One flash above the ridge, and every light in America died at once.
Eighteen months later, Del Jansen loads everything his family owns into a handcart he built in a barn and walks away from the only home he has ever known. Ahead of him lie two thousand miles, a mountain range he cannot imagine, and a valley in Idaho that a voice on a shortwave radio swears is still standing.
Eight hundred and forty-one people leave the Watauga bridge that April. Farmers, mechanics, children, a fourteen-year-old girl who knows how to make shoes. They are led by a cowboy and his wife, and by a drifter named Cale who gives no last name and who knows far more about the road ahead than any man should.
They will bury a great many of their own before they see the Salmon River.
And when they finally stand on that ridge and look down at the valley, they will learn what the broadcast never told them.