Disastrous! Three Stories of the End of the World

By Scott Overton

Let's admit it, there's a guilty pleasure in imagining how civilization could end!
An invasion from beneath our feet. A hammer blow from the sky. A genetic crop modification that could bring about humanity's extinction.
Tartarus Rising: The most critical business centres of the world are suddenly swallowed into the ground, a chemical explosion devastates New Jersey, and survivors flee the rumours of invaders from beneath the Earth. (First published in the anthology "Doomology" from Library of Science Fiction & Fantasy Press, 2010).
Saviour: A killer asteroid is headed for the Earth and the defence against it depends on one man. But what if he's the wrong choice?
The Cleansing: The people of a far-future pastoral Earth discover that their forbears genetically modified their crops to be protected from mutations by occasional die-offs. Except no-one has a plan when all of the crops start to die at the same time.

Three short stories with a total word count of about 16,000.

• Language: English
• Publisher: No Walls Publishing
• Release date: Dec 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9780993697319

Book preview

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DISASTROUS!

Three Stories of the End of the World

By Scott Overton

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NO WALLS PUBLISHING

Published by No Walls Publishing

Copyright © 2016 S. G. Overton

First No Walls Publishing Edition 2014

Epub ISBN: 978-0-9936973-1-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage & retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright holder, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this story are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Disastrous! Three Stories of the End of the World

TARTARUS RISING

SAVIOUR

THE CLEANSING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Get A Free Book

The Dispossession of Dylan Knox

Naïda

Look for other great books from Scott Overton

Body Of Opinion and other stories

Tartarus Rising: The most critical business centres of the world are suddenly swallowed into the ground, a chemical explosion devastates New Jersey, and survivors flee the rumours of invaders from beneath the Earth.

Saviour: A killer asteroid is headed for the Earth and the defence against it depends on one man. But what if he’s the wrong choice?

The Cleansing: The people of a far-future pastoral Earth discover that their forbears genetically modified their crops to be protected from mutations by occasional die-offs. Except no-one has a plan when all of the crops start to die at the same time.

TARTARUS RISING

It’s still hard to accept how quickly the Trogs took control of our planet. It wasn’t just that no-one had known an advanced species lived only meters beneath our feet. Some people, even now, say that’s impossible, and insist they must have come from space. It really makes no difference. What sealed our fate was that no-one believed we were under attack even weeks after it had begun.

Gamers were the first to use the name Trogs. The word troglodyte refers to ancient cave men. But to say the Trogs lived in caves was like saying the Queen has a nice house. They inhabited vast caverns under the earth’s surface—whole subterranean worlds. And we never knew until the disasters in New York and Tokyo.

There have been stories about dwellers underground for centuries. Just read the online ravings of the conspiracy theorists: tales of hairy creatures who attack amateur spelunkers, lumberjack types who visit trapped miners, or even more often, mysterious old men in robes with some connection to outer space aliens in UFO’s—the worst kind of lurid crap and no evidence worth a damn.

Trogs don’t look the way any of those stories describe them. But they are killers.

They killed thousands when the Citigroup Center in New York collapsed into a hole in the ground on June 14th. Then the Mori Tower in Tokyo the next morning. The week that followed tore the soul out of the business world: the Sears Tower in Chicago, the US Bank Tower in L.A., the Gherkin in London, England, and the Hochhaus Treptower in Berlin, Germany. They toppled like dominos until the news media couldn’t keep up. Not just some of the planet’s most famous buildings, but the vital organs of the capitalist world. Wall Street, central London, the Nihonbashi district...all sank beneath the surface amid clouds of dust and rubble, the very crust of the earth taken out from under them before anyone suspected a thing. We knew nothing about the Trogs, but they knew all about us.

The world economy was gutted in a matter of weeks. Workers refused to go to work. Even then there was not one credible suggestion that the disasters were anything but natural. We knew of no technology that could explain it, so it was left unexplained.

#

I’m just a hardware store manager and volunteer fireman. My friend Damon Langdon is a real estate agent, an excuse to spend all his time with his iPhone, running searches on the ’net. At least until the internet collapsed after too many major nodes were destroyed.

Shit, Craig, he said to me. Maybe these conspiracy nutbars aren’t so far off. What natural phenomenon would target only key financial centers?

God has a sense of justice after all? Doesn’t the Bible say it’ll be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into Heaven? Damon’s a good friend. He doesn’t laugh when I’m not funny.

It doesn’t say He’s going to send all the people who work for the rich men on a shortcut to Hell, too. He waved his iPhone at me. There are supposed to be lots of legends among native American tribes about ancestors who lived underground.

And what? Now they’ve developed technology that can make cubic miles of rock and dirt disappear?

Even I can hit on the truth by accident.

#

There’s a nightmare I remember from my childhood. I’d fallen asleep on the living room