merchant bandits

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a horrific accident when he was seven, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. When Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and her aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. Sometimes strange sounds emerge from that shed.

Alex Reid, a member of the US Coast Guard, is on the brink of divorce. On the day his wife arrives on the east coast to have him sign papers, the nation's crippled by a string of increasingly bizarre disasters. When the internet, communication, and power grid goes down, and explosions erupt across America, they soon find themselves fighting to stay alive. Desperate to protect family, they're forced to venture across a chaotic and powerless country in search of their daughter. As the world ends and panic takes hold, they must overcome more challenges than a broken marriage to survive.

It starts as a whisper, barely audible. Rumors. Paranoia. Conspiracy theories. Subterfuge. Like lightning, the plague moves across the globe, leaving few alive. But the end is only the beginning. Primarily set in Memphis, four loosely-connected strangers, caught up in their lives, find their worlds annihilated by the swiftly-moving plague. Alex Connelly is a wealthy young executive. Kirk Foster is a self-absorbed aging gay man. Meredith Brinkley's ongoing war with breast cancer takes a turn for the worse. Logan King is a closeted baseball jock.