The Yellowstone Caldera has erupted once every 600,000 years. We’re 40,000 years overdue. A LAND OF ASH Lava flows stretch for hundreds of miles. A cloud of ash billows east, burying the Midwest, destroying crops, and falling upon the Pacific Coast like a warm, dead snow. The remnants of the United States flees south as the global temperatures plummet. Amid this total devastation are stories of families, friends, sons and fathers and wives: the survivors. Within are eleven stories focusing on the human element of such a catastrophe, from an elderly couple gathering to await their death to a father sealing his shelter in hopes of keeping the air breathable for his daughter. ...

…a young man tries to build a better life while trapped in a mall after a plague has killed off most of humanity… …zombies overrun a world gone mad, leaving a boy with no choice but to rely on possibly mystical means of escape… …Halloween night brings out a darkness so threatening that a young couple's only hope of survival may be a procession of strange, ghostly children… …when the world is given a brief glimpse of divinity, a formerly disabled man must come to grips with the fact that not everything is as good as it seems… These tales and many more await in The Gate 2: 13 Tales of Isolation and Despair, the new collection edited by Robert J. Duperre. Thirteen talented...