Seventy years after terrorists unleashed a weapons-grade virus on the world, a lone cluster of mankind survives in the Shoals Area of NW Alabama. Why? A U. S. Air Force C-130 carrying the only supply extant of the "Mad Flu" vaccine crash-landed at the Muscle Shoals Airport in Colbert County. Two draconian figures, Henry Wade Smith III and Charles Edward Ragland V, stepped up, and in the vacuum of governmental and military collapse, they cooperated to save the citizens of their two counties. Smith ruled Lauderdale County on the north side of the Tennessee River, and Ragland became the benevolent dictator of Colbert County to the south. They succeeded but not without costs. Democracy is gone; the Smith Ascendancy in Lauderdale and the Ragland Ascendancy in Colbert dictated the leaders since the apocalypse. A falling-out between the ruling families led to two devastating wars leaving the occupants of the "Spared Territory" divided and hate filled. Always competing for resources, the two principalities have reached another breaking point. President Henry Wade Smith V is taking them to war for the third time from his seat in a painstakingly preserved Humvee, designated Slingshot 8...