When the power dies on an ordinary Tuesday morning, Kade thinks it's just another northern Idaho outage. Then he sees the dead phones. The stalled trucks. The smoke rising over town. And he realizes his two children are stranded four miles away, on the wrong side of a river, in a world that just went dark forever.
An EMP has fried everything with a circuit in it. No cars. No grid. No help coming. Ever.
But the blackout is only the beginning. As the county tears itself apart, Kade discovers that the real threat isn't the darkness. It's the people who prepared for it. A homeowners association president with an army of sons-in-law. A man with the last running truck in six counties. And an enemy with a doctrine for everything, marching up the pass to collect the county's children.
To survive, Kade must become something harder than a father with a rifle. He must learn the brutal arithmetic of a world with no law but the one his neighbors build with their own hands. Because every right answer costs something that used to be nailed down. And the hardest question isn't whether you can do the terrible, necessary thing.
It's whether you can do it and stay the man who hates it.