Hawthorne

In a world of raiders, indent gangs, and acid rain, surviving a hidden secret is everything…

Juliana Hawthorne has traveled nearly seven hundred miles to get her family away from the western border of the Eastern States and the DMZ She answered a request by her ex-lover Sergeant Master Gabriel Alder to become the new vet in Ridge Lake. What the rest of Gabe’s friends don’t know is that they’ve remained in contact after their disastrous breakup.

She has no desire to begin anew with Gabe. What she wants is to keep her family alive. She accepts the offer to re-settle, well away from the border, with a Guard escort from the Double Six in Lima, Ohio straight to Ridge Lake, where she will start over. She will. Her family will start over. Her brother, Greg, adopted brother, Cody, nephew Sean, and Del. They will…

Something two members of her travel group certainly don’t care about. Josie and Michael have been inserted into her “family” all because her brother got in with the black market. During the trip, she has been threatened, her family has been threatened, though they don’t know it, and her dreams have begun to shatter.

At the age of 23, Brogan Alden OpCar is on the old side to have begun his military career. He has left his family . Not out of poverty. Out of one of the worst forms of betrayal one can endure. While risking his life to begin hire-out work in order to secure heart medicine for his Aunt Edelle, his sister got involved with his then girlfriend, Andy. Ve had wanted them to split up, her brother to settle down, and begin breeding children to fatten the family ranks. Returning home, he found that Andy may have found a solution to in a bad family situation and gave in to her wishes to break up. The one person in his village to, even if partially, understand and accept him for who he was. He found that his mother had used his odd, social awkwardness as a means to control his over-bearing sisters. He decided that finally giving in to his own thirst for knowledge and curiosity of the world was better than… He can’t even bear the thought.

His SubUnit Commander, Sergeant Master Alder, asked him to complete a secret mission: to become a target for the Slave Trader Eli while on assignment as the head of security for the new town vet, Juliana Hawthorne. He has trained hard for this mission, away from the knowledge of his two bag buddies, Ter Whickman and Pete Tucker– two men who have become as dear to him as his birth family. He risks everything to ensure survival is even possible.