The Hungry Spring

Spring has returned to Central Kentucky. Food has not. Seven months after a cyberattack and an unexplained EMP shattered the country, Woodford County is green with horse pasture and nearly empty of anything people can eat. Refugees are walking out of Lexington. Stored grain will not last until harvest. Seed, fuel, machinery, and agricultural knowledge are all running out. Daniel Mercer is given authority to turn private land into public food. His emergency program ties rations to labor and possession to productive use, placing thousands of acres and hundreds of desperate lives under his control. Agricultural specialist Asha Raman warns that the council's ambitious acreage targets will waste the county's last viable seed. Carter Vale insists that caution is sabotage while using land, contracts, and armed guards to build a private power base. Then a ledger appears to prove that Asha diverted critical supplies. Daniel must decide whether the county's only qualified adviser is a traitor, or whether the evidence is designed to make him destroy the future with his own orders. The Hungry Spring is Book Five of The Ash Commonwealth, an extremely dark post-apocalyptic political thriller about hunger, coercion, and the dangerous institutions people create when survival cannot wait. The fields may hold a future, but every row comes at a human cost.