Remnants

One hundred years after the bombs fell, the wasteland remembers what we were - and punishes us for it.

Radiation didn't just poison the world. It rewrote human biology. Walkers - brainstem-driven husks - migrate in hordes across the ruins of North America. The wolf-touched, five generations deep into permanent mutation, hold the frozen mountains. Hemotrophs, their bone marrow destroyed, survive on transfused blood and hard politics. These are not monsters from legend. They are what we became.

In the frozen wastelands near the old Canadian border, a lone hunter named Jasper - grieving a wife and daughter he couldn't save - intervenes in a fight that isn't his. The woman he saves is Dakota, a fighter who has spent fifteen years searching for the brother raiders took when she was twelve. Neither trusts easily. Both need something the other has.

Their uneasy alliance pulls in two more: Quotes, a scholar who has spent a decade decoding military documents in a ruined Montana library, and Tif, a fifteen-year-old engineering prodigy tracking strange signals from the south. All four pieces point to the same coordinates - somewhere far to the south, where rumors persist of a place untouched by the war. No one has ever confirmed it exists.

The journey south will take them through walker migrations, wolf-touched territory, and the shadow of a hemotroph lord with his own reasons for wanting what they know. But the wasteland's greatest danger isn't what hunts them. It's what they'll have to do - and who they'll have to become - to reach the other side.

Not everyone who survives stays whole.

Remnants: Survive is the first book in an adult post-apocalyptic trilogy where radiation breeds biological tragedy, not supernatural fantasy. For readers of Station Eleven, The Passage, and The Road.