Live Load

A prisoner exchange on a frozen bridge is supposed to prove that order can still exist. For twenty-three seconds, it does.

Then the drones arrive.

As gunfire tears through the exchange lanes, Lieutenant Colonel Rachel “Rae” Calder and Colonel Gabriel Rourke issue the same impossible command from opposite sides: hold your fire. Neither can prove who began the attack. Both know what follows.

Bridges close. Roads change allegiance. Hospitals lose access. Water plants, rail yards, airports, and fuel corridors become weapons in a war fought through infrastructure, forged authority, and manufactured panic.

Rae is determined to keep St. Louis alive without allowing the institutions she serves to erase inconvenient evidence. Rourke is trying to impose discipline on a coalition whose most useful fighters may also be engineering the chaos. Between them stand civilians, medics, utility crews, exhausted soldiers, and officials who understand that whoever controls the routes will soon control the truth.

Live Load is a tense military and political thriller about fractured legitimacy, compromised command, and the cost of keeping systems alive while every faction tries to own them.