The Long Quiet

By M.C. Lewis

Twelve years after the outbreak, the world has settled into a fragile equilibrium known as the long quiet. The dead still walk, but they are fewer and slower. Small fortified communities like Ashford have learned to endure through isolation, careful rationing, and strict control of their borders.

Claire Voss, a seasoned scout who remembers the collapse, has spent more than a decade helping maintain that fragile order. When soil exhaustion, dwindling salvage, and unsettling changes in the behavior of the Still begin to erode Ashford's stability, she is ordered to lead a small expedition beyond the walls. What the team discovers is not empty wilderness, but a landscape already reshaping itself: organized human groups enforcing their own rules, religious enclaves that interpret the dead as divine judgment, and evidence that the Still are gathering and moving with new purpose.

As external pressures close in and internal divisions deepen, Claire must confront the central question the long quiet has deferred for twelve years-whether the walls that once protected her people now threaten to become their cage. In a world where both the living and the dead are evolving, survival demands a choice between preserving a place and preserving a people.

The Long Quiet is a grounded, atmospheric post-apocalyptic novel about the cost of endurance, the weight of hard knowledge, and the moment when isolation ceases to be safety.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HBPV9S23
• ISBN13: 9798189121579
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 164 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"