The First Book is Free

Jon Washington is a journalist. His beat has always been the ugliest corners of American life — the gun violence, the urban chaos, the places where civilization's thin skin tears open and shows what's underneath. He knows how to find the story even when the story is trying to kill him.

He went into Florida on assignment. He stayed too long. By the time he understood that, it was too late for the people he loved.

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For three months, the quarantine held — barely. The world closed its borders to America. A second wall went up in case the first one fell. The nation wasn't contained so much as it was desperately buying time. Then the disease appeared north of the wall — in places no infected person had ever reached. The logic of a wildfire doesn't care about concrete and steel. Neither does nature.

Now the quarantine is meaningless. The infected are evolving into something that hunts with a terrible collective purpose. And Jon Washington — one of the last reporters still standing inside what used to be a containment zone — finds himself responsible for a group of abandoned children who have survived the nightmare with a resilience that shames every adult around them.

Getting them north is the mission. But as Jon documents the exodus, he begins to glimpse something in the wreckage that doesn't fit. Something gestating in the ruins of the old world. Something that suggests the wall was never the point — because what's coming next isn't stopped by walls.

 

No Safe Distance is Book Zero of the Of Sudden Origin Saga — the series that asks what happens not when humanity ends, but when it's replaced.

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