. “You awake?” Henri Calderon whispered. “Barely,” I said, rubbing my eyes. Earl Chavez gurgled in his crib like the world was still safe. “Don’t go near the windows,” Henri said, voice low but urgent. “I won’t.” I could feel my heart trying to punch its way out of my chest. The living room windows looked like someone had smeared thick icing over the glass. Light collected and softened; I could not see the street. “It looks like fog,” I whispered. “It’s not...
I have always been a lucky person. "I mean, ridiculously lucky," I told Gillian as we shoved another box into the spare room. "Like college-by-a-hair lucky." Gillian laughed and tripped over a stack of canned soup. "You and your luck. You sure you didn't buy a rabbit's foot on Taobao?" "I bought a lot of rabbit's-foot-shaped things," I said. "But nothing worked as well as timing." "Then don't mess with timing now," she said, sliding lids into a crate. "If the world cracks, your...
The subway smelled like old coffee, wet metal, and the kind of fear you could count on the fingers of your hand. I set my watch anyway. "Five minutes," I told myself for the seventy-ninth time. "Five minutes and then—" Someone laughed near the door. Claire Fernandez adjusted her skirt and rolled her eyes. "You always do that, Sebastian. What's the point?" "It's a habit," I said. "A bad one." "Then forget it," Claire muttered, but she smiled. The smile was automatic, the way people...
I quit my job on a Tuesday and woke up the next morning feeling like a person who had just broken out of a tight suit of obligations. "I'll sleep for a month," I told myself, stretching on the couch. "No boss calls. No group chats. Just me, my couch, and bad drama on the screen." My apartment was tidy. Old enough to have the small comforts, new enough to not be crowded. One-twenty square meters—cozy by a single person's standard. The estate had been built a year ago; only a few units were...
I never expected a moonlit cave to hand me the whole world. "I hear a baby," I said, bending closer to the dark, my voice small in the hollow. "You hearing things now, Miriam?" Dieter answered, rubbing his temple. "We've had no sleep for days." "I did," I insisted. "Listen." I moved forward. The sound came again, thin and tired. The earth smelled of smoke and travel, our cart's last grain of flour gone weeks ago, our shoes all split. I reached with both hands into the dark corner and...
1. The countdown read: seven days. "I dreamed about the dead again," I told the camera as I turned the light off. "It felt so real." I, Layne Cotton, had been a streamer since college. Night shifts, late naps. That evening I woke to a flash of memory like a warned alarm. I couldn't tell if it had been a dream or a premonition, but one detail stuck: a scandal about a celebrity, then a news spike, then a tag I did not expect — "rebirth" and "seven days." "Fans are going wild," I said to...
I kicked the rusted door open and the house answered with a long, tired groan. "I have to go," I told the dark hallway, breathing loud in my own ears. The floorboards under my sneakers creaked like old bones. I shoved my shoulder into a closet door and dug through the jackets. "I need a bigger bag," I said, hoarding scarves and a broken raincoat into a worn backpack. A window glass broke three rooms away. Something heavy hit the kitchen glass. "Stay calm," I said, and the voice...
I signed the contract because of the money. A million dollars for one risky, weird job — find a missing high school girl and bring whatever was left of her back to the world. It sounded straightforward. It wasn't. "Are you sure about this, Alayna?" Jameson Clark asked, pushing the file back and forth between his fingers like it was a hot plate. "I am," I said. "You know what they're saying." He leaned close enough that I smelled the clinic coffee on his breath. "That game fries brains....
1 “My name is Kiley Riley,” I said to the empty room, because that felt like the honest thing to do. “You really should stop talking to yourself,” Maria Berg said from the doorway, rubbing at her apron like she was dusting off a memory. “Or at least don’t do it in the living room.” “Maria, I already told you I’ll move if you must,” I answered. “But not today. I have exams next week.” “You have more important things to do than complain about exams,” she said, the way small-town...
“Move!” I shouted, but the room still spun. The last thing I remember in the hospital was a patient biting a nurse's neck. Then teeth. Then cold blood on my hands. Then a robot voice counting down. “You are dead,” it said. “System link engaged.” Then I smelled dirt. “Where am I?” I whispered. “You're in 1973, Lena Feng,” the voice replied. “Binding complete. Countdown to global event: 24 hours.” I opened my eyes to two wild horses and a plank with teeth. “Jump!” someone...
I woke up in a crowd watching a screen and felt like I was the only thing anybody could look at. "Can someone tell me why they're escorting him like he's royalty?" a thick-shouldered man said, voice full of disgust. "They said he's an adult," an anxious woman whispered, "turned eighteen last month." I kept my mouth shut. My throat tasted like burnt paper. The collar around my neck—black and ugly—pressed against my skin. The little numbers under my clavicle hummed in my head, like a...
"One minute left," the invigilator said. "One minute!" someone behind me whispered. I bent over my answer sheet and tried to finish the last sentence. "Don't write that!" a voice snarled beside me. "Stop! Run!" A hand ripped my paper from under my pen. "Who—" I started. "Don't write!" the boy gasped. "Whoever finishes first dies!" The words were ludicrous until a wet, sudden sound filled the desk in front of me. "Boom," someone said, as if it were an ordinary...
I woke to the alarm I knew too well and slapped the bedside table. "Get up, get up," I told myself out loud. "Are you sure this is real?" my own voice asked. "It will be if I don't waste another second," I said. "Why are you packing three hundred packs of noodles?" my mother asked from the doorway when I shoved one last box into a crate. "Because there will be a second chance," I said. "Because I remember." "Remember what?" she asked, and her eyes had the tired softness of...
"I'll be quick," I told the class chat, fingers trembling even as I typed. "Stock up in the dorm," I wrote. "Keep it low-key." "You sure?" Bianca asked when she came back and I told her over the sink. Her voice was tight, but practical. "My mom said the city's got a problem." "I called my parents," I said. "They said it's serious. Just—don't advertise it." "Okay." Kailani's face softened. "Let's go together." Jimena nodded, but I could see her hands were already busy packing a...
