Apex PredatorWADE CORBIN Read on Amazon

A post-apocalyptic thriller series · 8 books · complete

The world ended and set the worst man alive free.

Silas Cade spent eleven years in a maximum security prison for thirty-five murders, and they were the best years of his life. Then the dead got up, the doors opened, and the only structure that ever held him came apart in a single morning.

All eight books are included with Kindle+.

Inmate
Silas Cade
Facility
Ashbury Correctional
Sentence
Six life terms
Released by
The end of the world

The county register · in reading order

Twenty-seven years. Eight books. One man counting.

Cade does what he has always done: count, calculate, and take. He does not repent. He does not learn to love. He simply discovers, for the first time in forty-three years, that he wants something.

  1. 01Day 11
    Cover of Cell Block Zero

    Cell Block Zero

    Thirty-five people. Six life sentences. And then the world ended.

    Eleven years into his sentence at Ashbury Correctional, the guards stop coming to work. On the eleventh day the generator runs dry and every cell in the building unlocks at once. Four hundred meters of concrete corridor, three hundred of the dead in the mess hall, and a mop handle.

    Start here
  2. 02Day 200
    Cover of The County

    The County

    The government came back. That was the worst thing that could have happened.

    Five hundred people, a warehouse and a fence line. Then a county emergency director arrives with thirty-one National Guard soldiers, a two-hundred-page plan, and a state file with Silas Cade's name on it.

  3. 03Year 2
    Cover of The Hungry Spring

    The Hungry Spring

    Nobody in the county asked where the dead had gone.

    Fourteen hundred people and eleven days of food. For eighteen months the dead of half a state have been draining into one valley, and it comes out at the fields where four hundred people are working in the open.

  4. 04Year 4
    Cover of The Braid

    The Braid

    Eleven seconds of a dead woman's voice on a radio at half past three in the morning.

    A hundred and fifty people went west two years ago and stopped answering. The route to them runs three hundred and ninety kilometers through country nobody has surveyed, and the council approves it anyway.

  5. 05Year 6
    Cover of The Directory

    The Directory

    Ten years ago he typed his own confession onto a state form and signed it.

    Ninety-four delegates meet to write down what they owe each other. It is the book the series has been building toward since the first year: the trial of Silas Cade, before eleven ordinary people.

  6. 06Year 13
    Cover of The Benches

    The Benches

    After thirteen years, the dead are finally wearing out. At least, the ones you can see.

    Cade holds no office. He sits on a ridge above a valley that once held a million of the dead and writes down one thing a day. Then ten people are trapped below, and the only voice that knows the ground has sworn never to give an order again.

  7. 07Year 15
    Cover of The Open Bench

    The Open Bench

    Every axe in four settlements was made before the world ended.

    The county needs steel, and there is exactly one place to build a foundry: the mouth of a valley holding four hundred thousand of the dead. Cade objects once, for five minutes, and he objects to the wrong thing.

  8. 08Year 27
    Cover of The Register

    The Register

    Where this conflicts with the record, the record is correct.

    He left seven volumes about himself and an eighth that stops in the middle of a sentence. The finale is not narrated by Silas Cade. It is the audit he spent seventeen years arranging, written by the one person who refuses to tell four thousand people what to think.

    Series finale

8 of 8 entries · series complete · included with Kindle+

Get the series on Amazon

For readers who are tired of good men.

Apex Predator follows Cade across a collapsing continent as he builds the only thing he has ever wanted to keep. He is not a good man in a bad situation. He is exactly what the state said he was.

A man who wants something will burn down the world to keep it.

Content notice

  • Graphic violence.
  • A protagonist who never repents, never softens, and never once lies to you.
  • No redemption arc. That is the point.

Six life sentences. Then the doors opened.

Start with Cell Block Zero, free with Kindle+.

Read Apex Predator on Amazon