survival - Stories

Captain Steve Dunlop and his partner, chief engineer Nico Weber, have put Lalande II on their list of places to grow old together while helping commission its space elevator. But when a massive quake hurls a hundred-foot wall of water against the coastal station, their battered starship barely escapes—and the fault network keeps rupturing. Now Steve must defy orders and risk his crew, his command, and the man he loves to stop a chain reaction that could tear a continent apart.

Cade has spent eighteen years underground, learning medicine and fearing the ruined world above. Then armed strangers invade Bunker 34 looking for his seven-year-old brother.

Forced to flee, Cade has one goal: keep Sable alive. Their best chance is Jared, a guarded survivor who knows the surface, carries too many secrets, and is becoming far too difficult for Cade to stop noticing.

But Sable is changing the world around him, someone wanted him badly enough to kill for him, and every mile west pulls them deeper into a mystery none of them fully understand.

Orphaned woodsman Oleg knows how to survive a northern winter, but not why his father marked him with a magical blue crescent. But when a wounded noble begs for shelter and armed riders recoil from Oleg's mark, a savage blizzard traps them together—until two more desperate boys appear beneath his cabin. Now four strangers must choose whom to trust as the hunters return, and Oleg must risk his home and his life for the boy who's making him want more than survival.

A mythic retelling of the American Revolution told as an epic poem. Ordinary colonists rise into heroic figures as they confront an empire and fight for liberty. Blending history with legendary imagery, the poem follows their trials, sacrifices, and triumphs as fate, courage, and unseen forces shape the birth of a new nation. It is a narrative of struggle, hope, and the forging of a republic.

Ninety crew dead. Ten left. All men. The ship's held together with duct tape, the AI keeps suggesting they turn it off and on again, and the captain is a meteorologist who fought a can of ravioli with an axe and lost. They're lost in deep space, eating rat, and absolutely not qualified for this. But they're alive. For now.

February 2011. Tripoli is burning.

Special Envoy Will Carter is trapped in a collapsing palace, hunted by militias and running out of time. His husband Andrew is the only thing standing between him and execution—but the city is a warzone, and the hunters are closing in.

From the corridors of power in Ottawa to the burning streets of the Libyan capital, the Carters are about to discover that some wars are fought with bullets, and some are fought with everything you have.

Blackwater is not a school. It is a pressure cooker.
For boys deemed a problem by their families or the law, the remote fortress on the North Sea offers only one path to freedom: break, or be broken.

As he navigates the unforgiving hierarchy Calloway discovers that rebellion is not just possible. It is the only way to survive. Their growing connection becomes the foundation of a resistance that threatens to expose the unspeakable truths hidden within Blackwater's walls.

The tide is coming in. And not everyone will make it out.

When a blizzard traps Arthur and the mall's chaotic security guard Flip in a dark, freezing apartment, they expect a night of awkward small talk. What they don't expect is the electric tension that's been building across the concourse for months—or the discovery that Flip's not as straight as he thought. Two days of forced proximity, instant coffee, and improvised fires spark something neither can ignore. But when the snow stops, Flip has a choice: walk away, or risk everything for the man who made him feel seen for the first time.

This one comes from Prompt #71.

Write a short story featuring only one character. No secondary characters at all. You might drop them in the woods and see how they fare, or come up with your own idea, but only one character is allowed.

Fraser Vogel knew it was dangerous to parachute in high winds. He wasn’t left with too many options in his Cessna 182 Skylane when its yoke seized and the engine failed.

Jump or crash? Pretty easy choice.

Some people have their lives together.

Other people spend twenty minutes trying to get their lives together when all they really want is to close a document without having to argue with their computer, themselves, and several imaginary witnesses.

And then there are some documents that simply don't want to be written. They fight back like an old boyfriend you forgot you left in the closet. So the choice is yours to decide with who you want to sleep.