Showing results by author "Franklin Horton" in All Categories

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?

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.

Across America, citizens of this once proud nation sit in the dark, slowly starving to death. Most are dirty and sick. They've been abandoned by politicians and bureaucrats who continued to grow fatter and richer during the collapse. Foreign governments court the nation's leaders, putting them up on cruise ships and in foreign hotels, while the average American lives in squalor, ignored and abandoned. A reluctant savior rises from an unlikely direction. He doesn't need the politicians nor the American government. They represent everything he despises.

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.

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 nearly a year and a half without power, Jim Powell’s community has begun to stabilize. The Reset Roadhouse—Jim’s apocalyptic bar, restaurant, and trading post—gave his people something to do and helped expand his network of friends and contacts. The establishment has become a hub of the community and is allowing Jim to better monitor what goes on in the town. Then the promise of electricity changes everything.

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.

Conor Maguire and his daughter, Barb, planned to weather the apocalypse by keeping to themselves, hidden from the world in their compound deep in the Appalachian Mountains. Their approach failed, allowing bad men to get too close and kidnap Barb. After rescuing her in a violent bloodbath that decimated the kidnappers, Conor realized it was time to enlist his community to work together to improve their security. They had better work fast.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When newcomers arrive in Conor Maguire's territory, they bring word of an enemy approaching from the north. They wear military uniforms, carry military weapons, and drive military trucks. Like a plaque of locusts, they sweep through every town in their path and pick it clean. In their wake, they leave ashes and atrocity. When it appears this enemy is on a collision course with their community, Conor must build an army to intercept them. This is no easy task since his daughter's abrasive manner has divided the community. Their hasty alliance will be tested.

In his last mission, Conor Maguire was called back into action by his handler, Ricardo, to go after a man who helped facilitate the terror attacks that devastated America. When Ricardo next pays Conor a visit, it's at the behest of a shadowy collective of patriots determined to purge the government of those who sold out the nation. It should have been a simple mission, a short trip to "punch tickets" in the way that Conor had successfully done hundreds of times around the world. But nothing in this mission will be simple.

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.

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.

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.

The Mad Mick’s new employer, Walter Lightspeed, has promised great things for America. Lightspeed cleared the way for his rise to power by skimming the dead weight off government, assassinating a legion of career politicians, lobbyists, and agency heads. Now only one barrier remains between him and the presidency—wrangling the support of the military. If he lives that long. Conor and Ricardo have their concerns about Lightspeed, but that’s not enough to make them surrender their lucrative contract work with him.

The Rotten Belly Society was an order that existed among some Native Americans tribes of the Great Plains. The members of this society were compelled by powerful visions to devote their lives to being contrarians. In simple terms, they did things backwards for the purpose of educating people on how to behave properly. A similar principle was seen on a popular t-shirt of the 1980s that said, “I’m not useless—I can be used as a bad example.”