Rose Winter has enough problems. With a marriage going down the tubes and a dreaded anniversary party on the horizon, the last thing she needs is the zombie apocalypse. She wanted to get drunk and sing karaoke, not murder her undead neighbors. It’s clear the party’s over, however, now Rose has more problems - a missing husband, an overbearing houseguest, and keeping her family alive.

As a reporter, I’ve seen firsthand what the Awaken virus does to people you love, turning them into mindless beasts intent on violence. That’s why I’m staying safe inside my apartment. Women are getting kidnapped right off the streets in broad daylight. Rumors say there’s a group of Awakened living under New York, and they’re responsible for the disappearances. The old me would have sniffed out that story, but post-apocalypse Mal is too scared to go digging for clues.

The virus spread. Billions died. The Ending began. A group of orphaned misfits. The wildlands of the last frontier. Superhuman abilities, harrowing adventures, and heartbreaking secrets.

"Happily Ever After" wasn't supposed to come with a do-over option. But when my husband of 20 years packs up and heads for greener pastures, and my son heads away to college, that's exactly what my midlife becomes. A do-over. This time, though, I plan to do things differently. Age is just a number, after all, and at 40 I'm ready to carve my own path. Eager for a fresh start, I make a somewhat unorthodox decision and move to a tiny town in the Sierra foothills.

Sylvie Rossi has the loner thing down pat, with the exception of her best friend, Grace. But when the two are trapped in a hospital during the last gasp of a dying city, alone time is no longer an option. A nurse's offer of sanctuary promises Sylvie the supplies she needs to survive the zombies - it's the coexisting with people that might do her in. Eric Forrest will do whatever it takes to get into the dead city for his sister, including ending up dead himself. He's used to taking risks, but with every mile he travels death looks likelier.

Half of the earth's population has been wiped out. Impossible to predict or stop, the Gamma Ray Burst tore through the Earth like a bullet, its radiation wave killing hundreds of millions, and the after effects ensuring the deaths of billions more.

Jane Finch wishes her problems ended with a bad commute and no coffee. But when she and her beloved Great Dane, Schrodinger, emerge from a locked room they discover a city changed for the undead. Zombies are everywhere. Some are endlessly cycling through their last actions, others have turned feral—and hungry. Jane and Schroddie's best chance for survival? Reaching her parents' bunker on the city's north shore. Not an easy commute on foot—when surrounded by zombies. Dodging stray bullets and feral zombies is one thing. But soon Jane realizes one of the zombies is following her.

Alex Duncan is a mother, a sister - and the daughter of a doomsday prepper. She always thought her father was insane, raving about an apocalypse she never believed in, but when a plague hits the United States and the dead no longer stay dead, Alex discovers heeding her deceased father’s advice is what will keep her family alive. Before he died, Alex’s father created a compound in Montana just in case situations like this arose. The dead walk, hungry for human flesh. With little time to spare, Alex must make split-second decisions to prevent her family from being devoured.

Now the last member of my family has died, and I'm forced to travel across what's left of three states to find the only people I know left alive. To survive, I'll have to salvage food and supplies and try to avoid violent men who've learned they can take what they want by force. The only way I'm going to make it is by trusting Travis. Travis used to fix my car, and now he's all I have left in the world. He's gruff and stoic and unfriendly, and I don't really know or like him. But he's all I have left. He'll keep me safe.

It began on New Year’s Eve. The sickness came on suddenly, and spread quickly. The fear spread even faster. Within weeks, everything people counted on began to fail them. The electrical grid sputtered; law and government collapsed - and more than half of the world’s population was decimated. Where there had been order, there was now chaos. And as the power of science and technology receded, magick rose up in its place.

Three survivors travel the ruins of a collapsed society, sifting through the rusted relics of the Ancients' civilization as they search for a better future, hoping to escape the horrors of the past. But among those treasures lurks danger. And what they discover might be worse than what they left behind.

With little warning, a solar super flare erupts from the sun. A billion tons of superheated plasma hurtles through space toward Earth. As multiple solar storms strike Earth, transformers explode, the power grid fails, and communication networks collapse. Half the world goes dark, thrusting the planet into utter chaos. With society crumbling around them, the survivors must fight not only for their lives, but for everything they hold dear - hope amid devastation, justice in the face of depravity, and ultimately, the perseverance of the human spirit against all odds.

With only three days left until the predicted apocalypse, the small town of Franklin Springs, Georgia, has become a wasteland of abandoned cars, abandoned homes, abandoned businesses, and abandoned people. People like Rainbow Williams. Rain isn’t afraid of dying. In fact, she’s looking forward to it. If she can just outrun her pain until April 23, she’ll never have to feel it at all.

After devoting 18 years of his life to the US Navy, Petty Officer First Class Shane Parker is struggling with the very real possibility of becoming unnecessary. If he doesn't make chief petty officer before he's 20 - and it doesn't seem likely that he will - he'll be retired from active service and placed on the Fleet Reserve list until his mooring lines are officially cut forever. While it would all be very honorable and ceremonial, he simply wasn't civilian material.

The Overland Trail, 1853: Naomi May never expected to be widowed at 20. Eager to leave her grief behind, she sets off with her family for a life out West. On the trail, she forms an instant connection with John Lowry, a half-Pawnee man straddling two worlds and a stranger in both. But life in a wagon train is fraught with hardship, fear, and death. Even as John and Naomi are drawn to each other, the trials of the journey and their disparate pasts work to keep them apart.

Cassie Forrest isn't surprised to learn that the day she’s decided to get her life together is also the day the world ends. After all, she’s been on a self-imposed losing streak since her survivalist parents died: she’s stopped painting, broken off her engagement to Adrian and dated a real jerk. Rectifying her mistakes has to wait, however, because Cassie and her friends have just enough time to escape Brooklyn for her parents’ cabin before Bornavirus LX turns them into zombies, too.

One woman's story as she blogs about - and fights back against - the zombie apocalypse.

Allison Hewitt and her five colleagues at the Brooks and Peabody Bookstore are trapped together when the zombie outbreak hits. Allison reaches out for help through her blog, writing on her laptop. It may also be her only chance to reach her mother. But as the reality of their situation sinks in, Allison's blog becomes a harrowing account of her edge-of-the-seat adventures.

The living dead are more alive than ever! Zombies have become more than an iconic monster for the 21st century: They are now a phenomenon constantly revealing as much about ourselves - and our fascination with death, resurrection, and survival - as our love for the supernatural or post-apocalyptic speculation. Our most imaginative literary minds have been devoured by these incredible creatures and produced exciting, insightful, and unflinching new works of zombie fiction.

In Emmy Laybourne’s action-packed debut novel, six high school kids (some popular, some not), two eighth graders (one a tech genius), and six little kids trapped together in a chain superstore build a refuge for themselves inside. While outside, a series of escalating disasters, beginning with a monster hailstorm and ending with a chemical weapons spill, seems to be tearing the world - as they know it - apart.

Everyone knows a guy like Jared: the burnout kid in high school who sells weed cookies and has a scary mom who's often wasted and wielding some kind of weapon. Jared does smoke and drink too much, and he does make the best cookies in town, and his mom is a mess, but he's also a kid who has an immense capacity for compassion and an impulse to watch over people more than twice his age, and he can't rely on anyone for consistent love and support, except for his flatulent pit bull, Baby Killer (he calls her Baby) - and now she's dead.

Cassie Salazar and Luke Morrow couldn't be more different. Sharp-witted Cassie works nights at a bar in Austin, Texas, to make ends meet while pursuing her dream of becoming a singer/songwriter. Luke is an army trainee, about to ship out for duty, who finds comfort in the unswerving discipline of service. But a chance encounter at Cassie's bar changes the course of both their lives.

In her tour-de-force first novel, Juliann Garey takes us inside the restless mind, ravaged heart, and anguished soul of Greyson Todd, a successful Hollywood studio executive who leaves his wife and young daughter and for a decade travels the world giving free reign to the bipolar disorder he's been forced to keep hidden for almost 20 years.

Following the death of his 10-year-old son, physician Peter Croft embarks on a desperate, seemingly random search for a missing child, risking his sanity, even his life in a grief-induced quest. His journey propels him into the darkest reaches of human suffering and pits him squarely against an adversary whose own obsession defies all reason.

This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides - or are chosen.

Rachel de Luca has found incredible success writing self-help books. But her own blindness and the fact that her troubled brother has gone missing have convinced her that positive thinking is nothing but bull. Her cynicism wavers when a cornea transplant restores her sight. The new eyes seem to give her new life, until they prove too good to be true and she starts seeing terrifying visions of brutal murders-crimes she soon learns are all too real.

They said she was armed. They said she was dangerous. They were right. Petty Moshen spent 18 years of her life as a prisoner in her own home, training with military precision for everything, ready for anything. She can disarm, dismember, and kill - and now, for the first time ever, she is free.

Instead, he’s dodging bullets and wondering how the hell he ended up back in the Black Ops lifestyle he left behind him. After rescuing former child star Trey Bishop from a pair of thugs in the middle of the night, he knows it’s time to pick up his gun again. But it seems trouble isn’t done with Trey, and Kuro can’t quite let go...of either the gun or Trey Bishop.

Suffer the Children presents a terrifying tale of apocalyptic fiction, as listeners are introduced to Herod's Syndrome, a devastating illness that suddenly and swiftly kills all young children across the globe. Soon, they return from the grave, and ask for blood. And with blood, they stop being dead. They continue to remain the children they once were, but only for a short time, as they need more blood to live. The average human body holds 10 pints of blood, so the inevitable question for parents everywhere becomes: How far would you go to bring your child back?

Margo is not like other girls. She lives in a derelict neighborhood called the Bone, in a cursed house, with her cursed mother, who hasn't spoken to her in over two years. She lives her days feeling invisible. It's not until she develops a friendship with her wheelchair-bound neighbor, Judah Grant, that things begin to change. When a neighborhood girl, seven-year-old Neveah Anthony, goes missing, Judah sets out to help Margo uncover what happened to her. What Margo finds changes her, and with a new perspective on life she's determined to find evil and punish it.

Panic is a legendary game played by graduating seniors in the middle-of-nowhere town of Carp, where the stakes are high and the payoff is even higher: After a series of challenges ranging from sleeping in a haunted house to running across a highway blindfolded, one winner takes home a cash prize in the tens of thousands at the end of the summer. Participating players are sworn to secrecy, which means little is known of Panic’s history. Until now.  

The virus spread. Billions died. The Ending began. A group of orphaned misfits. The wildlands of the last frontier. Superhuman abilities, harrowing adventures, and heartbreaking secrets.

Walk. Scavenge. Destroy. Trade. A simple cycle that's suited Ronin for 185 years. With no clear grasp of his programming, the barren wasteland known as The Dust offers him purpose, a place where his armored undercasing, amped-up processors, and advanced optics can be put to use. The ramshackle towns on the edges of the waste serve merely as resupply stations between increasingly long treks. But one night - one human woman - makes him question everything.

After a deadly virus ravages Chicago and destroys Mackenzie Lyons’ carefully curated world, Mac escapes the devastation and horror to her childhood hometown with the help of her best friend’s little brother, Jake. But the small-minded community of Sanford isn’t exactly welcoming, and the virus isn’t the only battle brewing.

Reagan McClane is a prodigy med school student on the brink of a brilliant career, but the United States and the rest of the world are headed toward total economic and social collapse. And it doesn't take more than a few hours for mass crime, looting, and pillaging to spread across the country like a plague. A brutal attack at her university leads to a fight for her life before Reagan barely makes it home to the safety of her awaiting grandparents and sisters on their family farm in Tennessee.

I was once an average college student with dreams of the Olympics. A better future had been within my grasp. I was weeks away from graduating from college, and I had just received my invitation to the National Team. Sure, I was still nursing a broken heart and coming to terms with the betrayal delivered to me at the hands of people I once trusted and loved dearly. However, things were finally looking up. Or so I thought. The news began to report disturbing stories about a new virus. This virus was turning people. The infected became violent and attacking anybody and everybody. My plans for ...