A Country Gone Dark: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Thriller
Eight days after every engine, radio, and light in North America died in the same second, Mortimer Durand is still standing on his porch in Meade County, South Dakota, drinking terrible chicory and counting.
He has four thousand pounds of food in a hillside. A hand pump older than the barn. A grain mill that runs on human arms. Twelve years of being laughed at by every man at the co-op, and a cellar full of the reason why.
He also has a wife coming to the end of her supply, a ten-year-old son who walks the north fence alone at four o'clock, and a mile and a half of gravel road between his family and a hundred and forty starving people in a church basement.
Someone has already been up that road in the dark to count his chimneys.
When the first note arrives nailed to his gatepost, it's signed by a hardware man Mortimer used to call a friend. It's the seventh line, written in a different hand, that keeps him awake:
Your boy walks the north fence alone at four o'clock.
What follows is not a war between good men and monsters. It's a war between decent people with nothing left, pushed by a stranger in a good coat who walked in off the interstate on day nine, has never once asked anybody for food, and knows exactly what happens to a town that gets hungry enough.
Mortimer will bury fourteen strangers in his own pasture and burn a number into a cedar stake for every one of them, so somebody can come find them later.
He will do worse things than that.
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