The Malone Chronicles — Book One: The Long Silence

Signal recovered

The world went quiet. He didn't.

Two years after the sky turned to fire, Cage Malone survives on habit alone — the old training that kept him breathing long after everything worth living for was gone.

He wakes in a stranger's bunker with no jacket, no blade, and no memory of how he got there — only the certainty that someone dragged him three miles through a dying storm rather than let him die in it. Whoever they are, they want something.

What's waiting for him at the surface is Haven: one of the last towns on a ruined continent still holding itself together, and a woman patient enough to sit with a man who stopped talking the day he buried his family.

The Long Silence is a story about what's left to rebuild when the world doesn't give anything back — and what it costs to let someone in again.

Field dossier

Subject

Cage Malone — former soldier, sole survivor of an ordinary morning in Indiana

Setting

Two years after. A dying highway, a bunker, and the town called Haven

Genre

Post-apocalyptic survival fiction with a slow-burn emotional core

For readers of

Character-driven survival stories where the wasteland is the backdrop, not the point

Dispatch from the author

Mike H. has field-dressed a deer with a Swiss Army knife, negotiated a ceasefire he's not allowed to discuss, and once won an arm-wrestling match against a man who later became a head of state. He does not jog. He arrives.

He wrote The Malone Chronicles between expeditions — one to a mountain range that does not appear on most maps, another to a poker table in a city he was asked not to name. Critics have called his prose "unnervingly assured." His barber calls it "on time, as always."

Mike H. has never asked a bartender for a recommendation. He has, however, been asked for several.

He lives, currently, wherever the story requires him to be.

Mike H.

The world went quiet. He didn't.

Start the Chronicles.