The world didn't end with fire. It ended with silence.
Five minutes was all it took. A bite, a scream, a body collapsing into something unrecognizable. The Broken rose with veins black and movements jerking like tangled marionettes. In less than a week, cities were empty, families shattered, and survival became the only language left.
For a woman and her fourteen-year-old daughter, survival begins on the road. Their car dies twenty miles from safety, forcing them toward a lakeside cabin that once held summers of laughter but now waits hollow and brittle. Each step punishes them. Each night echoes with the threat of footsteps in the dark. Every choice she makes teaches her daughter what it costs to endure.
For her ex-husband, survival begins alone. Armed with a bow, a baton, and fragments of resolve, he scavenges the forest and clings to memories of a family already fractured by divorce. The trailer he left behind was a coffin disguised as home. The woods are no kinder, but they allow him to keep moving.
Neither knows the other still lives.
Her story unravels backward, step by step through hunger and ash. His moves forward, memory by memory: a bookstore, a wedding on the beach, a birth wrapped in fear and joy, the long unraveling of promises once believed unbreakable. At the center stands their daughter-fragile yet fierce-the thread binding past to present, loss to survival.
The Broken is a haunting novel of ruin and remembrance, where endurance is fragile, love is fractured, and even in a world consumed by silence, some bonds refuse to die.
Barret MacIntosh writes apocalyptic and survival fiction that examines how ordinary people navigate extraordinary circumstances. Based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, he brings a background in software development and game design into his storytelling, building worlds where structure and detail matter as much as emotion.
For Barret, writing The Broken was not just a creative endeavor but the fulfillment of a long-held goal. After years of imagining stories and letting them linger, he realized that if he didn't commit to writing a novel now, the chance to chase that dream might slip away forever. The novel is his debut, but it carries the weight of a lifetime's reflection on love, regret, and the fragile threads that bind people together when everything else falls apart.
He acknowledges the enduring support of his ex-wife through their marriage and beyond, and the love of his daughter as a source of strength and inspiration. That connection to family - both in its closeness and in its distance - is the emotional foundation beneath his work.
Looking forward, Barret is developing future books that continue to explore genre-driven narratives of survival, collapse, and the human spirit under duress. His goal is to give readers not only the tension of an apocalyptic thriller, but also the resonance of stories that linger long after the last page is turned.
