bwebster21450
Five kids grew up together in Harlan, Texas, and then they scattered - one to the Army, one to a hospital, one to the power grid, one to nowhere good, and one who never left at all.
Fifteen years later, at 4:17 on an ordinary morning, the lights go out. Not a storm. Not an accident. Within seventy-two hours a foreign army is landing on the Texas coast, and the only road between the invaders and the heart of the country runs straight through the town that made them.
So they come home. A burned-out Ranger who can't outrun what he's good at. A flight nurse who's kept a rifle hidden in a camera bag for nine years. A grid engineer who watched the country die from a control room and is the only person alive who understands what the enemy really wants. A dirt-road smuggler who trusts no one and shows up loaded down with everything a town is about to need. And the one who stayed - a contractor who knows every road, culvert, and load rating in the county, and the exact weight of everything he owns.
They haven't spoken since the summer they lost the sixth of them to black water. Now they have to become something together, before an occupying army decides a town full of "farmers and loggers" isn't worth taking seriously - and finds out, one hard night at a time, exactly how wrong that is.
But the enemy isn't the only thing that came home with them. And some water never gives back what it takes.
They didn't come back to be heroes. They came back for the people they love - and the ground that made them.