Water
A working tank buys time. It does not decide how that time should be shared.
The Meridian Series Book One
Dead
Reckoning
A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller
When the systems stop, the decisions begin.
An EMP leaves a community north of Jeddah without the systems it depends on. For engineer Marcos Vidal, keeping his family safe means facing a question no calculation can settle: who can they afford to help?
A city without power. A community at a crossroads.↓
01 / The book
The power is only
the beginning.
North of Jeddah.
On both sides of the wall.
Marcos Vidal is reviewing a drainage report at a Saudi airport when the screens go black and aircraft stop on the taxiway. His wife and two young sons are across the city. He needs to get home.
In the novel’s imagined escalation involving Iran, Israel and the United States, a distant conflict has become an immediate struggle to survive. Communications fail. Reliable information disappears. The systems that made ordinary life possible can no longer be taken for granted.
Inside a walled compound north of Jeddah, a multinational community begins working out what it has left. Water must be found and shared. Equipment must be kept running. Every decision at the gate has consequences for the people on both sides.
Marcos understands infrastructure. He is less certain what it means to lead people who are frightened, hungry and beginning to disagree. Protecting his family and helping his neighbours may not always mean making the same choice.
Dead Reckoning is a grounded post-apocalyptic survival thriller about practical knowledge, responsibility and the cost of deciding who gets help.
Dead Reckoning is a work of fiction. Its depiction of institutions, infrastructure and geopolitical events is fictionalised. It is not emergency-preparedness advice.
What remains
Survival is not
a solitary act.
The gate
A wall can protect a community. It also separates it from people who need help.
Family
Marcos wants to keep his wife and sons safe. The people depending on him want the same thing for their own families.
The opening sentence
“The report had been sitting on Marcos Vidal's desk for eleven days, and on the morning the world ended, he was finally getting to it.”
Dead Reckoning · L. A. Carrera
02 / The series
The Meridian Series
A story of family, community and survival when the systems people rely on no longer hold.
03 / The author
About
L. A. Carrera
L. A. Carrera was born in northern Spain and has worked in infrastructure across Europe and the Middle East. His experience in Saudi Arabia inspired Dead Reckoning, a novel about a community trying to survive the failure of the systems it depends on.
Dead Reckoning is his first novel and the opening book in The Meridian Series.
Correspondence
Get in touch.
For reader correspondence and media enquiries:
la_carrera_books@icloud.com