A series
Rally Point
One family, scattered across a country that has just stopped working, each of them walking toward the same place on a map.
The Scattering
The grid went down on a Thursday. The Eckerts were already scattered.
A flu out of Southeast Asia takes the power grid and the supply chain with it, and one family finds itself spread across a continent with no way to close the distance except to walk it.
Ray and June hold a small ranch in the Texas Hill Country, and a road that is filling with strangers. Rachel is a large-animal vet snowed into a Montana valley with a doctor’s bag and no doctor. Dan is a Navy engineer in the middle of the Atlantic on a ship that may not be allowed to dock. Ben is twenty years old, a continent to the west, with eleven dollars in his account and a car he is not certain will start.
For thirty years Ray Eckert was the family joke — the man who buried rice in the yard. What he was actually building was an address: a place worth walking toward, and four people who all knew where it was.
This is the walk home. Four roads told in rotation, across a country working out, mile by mile, what it costs to be decent to a stranger — and what it costs not to be.
The rest of the series
- The Long Winter — drafted
If you got here from the back of The Scattering — thank you for finishing it.
Book Two is The Long Winter. It takes the family through the first winter: the homecoming Book One banked, a war fought over a radio frequency and a fence wire, and the question of what a household owes the people walking toward it.
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