Nobody was coming. That was never the bad news. Dr. Owen Kessler spent twenty years getting ready for the end of the world — the well, the diesel, the fourteen-month pantry, the range cut into ten acres of east Bexar County. Twenty-six years in the ER taught him exactly how thin the wire under civilization runs. So he built for the night it snapped. Then the grid over San Antonio dies — and stays dead — and the disaster that arrives is not the one he prepared for. The city goes dark. The hospital's generators run on a maintenance schedule nobody funded. The county road fills with people who never asked him a practical question about water — until they do. And the prepared man discovers, thirty-four days deep and one patient at a time, that the barn was never the preparation. The neighbors were. The knowing was — if he can learn to hand it over instead of holding it like a verdict. A wife who runs a county from a rocking chair with a radio log. A twelve-year-old stepson whose video game turns out to have been a logistics course. A charge nurse who orders her doctor to keep charting when there's nothing left to chart with. Triage is a grid-down novel written as one physician's field record — the gauges, the nets, the arithmetic, the names — for readers of A. American, Franklin Horton, and anyone who suspects the scarcest supply was never ammunition. Book One of the Triage Quartet. The county's story continues in Golden Hour.