“One of the Five Best Zombie Series out there” — Amazon Reviews
“Faster paced than The Passage but just as much a page turner” — Amazon Reviews
“Mr. Harwood has created a new class of characters that are truly unique to the genre and who will definitely keep you up at night” — Amazon Reviews
The wall didn’t stop it. Walls never do.
For three months, Florida was a cage — quarantined, desperate, holding on by its fingernails while the world closed its borders to America and a second wall went up in case the first one fell. The nation wasn’t at ease. It was barely holding its breath. Then the disease appeared north of the wall, in places no infected person had ever reached.
Nature doesn’t wait for permission.
Jon Washington is a journalist who went into Florida on assignment and stayed too long. His beat has always been the ugliest corners of American life — gun violence, urban chaos, the places where civilization’s thin skin tears open and shows what’s underneath. He knows how to keep his head when everything around him is losing theirs, and how to find the story even when the story is trying to kill him. The story kept him in Florida past the point of no return. By the time he understood that, it was too late for the people he loved.
Now the quarantine is meaningless, the nation is waking up to what’s coming, and Jon is one of the last reporters still standing inside what used to be a containment zone. When he finds himself responsible for a group of abandoned children who have survived the nightmare with a resilience that shames every adult around them, leaving is no longer the question. Getting them north is.
But as the infected evolve and the panic spreads, Jon begins to understand that the sickness isn’t just a plague. It was never just a plague.
Something is gestating in the ruins of the old world. Something that hunts with purpose. Something the wall was never designed to stop — because nothing built by human hands could have stopped it.
For readers new to the saga:
No Safe Distance is the entry point to the Of Sudden Origin Saga — a relentless, character-driven series that asks a question no other post-apocalyptic story dares to ask: what if the disease didn’t destroy humanity, but improved on it? If you like The Passage, World War Z, and The Road — but want something that goes further and darker and stranger than any of them — start here. It’s free. The saga that follows will cost you sleep.
For readers who already know the saga:
This is where Jon Washington’s story begins. Before Nikki. Before the scientists. Before the first infant Chosen opened its eyes and looked at the world with something that wasn’t quite human hunger. No Safe Distance plants the seeds that the rest of the saga grows from — including details you’ll recognize with a cold chill once you know what they mean. The pregnant Fiend in the swamp. The children who sense something in the dark water. The heartbeat that doesn’t belong to anyone in the room. Read it last if you want the full retroactive horror. Read it first if you want to experience the saga the way it was always meant to be told.
