The Warden's Lonely Mile

For eleven years Warden Petra Vance has patrolled a wild river valley alone. For nine months she hasn't spoken a single word to another soul. And for three years someone has been leaving supplies at her cabin door. She knows who it is. Jonas Reyes, the marine-turned-lumberjack who runs the valley's last sawmill, has never once knocked. When the pulse kills the dam upstream and drains the river to mud, everything the water was hiding rises to the surface: two families with a blood feud and a spring to fight over, a scavenger crew out of the fallen town picking the valley clean, and a conversation between two people that is three years overdue. They split the valley. She takes the feud. He takes the crew. And every fifth night they meet at her cabin to trade news, ammunition, and eventually a great deal more. Then the crew poisons the spring, and the fragile peace Petra has brokered comes apart in a single morning. An EMP survival romance about two competent, solitary people learning that they never actually wanted to be alone.