EMP

Jonathan Welsh is sixty-one years old, and he owns a barge.

Three hundred and eleven feet of rusted scrap steel with three masts welded to her deck and sails stitched from billboard vinyl and truck tarp. No engine. No radio. No way to turn around. He has two hundred and twelve people, forty-one days of food, and a plastic sextant he never learned to use.

Eleven hundred miles south, there is an island with fresh water and soil that grows food twelve months a year.

Hurricane season starts in three weeks.

Then three trucks come down the rail bed at nine o'clock at night, and a man named Bennett Kestrel steps into his own headlights with four hundred and ten people and an offer Welsh cannot refuse and cannot survive.

What follows is a crossing that costs everything, a landing on a coral reef in the dark, and a hundred and forty years of what comes after: the fever, the fire, the wall, the vote, the ring on the beach, and the thing in the west that nobody who goes there can ever describe.

This is not a story about a man who saves everyone.

It is a story about people who wrote down exactly what they did, including the parts that damn them, and handed the book to whoever came next.

Some of them were monsters. Most of them were tired.

They kept a record anyway.