Amsterdam, Virginia - a small farming community in the midst of a suburban transformation - is decimated by the H16N1 flu pandemic. With resources scarce and law enforcement nonexistent, the normally decent citizens of the once well-to-do area turn on each other. Then the militias arrive - men once looked on as "kooks" and outsiders, but who now have the military resources to claim the area farming infrastructure as their own. And with their ranks swollen by the desperate, they don't stop there.    United against the tyranny by Reverend Jacob Craft - a local minister and veteran of the war in Afghanistan - the people of Amsterdam fight back. But with the federal, state, and local governments eerily silent, a new form of leadership is needed and The Amsterdam Directorate is born.      Today  -   Reverend Jacob Craft awakens to a brilliant flash in the Eastern sky, the sight of a fiery mushroom cloud on the horizon, and a world ensnared in darkness by the failure of a susceptible power grid. With everything he has worked to build threatened, Jacob rushes to find answers. But an old enemy waits in the darkness for a second chance. Can Jacob keep the peace and defend his friends from a madman's attack or will the fragile community be torn apart from within and consumed by forces from without?   ????? "Slick, well-executed!" - Steven Konkoly (author of The Jakarta Pandemic and The Perseid Collapse series)