What This Story Is About
The city of Austin has become a frontline. Brent Carter and Elena Martinez are two soldiers from different backgrounds, thrown together by circumstance and mission. Their objective: reach the river before the Eastern Coalition closes the corridor. Their reality: the city is burning, their unit is scattered, and the only thing standing between survival and death is each other.
What makes this story worth reading is not the action — it is what happens in the quiet moments between it. A fountain in a ruined plaza. A conversation that should not be happening. Two people who understand, without saying it, that there may not be another chance to say what needs to be said.
"This story is purely fictional. All names, characters, and resemblances to real persons or places are the product of the author's imagination." — Benn Finn
Why I Wrote It
I have been fascinated by war fiction since I was a kid — not the glorification of it, but the human dimension of it. What do ordinary people do when they are placed in extraordinary and terrible circumstances? How do relationships form and break under that kind of pressure? What does sacrifice actually mean when it is no longer abstract?
This story is my attempt to explore those questions in a setting that feels uncomfortably close to possibilities I hope remain fictional. It sits in the same universe of anxieties that drives the Kill Them Dead series — the sense that the systems holding civilisation together are more fragile than we like to think.
Read it for free at the link above. I hope it moves you.
