Code Black

When every computer on Earth dies simultaneously, software engineer Charles Walter is seventy miles from home, alone in the Colorado wilderness. By the time he reaches Denver, the city is burning. His house is ransacked. His wife Emily and seventeen-year-old daughter Sophia are gone, fled north toward safety with only a hastily scrawled note: Find us in Sheridan, Wyoming.
Five hundred miles of apocalyptic wasteland separate Charles from his family. Nuclear power plants are melting down across the globe, spreading invisible clouds of lethal radiation. Highways are graveyards of dead vehicles. Cities have become war zones. And the few survivors are either desperate refugees or predators who've embraced the violence of a world without law.
Charles gathers a group of unlikely companions: a traumatized photographer, a young park ranger, an ex-cop, a dying mother and her silent son. Together they fight their way north through radiation zones and raider ambushes, scavenging weapons and making impossible moral choices. Each mile strips away another piece of the man Charles was, replacing it with something harder, more capable of the violence required to survive.
But they're being hunted. Victor Kane, a charismatic ex-soldier turned warlord, has built an army in the chaos. His obsession with one of Charles's companions drives him to pursue them relentlessly, and his cruelty knows no bounds-he'll use the dying as weapons, burn entire communities, sacrifice anything to claim what he believes is his.
Meanwhile, Emily and Sophia wage their own battle for survival, killing to protect each other, fortifying a small neighborhood in Sheridan, and praying that Charles is still alive.
Code Black is a visceral, character-driven thriller about the collapse of civilization and the lengths we'll go to protect the people we love. It's a story of transformation, from isolated individuals to found family, from comfortable complacency to hard-won resilience. In a world where technology has failed and radiation is slowly poisoning everyone, the only question that matters is: what are you willing to become to survive?
And when survival demands you become a monster, can you find your way back to being human?