EMP

THE HILL STOOD. BUT THE WAR HAS ONLY BEGUN.

One year after the lights went out, the free settlements gather at a single hill for a reckoning. Jeff Lowe has turned that hill into a fortress, but nothing could prepare him for what marches out of the dawn: a disciplined army, armored machines that shrug off rifle fire, and a cold voice that always knows his next move.

What follows is the longest two days in the history of the broken world. A welder and his wife who kill machines with fire. A chimney built in thirty minutes by a woman with nothing left to lose. A daughter snatched into the dark. A son who holds the line. And an enemy who never once shows his whole hand.

But the darkness was only the first thing to come up the pass.

When the old world finally returns, it does not come to save the free settlements. It comes to cage them. And the man it sends, General Alexander Sarkovsky, is something worse than any army: a hollow, sadistic mind who breaks strong men for the pleasure of it, and who has just learned exactly what Jeff Lowe loves most.

Jeff has already buried more than any man should. He made a dying promise to stay warm, to never become the thing he fights. Now a voice on the radio is about to test whether that promise can survive when everything he has left is on the line.