Influx: Expanded Edition

The condo board says war games. The thing shaking the building is not artillery.

The condo board calls an emergency meeting in the laundry room: military war games all week, roads closed for miles, everyone stays inside. Be glad, they say, that you're sheltering in the one building in the complex built to withstand anything gruesome.

Henri Benoit works six days a week, keeps his own company, and once washed out of training for the Heartland Security Agency — which left him exactly one useful skill: he knows a cover story when he's locked inside one. The rumbles shaking the walls are not artillery.

Miles away, Lieutenant Colonel Remy LeStrand stands in a wildflower pasture that smells like the end of something, watching the reason for the lie through binoculars. In the predawn hours, something wriggled into Oklahoma through a patch of multihued mist. LeStrand commands the so-called spectral forces — the military's quiet answer to questions the country isn't allowed to ask — and he has spent his whole life preparing to defend an ideal of what humanity should be. This is the week that tests it.

Inside the cordon, the ordinary rules are quietly lapsing: the mist has moods, the ground rehearses new shapes, and sleep is no longer a safe place to wait.

Told from both sides of a national secret, Influx is the Eve of Light universe at its furthest edge — where the apocalypse doesn't announce itself. It moves in.

For readers who want end-times horror at human height, told by the lied-to and the liars alike.

The Expanded Edition contains the complete novella and "Knotty & Ice," a short story from Hell's Brood: Volume I.