EMP

The lights went out and never came back on. Every engine, every phone, every machine, dead in a single silent instant. The quiet was the part nobody was ready for.

Eleven days later, Chris Mathers walks into the mountains to die.

A former Ranger with stage four cancer and twenty years of ghosts behind his eyes, Chris has lost every reason to take the next step. He has it all planned out: walk far, find a quiet place under the spruce, and let go on his own terms before the worst of it comes.

Then he hears a child scream.

What he finds is a woman standing alone against three armed men, shielding six orphaned boys with her body. And his own training moves him before he can think, down the mountain, rifle up, toward the screaming instead of away.

That single choice changes everything.

Because those six children escaped from a place that should not exist. A man who calls himself the Godfather, a former police chief turned warlord, has built an empire of fear in the ruins, with walls, working trucks, a thousand followers, and a building full of stolen children he calls the School for Lost Children.

Six got out. A hundred and forty are still inside.

Chris Mathers came into these mountains looking for a good place to end. Instead he finds the only thing that ever made the brutal arithmetic of his life add up: a reason. Six reasons, and then a hundred and forty more.

With a dying body, a brave teacher named Sonja, an old sergeant's hidden valley, and a handful of farmers he has only weeks to turn into something deadly, Chris sets out to do the last and best thing his ruined hands were ever made for.

To stand between the children and the dark.