Three hundred and eleven days after the EMP, Patricia Walker still climbs to the same rock before dawn. Binoculars. A paper map. A rifle her father carried before her. From her cabin on the north shoulder she can see fourteen miles of dead highway, and she has learned to read every inch of it.
She is watching for the day someone comes up her mountain.
That day arrives with a hard white beam sweeping the valley floor. It's a light that shouldn't exist anymore. It brings a man who knows her name before she's ever shown her face, an old trapper carrying a secret he's kept for a year, and a warning written on the back of her own note: the gate opens Tuesday, and it only opens one way.
Below her, a self-declared county administrator is building something. Beyond the ridge, nine thousand acres of burned timber hide people who've been quietly keeping each other alive. And somewhere out there, a group that calls itself The Bandits is learning her name.
Patricia has spent eleven months certain that survival means keeping the valley out.
She's about to find out what it costs to be wrong.