The search party comes down off the north ridge carrying the answer nobody wanted. Gerald Phillips is dead. The dog held that line for eight hours while the whole camp faced the road, and the price of not listening came due in the dark. Camp Ridge has lost its first friend, and there is an army massed on Route Five that does not care whether the camp has time to grieve.

They do not come home alone. A stranger walks in from the field. JJ Morris, fifty years old, Canton born and raised, a former Black Ops SAR technician who spent a career pulling people out of the worst ground on earth. He watched Pryor's men kill Gerald and could not intervene. The numbers were too many. His first act inside the wire is a debrief: how it happened, how many were involved, and what that says about the thing gathering down the road. He arrives carrying intelligence, not a request for shelter, from a man who knows Pryor's territory better than anyone inside the wire.

So Camp Ridge does the thing the world says it cannot afford. It buries Gerald Phillips under rifle guard, with the watch unbroken and an army looking on, because a camp that stops honoring its dead has already lost something no perimeter can protect. Calloway leads the service. Faith stops being a private habit and goes to work. And in the middle of the grief, JJ puts one small good thing on the table: he knows where a large cache of CarniVault freeze dried meat is sitting, and when a safe window opens, it is worth going to get.

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