Beneath the Smoke, page 1
Beneath the Smoke
THE DIVIDED COLLAPSE SERIES
BOOK FIVE
BR PAULSON
CAPTIVA CONSULTING, LLC
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
Also by BR Paulson
Beneath the Smoke
THEY SURVIVED THE COLLAPSE. THEY SURVIVED THE JOURNEY. BUT CAN THEY SURVIVE GETTING EVERYTHING THEY WANTED?
The woman he thought was dead just walked back into his life.
And she's about to destroy everything.
Annie and Caleb Morgan have finally reached safety—their father's fortified homestead in the Montana wilderness. After months of loss, betrayal, and impossible choices, they've made it through the collapse alive.
But surviving together has left them fractured.
Annie has found love with Dax—the quiet protector who's never promised more than he can deliver. For the first time since the world ended, she can imagine a future that doesn't involve just surviving.
Caleb has finally healed with Evie—the woman who stayed when everyone else left, who believed in him when he'd stopped believing in himself. He's ready to let go of the past and build something real.
Then the radio crackles with impossible news:
His dead fiancée is alive.
Meredith—the woman he mourned, the love he buried with the old world—has been searching for him through every refugee camp and processing center. She's found him. And she's coming.
Now Caleb must choose between the woman who defined his past and the woman who gave him a future. Between honor and survival. Between the man he was and the man he's become.
But some choices burn everything down—even the people you're trying to save.
In a world where trust is the most dangerous luxury, what happens when the dead refuse to stay buried?
BENEATH THE SMOKE—where love becomes a weapon, hope becomes a burden, and the only way forward is through the fire of who you used to be.
Perfect for readers who loved THE LAST OF US, THE ROAD, and aren't afraid of stories that leave scars.
Chapter One
Annie
The compound breathed differently the morning after.
Annie noticed it before she noticed anything else—the way sound moved through Frank's homestead like it was afraid of itself. Footsteps softer than usual. Doors eased shut instead of pulled. Conversations trimmed to murmurs, eyes cutting sideways before anyone spoke above a whisper.
Word traveled fast inside a fence line. Thirty-seven people lived inside these walls, and every one of them had heard about Caleb before sundown. Now the compound operated like a hospital ward where the patient might still die.
Annie hadn't slept. She'd lain in her bunk staring at the ceiling for six hours, listening to the night shift rotate at the perimeter fence, counting boot steps the way other people counted sheep. Her body cataloged the sounds without permission—two sentries on the south approach, one on the ridge, the third walking the tree line at intervals that matched Mitchell's rotation protocol. She'd absorbed that training the way muscle absorbed bruising. Couldn't stop it now if she tried.
At some point the darkness outside the window had turned gray, then pale, then the sharp blue-white of northern Idaho morning. She got up because lying still felt worse than moving.
The morning briefing was at 0600. Mitchell ran it from the main hall, clipboard in hand, voice pitched low and steady. Water levels in the cisterns. Patrol rotation for the south ridge. A supply run scheduled for Thursday if the roads stayed clear. Annie stood against the back wall and absorbed every word without retaining any of it. She counted the exits instead—two doors, four windows, the service hatch Mitchell probably didn't know she'd found behind the radio shelf. Her body did it on autopilot. She couldn't enter a room anymore without mapping the ways out.
Three people asked if she was okay. She told all of them yes.
Patrol prep took twenty minutes. She checked her rifle with the methodical attention Mitchell had drilled into her—bolt, magazine, sight alignment, safety. The weapon was clean. It was always clean. Maintaining it gave her hands something to do when her mind wouldn't stop cataloging damage.
She slung the rifle and walked to the mess area. Breakfast was powdered eggs and canned peaches. The eggs had a chemical flatness that coated the inside of her mouth like chalk, and the peaches were syrup-sweet in a way that turned her stomach. Annie carried a plate to the long table, sat down, and moved food around with her fork until enough time had passed to leave without drawing attention. Connie glanced at her from across the room but didn't say anything. Even Connie, who had opinions about everything, was keeping her distance today.
Annie scraped her untouched plate into the compost bin and started walking.
She told herself she was doing a systems check. Making sure the compound was functioning, that people were where they needed to be, that yesterday's fracture hadn't cracked anything operational. That's what she told herself. The truth was simpler and uglier: she needed to see them. Needed to put eyes on every person she loved and confirm they were still standing.
Evie's bunk was empty. The sheets were pulled tight, corners tucked with the precision Evie brought to everything—but the pillow was cold. Annie touched it, then pulled her hand back. The medical bay. Evie had slept in the medical bay again, probably curled on the examination table with her first aid kit clutched against her chest.
Annie could go check. Confirm it. Stand in the doorway and see Evie's face and know whether the damage from yesterday had settled into something survivable or something worse.
She didn't. She closed the door quietly and kept walking.
Caleb's door was shut. No light underneath. No sound from inside. She stood there for ten seconds, hand raised to knock, then lowered it. Whatever was happening behind that door—sleep, grief, the kind of staring-at-nothing that she recognized from their father—Caleb wasn't ready for her yet. And she wasn't sure what she'd say if he opened it.
The temporary barracks sat at the compound's eastern edge, a prefab structure Frank had added three weeks before they arrived. Through the window, Annie could see Meredith sitting on a cot, back straight, hands resting on her knees. Awake. Alert. Watching the door like she expected someone to come through it.
Annie studied her through the glass the way Mitchell had taught her to study terrain—reading what was there, not what she expected to find. The woman's hands were still. No fidgeting, no restless shifting. Her gear was stacked in a neat line at the foot of the cot, pack already repacked, boots laced and set within reach. Those weren't the habits of a refugee grateful to be safe. Those were the habits of someone trained to move on short notice.
Mitchell had mentioned it at intake. Meredith's posture during processing, the way she'd asked about perimeter depth before she'd asked about food. Details Annie hadn't cared about then but couldn't stop turning over now.
She turned away before Meredith could see her watching.
The eastern perimeter fence ran along a tree line of lodgepole pine, the posts sunk deep and reinforced with wire that hummed faintly in the morning wind. Annie followed it with her eyes scanning the ground out of habit—tracks, disturbance, anything that didn't belong. The air smelled of pine sap and wet earth, sharp and alive, a world apart from the stale, recycled stillness inside the barracks. The wind shifted and she noted it without thinking—blowing northeast, which meant sound from the compound would carry toward the ridge, not away from it. Mitchell would adjust the south patrol if he was paying attention. He was always paying attention.
She heard Dax before she saw him. The soft crunch of gravel under boots, the particular cadence of his walk—measured, deliberate, the stride of someone who'd spent years making sure his footsteps didn't give him away.
He came up beside her and leaned against the fence post. Dust on his jacket from early patrol. His face carried the careful blankness he wore when he was thinking hard about something he hadn't decided how to say.
They stood in silence for a minute. Two. The morning air was sharp with pine and the metallic bite of coming rain.
"We should leave," Dax said.
Annie's fingers tightened on the fence wire. "What?"
"All of us. Before your father makes the choice for you."
She looked at him. His jaw was set, his eyes fixed on the tree line like he was reading a map only he could see. This wasn't impulsive. Dax didn't do impulsive. This was something he'd been sitting with, turning over, running tactical calculations on while the rest of them were managing yesterday's explosion.
"Leave and go where?"
"South fork of the Priest River. Eighteen miles northwest. There's an old Forest Service cabin that's structurally sound—I checked it on patrol last week. Spring-fed water. Defensible terrain. Clo se enough to the Canadian border for options but far enough from the network routes that no one would look for us there."
He'd had an exit route planned since they arrived. Annie absorbed that. Dax had walked into Frank's compound, shaken the man's hand, accepted his patrol assignment—and immediately started mapping a way out.
"You've been planning this."
"I plan exits wherever I go. You know that."
She did. She'd watched him do it at Riverside, at the settlement, at every temporary shelter they'd passed through on the way north. It was the thing about Dax that had annoyed her first and comforted her later—his refusal to trust any place completely, even places that felt safe. Especially places that felt safe.
"Dax. My brother is in there. Evie is in there."
"I know." His voice stayed level. "That's why I said all of us."
She wanted to argue. Wanted to tell him that running was exactly the wrong response to yesterday, that what their family needed was stability, not another upheaval. But the words died before she could form them, because some part of her—the part that had been swallowing her anger at Frank for weeks—recognized what Dax was actually saying.
This compound was Frank's world. Frank's rules. Frank's hierarchy. And in Frank's world, people didn't get choices. They got assignments.
For half a second, something loosened in her chest. Relief. The word yes forming somewhere behind her ribs before guilt crushed it flat. She wanted to run. She hated herself for wanting it.
"I'm not ready," she said.
Dax nodded once. He didn't push. Didn't argue. Didn't tell her she was wrong or try to convince her. He just stood there, steady and present, the way he always did when she needed time to catch up to something he'd already figured out.
"The offer stands," he said. Then he pushed off the fence post and walked back toward the compound, leaving her alone with the hum of the wire and the weight of a decision she wasn't ready to make.
Annie leaned her rifle against the fence post outside the operations room door. The weight of it had been a comfort on the walk over. Now it felt wrong—carrying a weapon into a conversation with her father. Not because she was afraid she'd use it. Because she was afraid of what it said about the kind of person this compound was turning her into.
She found Frank inside, standing at the long table where he ran his morning planning sessions, maps pinned under clear plastic, radio equipment casting green light across his face. Alone. His people had cleared out after the briefing, leaving him with his systems and his silence. Frank preferred it that way. People were assets to be managed. Solitude was where the real work happened.
Annie closed the door behind her.
Frank looked up. His expression didn't change—it rarely did—but something shifted behind his eyes. A recalibration. The slight adjustment of a man who'd been expecting this conversation and had already decided how it would go.
"You brought her here," Annie said.
No preamble. No easing in. The time for careful navigation had ended somewhere between her empty plate and Evie's empty bunk.
Frank set down the pencil he'd been marking coordinates with. "Meredith arrived with a scheduled transport of displaced civilians. I approved the transport three days ago based on a request from Administrator Wells in the northern zone."
"You knew she was on that transport."
"I was informed of the manifest twenty-four hours before arrival."
"And you didn't tell Caleb. You didn't tell any of us."
Frank's chin lifted a fraction of an inch. The gesture that meant he was done being questioned and was about to start explaining, which in Frank's language were two very different things. But his hand moved to the edge of the map table, and his fingers pressed against the surface for a beat longer than necessary before he spoke. Annie filed it. Frank didn't fidget. Frank didn't need to brace.
"Caleb's emotional state has been unstable since the communications room incident. Introducing this variable without preparation would have been operationally irresponsible."
"Operationally irresponsible." The words sat in her mouth like metal shavings. "Your son found out his dead fiancée was alive from a bureaucrat on a scratchy radio tape. Three days later she walked through your front gate while Evie was standing right there. And you call that preparation?"
"I call it a situation that required controlled management."
"You didn't bring her here for Caleb." The words came out quiet. Steady. Surprising even to Annie, who'd expected to shout. "You brought her here for you."
Frank went still. Not offended. Not angry. Just still, the way a man goes still when someone sees through the operational language to the calculation underneath.
"Meredith Larson is former emergency medical services with wilderness trauma certification," he said. "She has field triage experience, defensive training, and leadership capacity. She's an asset this compound needs."
"And Evie?"
The question sat between them. Annie watched her father's face for any crack in the armor—any sign that he understood what he'd done to the woman who'd kept his son alive, who'd stitched wounds and rationed antibiotics and loved Caleb without asking for anything except the chance to stay.
"Evie is kind," Frank said. "Kindness doesn't keep walls standing."
Annie's hands curled at her sides. She felt the blood leave her fingers, felt her nails press crescents into her palms. The operations room was quiet except for the low hum of the radio and her own pulse knocking against the base of her throat. She had to stop before her next sentence. Had to wait for air to come back, for the tightness in her chest to release enough to let words through.
She thought about her mother on the trail outside the mine. The dry rasp of Mary's breathing, the way her hand had gone cold in increments. Evie had been there. Evie had held that hand and lied about how bad it was so Caleb could keep leading and Annie could keep walking and Mary could keep believing her children would make it north. Evie had carried that lie for days, and it had cost her something Annie was only now beginning to understand.
"Evie kept your son alive," Annie said. Her voice was low and even, and she barely recognized it as her own. "She kept all of us alive. While you were up here building your kingdom, she was in a mine in Wyoming holding my mother's hand and lying about how bad it was so Caleb could keep leading. She earned her place here. Not because she's an asset. Because she's family."
Frank looked up from his maps. Something moved behind his eyes—not guilt, not remorse, but recognition. The acknowledgment that his daughter had just drawn a line he hadn't expected her to draw. His hand was still pressed flat against the table. He didn't move it.
"Family," he said, the word carrying the same testing weight it had the day they'd arrived.
"Family," Annie repeated. And this time, she didn't wait for his verdict.
She turned and walked out of the operations room, pulling the door shut behind her with a deliberate, measured click. Not a slam. A slam would have been anger. This was something harder than anger. This was a decision.
She picked up her rifle from where she'd leaned it. The stock was cold against her palm.
She stood in the hallway, her pulse hammering against her ribs, and understood for the first time that the homestead had never been the finish line. It was the place where she'd finally have to choose who she was—Frank's daughter, or Mary's.
Or something neither of them had made room for.
Chapter Two
Caleb
The ceiling was pressing down.
Not literally. Caleb knew that. The rational part of his brain logged the fact the way it logged radio transmissions—timestamp, source, assessment: false alarm. But the rest of him couldn't breathe. The dark was too close, the walls too tight, and the sound of his own exhale filled the room like something trapped.
