Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

The shock jarred his whole body. The strings snapped with violent twangs and wood splintered, filling the air with jagged sound. The candelabra, toppling, plunged to the floor and went out, spilling darkness throughout the hall.

The silence seemed to last for a long time.

Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers by John Langan

John Langan has published several stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, two of which—”On Skua Island” and “Mr. Gaunt”—were nominated for the International Horror Guild Award. A collection of his short work, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, is forthcoming from Prime Books. Langan’s reviews and essays have appeared in Dead Reckonings, Erebos, Extrapolation, Fantasy Commentator, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, The Lovecraft Annual, Lovecraft Studies, and Science Fiction Studies. An adjunct instructor at SUNY New Paltz, he is in the process of completing his dissertation on H.P. Lovecraft.

“Episode Seven” is reinvention of a story Langan wrote in his early twenties. This current version was influenced by another story in this volume: “The End of the World As We Know It” by Dale Bailey. “Dale’s story is a great revision of the classic, mid-century post-apocalypse story,” Langan says. “I admired what he’d achieved, but I also felt a bit of rivalry, a desire to show that not everyone would roll over and go gently into that good night.”

"There’s a whole lot of hate left on this world, Spiderman."

— Samuel R. Delany, “The Einstein Intersection”

"Come On Down, Make the Stand."

— The Alarm, “The Stand”

"He was not assaulted by a roving pack of feral dogs."

— Dale Bailey, “The End of the World As We Know It”

    AFTER three days and nights on the run—

—during which they slept in thirty-, sixty-, and ninety-minute snatches, in the backs of large cars and SUVs, in a hotel lobby, in a sporting goods store at one end of a mall—

                                        —they managed to pull ahead of the Pack—

—who had been too close from the start and drawn closer than that, despite Wayne’s traps, all of which were clever and a few ingenious and the least of which thinned the Pack by two or three; until Wayne succeeded in luring them onto the walkway between the foodcourt and the mall’s front entrance, where he detonated something that not only dropped the floor out from beneath the Pack, but brought the roof down, too, raining shards of glass like so many economy-sized guillotines—Jackie had wanted to stay and finish the survivors, but Wayne had declared it was still too dangerous and hauled her out the door—

                 —cross the Bridge—