Most novels, TV series, and films in this genre do you a favor. They kill almost everyone in the first chapter—an asteroid, a plague, something fast that wipes the board clean and leaves a handful of survivors to pick through an empty world. There’s a comfort in that scenario, whether the authors intend it or not. You’re either alive or you’re not, and if you’re alive, you have the entire remnants of civilization to scavenge.

That’s the fantasy. The most likely reality is worse, and it gives me nightmares.

In my years in Special Forces, I served in places where civilization didn’t end with a bang. It ended the way a bridge rusts—slowly, from the inside, in places nobody checks until something gives way underfoot. The lights flickered before they went out. The garbage piled up before the disease spread. The police stopped coming, and then the checkpoints went up, and it wasn’t to enforce the law.

The most dangerous period wasn’t after the collapse. It was during. The window when the old rules had stopped working but nobody had agreed on new ones—and most people don’t realize it. When everyone is still there. All the people, all the need, all the fear. But the systems that keep them fed and watered and civil are failing, like instruments dropping out of an orchestra until all that’s left is the drumbeat.

That’s the scenario in Slow Fall, the first book in my Green Beret Survival Series. Not the empty world. The full one. Five groups in Knoxville, Tennessee, who have to recognize the signs while everyone around them insists things are fine.

One of the hardest things is realizing the system is breaking down. That’s the core of this first book.

Slow Fall is available on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GQJ9R3WT