He returned to rekindle old friendships and rebuild alliances… but found only ghosts.

Joshua Ragland—the battle-hardened drifter who once helped Bakerstown survive its darkest hours—returns to find the gates smashed, the streets empty, and his friends gone. No bodies. No signs of battle. Just an eerie silence where a thriving community once stood. In Marly’s abandoned office, he finds her diary—and the terrible truth.

They called themselves Marshalls of the Eastern Provisional Authority. They wore clean uniforms, carried military-grade weapons, and spoke of order and unity. But their leader, a cold-eyed man named Nash, hadn’t come to protect Bakerstown.

He came to subdue it. First, they seized the weapons. Then they imposed a curfew. Then they started making examples.

The diary’s final entries tell of desperate midnight evacuations through storm drains, of townsfolk hiding in the limestone caves of Franklin Ridge. Of executions in the town square and forced relocations to a place called Harrisburg.

Now Ragland faces an impossible choice: turn back and keep drifting and maybe return to The Cities—or find the survivors and confront the rising power in Harrisburg.

For a man like Ragland, it’s not really a choice at all...

Don’t miss the thrilling fourteenth installment of the America Falls saga and the first volume of the America Rising Sequence—where new alliances are forged, old friends reunite, and one man rides straight into the heart of a new tyranny.