Cal is twenty-three, works the register at a rundown variety store, and has already worked out - half as a joke - exactly why it beats the Supercenter down the road if the world ever ends. Then it does. Slowly. Nobody arrives with sirens. It arrives the way everything arrives in a small town: as gossip, as a headache pill that sells out too fast, as a dry patch of skin on a stranger's hand that everyone decides is nothing.
By the time Cal understands what he's looking at, the man standing in front of him used to sell him tires. What follows isn't the fast, screaming apocalypse you've seen before. The sclerites don't run. They don't moan. They stand - for weeks, for months - while the world tries to talk itself into believing in something else. And when they finally move, what they've become is worse than anything a faster monster could manage.
Cal has a brother, a boss who counts everything twice, and a plan that started as a joke about which building in town is actually worth defending. What he doesn't have is any idea how much of himself he'll have to bury to keep the people he loves alive - or how much of what's coming, he'll never see explained. A slow-burn survival novel about the last ordinary winter anyone will have, and what's left of a person once the deciding is done.
Cal is twenty-three, works the register at a rundown variety store, and has already worked out - half as a joke - exactly why it beats the Supercenter down the road if the world ever ends. Then it does. Slowly. Nobody arrives with sirens. It arrives the way everything arrives in a small town: as gossip, as a headache pill that sells out too fast, as a dry patch of skin on a stranger's hand that everyone decides is nothing.
By the time Cal understands what he's looking at, the man standing in front of him used to sell him tires. What follows isn't the fast, screaming apocalypse you've seen before. The sclerites don't run. They don't moan. They stand - for weeks, for months - while the world tries to talk itself into believing in something else. And when they finally move, what they've become is worse than anything a faster monster could manage.
Cal has a brother, a boss who counts everything twice, and a plan that started as a joke about which building in town is actually worth defending. What he doesn't have is any idea how much of himself he'll have to bury to keep the people he loves alive - or how much of what's coming, he'll never see explained. A slow-burn survival novel about the last ordinary winter anyone will have, and what's left of a person once the deciding is done.
