The Long Winter

Day Forty-Two. June Eckert sets four places for breakfast, and leaves the fourth plate at an empty chair.

Not hope. Hope is weather. The plate is construction.

Winter is closing on a country that has stopped pretending the lights are coming back. At a ranch in the Texas Hill Country, Ray and June are no longer keeping one family alive - a settlement has formed around their lists, their post riders, and their habit of turning up. In a Montana valley, Rachel is the only doctor for sixty miles, and the reason a militia calling itself the Ridgeline has started preaching on the radio. Dan is working west across the fall line one mill town at a time, learning that the sentence that opens a gate is usually "Y'all eat yet?" And Ben is close enough now to count the rivers.

The Ridgeline runs on voice. So does everything standing against it. What began as a walk home becomes an argument conducted at night, across bad air, between people who will never meet - about what a place owes a stranger, and what it can afford.

Still no hordes. Still no leather. The violence is rare and it is paid for. The heroism is a ledger kept honestly, a net that meets on schedule, a light left on through a blizzard.

Rally Point is a three-book series. The Long Winter is Book Two.