To the North

Brad Garner thought he had lost everything, after the Yellowstone calderas exploded and the awful volcanic aftermath. After fleeing south and wallowing in self-pity, by random chance, he hears of a faint signal over a functioning network. It comes from far north, somewhere in Idaho on the Montana border, near the eruption's epicenter. Soul sick, and with little remaining purpose to his life, Garner decides to follow the signal, an unmistakable if faint cry for help. He gears up and heads with an abandoned dog named Tanya into the ash-strewn wasteland that the U.S. West has become. Alone. Later, Garner finds himself in a vast refugee camp in the Great Basin of Southern California near Thousand Palms. He believes his family, trapped in Idaho by the Yellowstone volcanic eruption, is still alive, after having all but given up hope. Many obstacles obstruct the path to his loved ones, however, including floods, desert extremes, as well as his own gnawing guilt and need for personal redemption. Zeke Sanchez, a part Ute, Hispanic Indian who distinguished himself in Iraq and tends toward peyote inspired spiritual journeys, plays a big role in To The North, especially in regard to his desert-survival skills. Garner also encounters Sam, orphaned by the eruption, Giovanna, a Red Cross nurse who lost her husband Marcel in a terrorist attack in Egypt, and two federal agency officials who are close-mouthed about their actual mission to the epicenter. They might be intimately involved in an artificial intelligence experiment to study the deadly super volcano.