They must adapt in order to survive when the lights go out. After leaving college, Elna Pasqualee is determined to bring her family’s California vineyard into the twenty-first century. She hopes her diligent efforts will finally earn her father’s respect and keep visitors safe and comfortable. But all her hopes for the future are dashed with the EMP attack. Broadcasts offer only a brief warning before missile strikes wipe out all power and communications across North America. The idyllic setting on the private island quickly sours as food and water to sustain the Pasqualees and their guests grow scarce and life becomes a fight for survival. A fight further complicated when they are cut off from the mainland – and an unexpected assailant threatens their lives. Someone is stalking one of the guests, hiding out on the island and sabotaging Elna’s desperate efforts to sustain their source of fresh water. When her father goes missing and another guest is gravely injured, remaining on the island isn’t an option. But even if they reach the mainland, there are no longer guarantees of safety in a world where science and reason have descended into post-apocalyptic anarchy. And survival of the fittest reigns supreme.

When the lines between friend and foe are blurred, life and death hang in the balance. Life at the Pasqualee island vineyard has settled into a new normal after the EMP attack. Cut off from the dangerous mainland, Elna has succeeded in securing the small group’s basic necessities in their new post-apocalyptic world. The island’s become, if not exactly a paradise, at least a safe and secure shelter where they can ride out the devastation for the foreseeable future. Until a vicious fall storm sends newcomers careening onto their shores. The sailor and his young son were on their way north to an experimental clinic for vital medication when the storm blew their sailboat off course. They need to make repairs and try again to reach it or the gravely ill boy will die. When Elna discovers her father has run out of heart medication, she volunteers to join the small group and set sail with the frantic sailor in his weakened son’s stead. Yet the way is treacherous by both land and sea. When the sailors are forced to abandon the boat far from their destination, their travels inland are impeded by injury—until a Good Samaritan volunteers to help protect and guide them safely to the clinic. But safety is out of the question when the valuable goods they hoped to trade for medicines are discovered, and it becomes a deadly fight to claim them. Now it’s a race to reach the facility before more lives are threatened. And time runs out.