The headlights are blinding, the carbines are leveled, and the first major arc of the Driftless resistance has hit the end of the line. Station Zero is stepping away from the mic for a brief maintenance cycle—here is when the signal cuts back through the static for Book Two.
The back door of the Checker Marathon swung open. Static, the German Shepherd, didn’t jump out. Two Aegis contractors stepped into the blinding spotlight, their weapons already raised and leveled at Cronauer’s chest. Cronauer froze, his boots planted in the mud, the engine of the GS ticking in the white glare. He slowly turned his head, his eyes locking onto Audrey behind him as the realization struck like a physical punch to the throat. The coordinates hadn’t been found. They had been given.
“We change the scale,” Cronauer said, his voice dropping into the deep, authoritative broadcast resonance he’d spent thirty years anchoring. “Joy Luebke and Eli are building a massive structural mast on Nottingham Ridge right now. If you stay here, you save one room until they lock your cage. If you come with me, we broadcast your medical logs, your triage data, and your pharmaceutical protocols to every ham operator and survivor from La Crosse to Madison. You can be a prisoner, or you can heal the whole valley from the sky.”
The plastic syringe she had been holding slipped from her numb fingers, hitting the floorboards with a dull, hollow click. Audrey just stared at him, her face completely drained of color, looking at a man who was supposed to be a ghost thousands of miles away. In the tight, amber-lit alcove of a leaking riverside shelter, the weight of three decades and the raw trauma of what they had lost before the sky went dark came crashing back into the frequency.
The western bank of the Mississippi was a different kind of graveyard—sterile, calculated, and bound by invisible threads of corporate security. Crawling flat against the limestone shale to slip beneath the high-frequency click of Aegis microwave fences, Cronauer watched the cold reality of the harvest unfold through his night-vision lens. They weren’t just clearing the valley; they were indexing human assets, checking teeth, and sorting survivors like hardware for the shelters down south.
The six minutes didn’t tick away; they evaporated. The machine was awake, the checksum was breached, and the maintenance deck of the dam erupted into a crossfire of automated lasers and concrete-shattering 7.62 rounds. With no time to reach for his rifle, Cronauer stood flat on the pegs and turned the heavy aluminum armor of his BMW GS into a flying kinetic battering ram.
The Mississippi was breathing. A thick, rhythmic fog rolled off the water, swallowing the bottom of the bluffs and turning the world into a grayscale blur. I had the GS in “Blackout Mode”—lights killed, traction control dialed to the dirt setting. But I wasn’t hearing the river. I had my helmet speakers pinned. Stuck Mojo … Read more
“He didn’t scream when the staples bit into his skin.” Under the red glow of a headlamp, Cronauer staples his wounds and discovers “The Mule”—a strategic off-road trailer that could save Viroqua, provided he can survive the high-speed run back to the ridge.
“Unidentified thermal anomaly detected.” As Cronauer ghosts his BMW GS down a forty-degree limestone drop, he realizes the mission has changed. He isn’t just fighting the dark; he’s fighting a Signature-Based Algorithm designed by the best engineers the old world had to offer.
“Going kinetic!” Cronauer roared. With a 600-pound BMW GS as his projectile and an AR-15 snapped from its scabbard, he dives into the chaos of the Coon Valley creamery to protect the only assets the “auditors” haven’t yet bled dry.