Showing results by author "Franklin Horton" in All Categories

We find Grace taking refuge in a secure compound in the Southern Appalachians. After reuniting with her father, she expected that the remainder of her journey home would be uneventful. Her dad was with her now - things would be okay. She couldn't have been more wrong. Nothing in this new life is easy. Grace and her friend Tom, a physically-challenged veteran utilizing a specially-outfitted track chair, find themselves suddenly thrown back in the fight. Robert Hardwick and Tom's mother become separated from their children and find themselves under attack from a highly-skilled and heavily-armed force. Most alarming of all, an innocent comment from a child's lips puts the remainder of Grace's family directly in the crosshairs of a violent sociopath. If he is able to carry out his plans, Grace and her father will not have a home, or even a family, to return to.

It's been around nine long months since the United States spiraled into chaos due to a cascading systems failure. From the recesses of a fractured government comes a plan to restore order and rescue what remains of the population. The first step comes with restoring power. But what if having access to electricity came at such a price that many - like Jim Powell, his friends, and his neighbors - would rather face a future in the dark.

In the Borrowed World Series, America is brought to its knees by coordinated terror attacks against the infrastructure. After spending weeks walking across a violent and horrific landscape to reach his family, Jim Powell hoped they could weather this storm on their secluded Appalachian farm. They had prepared for this. They had armed for this. They could live without power and fuel. What happens, though, when the same qualities that drew Jim to his isolated valley begin to attract another armed group looking for a place to hide from the unrest of a starving nation?

A new mission. An old rival. The powerful secret that binds them. Since the U.S. collapsed into chaos, Conor Maguire has fought to keep his family and friends safe, turning away attackers who threatened their community, seeking to live off the spoils of theft and murder. Fortunately, Conor is no stranger to fighting. In fact it’s his job. He’s an old-school assassin. When Conor and his partner reach their target they find that all is not as it seems. One small job, killing a shady financier, quickly becomes something larger.

After an EMP strands Dan in Boise, he escapes to the Idaho mountains with his new friend, Holly. She's not entirely sure what she's gotten herself into. She's straight-laced, pragmatic, and comes from a law enforcement background. Dan is a vigilante who thinks murder is sometimes the best solution to a problem. He's also a weed-smoking drinker who's constantly spouting his personal philosophy, The Way of Dan. Somehow, the two of them have to find a way to survive together in the close quarters of their isolated cabin.

In this fifth installment in The Borrowed World Series, human resources manager Alice Watkins is finally making it home. In her journey across Virginia, she experiences a country disintegrating and collapsing in on itself in the wake of a nationwide terror attack. Her trip home is agonizing; her experiences indescribable.

When Robert Hardwick’s daughter, Grace, was struggling to reach home because the nation was collapsing, he couldn’t wait. He went after her, finally finding her at one of the safe houses he’d arranged along her route home, a friend’s survival compound in the mountains of northern Georgia. A chance encounter at the compound gave Grace the opportunity to hitch a ride home in a chopper while Robert chose to wait for an injured friend to heal up.

Army combat veteran Ty Stone has now joined the ranks of DKI, a veteran-operated organization waging war on human trafficking. He splits his time between training in Arizona and his home in Virginia. He's doing better at the training than at winding down, struggling with his relentless PTSD symptoms if he has too much time on his hands.

While just a few days have passed since the initial attack, the group finds that its country is quickly descending into a vicious, chaotic landscape where nothing comes easy. While they fight to close the distance between them and their loved ones, they cannot avoid the steadily growing number of people who have realized that they can get away with whatever they want in a world where there are no longer any legal consequences for their actions.

Ty Stone never wanted to be anything but a soldier. While in Afghanistan, an operation under his command goes horribly wrong, ending his military career. Ty is thrust back into civilian life, stuck working as a security guard at a truck stop. To make matters worse, he struggles every day with the demons that followed him home from the war. His new job is routine, even boring, until a young girl is abducted while he’s on duty.

After his last mission collapsed into utter failure, Conor Maguire and his daughter Barb returned to the US only to confirm their worst fears - Conor's friend and longtime handler, Ricardo, is presumed dead. Worse yet, Conor's new boss is none other than the man who ordered the hit, Billy Browning, and he's long held a grudge against Conor. Conor is given an ultimatum: work for Browning or lose his compound to a missile strike.

Teenager Amanda Castle was like a lot of people, posting pictures of her everyday life to a variety of social media sites. Not everyone who viewed her pictures was there to share in her experiences. One was there to steal her profile pictures. A terrorist in Frankfurt was desperate to please his leadership. He planned the perfect attack, one in which vulnerable people would be invited through social media to participate in a flash mob. There, the unwitting participants, thinking they were taking part in a random act of kindness, would find themselves engaged in a random act of terror.

Jim Powell is convinced that his presence in the valley is putting his friends and family in danger. Hoping to buy them some time, he increases the security at his home, then sets off on a trip to allow the situation in his community to cool off. As much as he hates the idea, he also intends to scout out a location to fall back to if his people get driven from their homes. Frustrated by the constant tension and violence, his best friend, Lloyd, joins him.

Dan Slaughter has given up on appearances. With his wife dead and his kids grown, he’s slowly reverting back to the east Tennessee boy he used to be three decades earlier. He quit cutting his hair and started smoking pot. He drinks when he wants to and sings along with the classic songs of his lost youth.

Just when Dan and Holly think things can't get any stranger, a terrifying new presence arrives in their community. Faces smudged with ash. Bodies decorated with mysterious symbols. Crude hides for clothing. Weird rituals conducted in the dark of night.

Ty Stone is enjoying life in Arizona and his new job with Door Kickers International, an organization dedicated to rescuing people from human trafficking. Then a high-profile raid on a movie mogul goes horribly wrong and Ty finds himself out on the street yet again.

Robert Hardwick is finally within reach of his family in Damascus, Virginia, but there’s no time to rejoice. His presence at a friend's compound in North Georgia put him on the radar of a corrupt congressman whose only bug-out plan is to take the property of someone better prepared than himself. When the congressman’s effort to take the Georgia compound fails he has little time to find an alternative. He decides to track down the writer from Virginia, a man whose own home should be well-stocked to survive the apocalypse he describes in his books.

In this third installment, Legion of Despair, the country is teetering on the brink of anarchy. While one of the stranded travelers, Jim Powell, made it home and is working to establish a safe, sustainable enclave for his family, his co-workers Gary and Alice are not faring as well. After spending hundreds of painful miles dreaming of his reunion with his family, Gary arrives home only to find his family under attack. Now he must face the painful decision as to whether his family's plan to bug-in is viable or whether they may need greater numbers and a better location to survive in this collapsing nation.

For a year now, Jim Powell has wrestled with his personal demons. As he watched people around him suffer and die, he harbored a secret guilt. He'd once wished for an event like the one America was now experiencing, dreaming of the great reset that would purge the nation of those who'd gone soft and weak.

Grace Hardwick's dad is a science fiction writer who makes his living destroying the world. When Grace decides to go away for her first year of college her dad, Robert, can't help but think of all of the potential ways that society could collapse and strand his daughter hundreds of miles from home. Then, near the end of her freshman year, it happens.