Chapters (77)
- Title Page
- Contents
- Dedication
- Book 1
- Part 1
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Part 2
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Part 3
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Part 4
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23
- Chapter 24
- Part 5
- Chapter 25
- Chapter 26
- Chapter 27
- Chapter 28
- Chapter 29
- Chapter 30
- Chapter 31
- Chapter 32
- Part 6
- Chapter 33
- Chapter 34
- Chapter 35
- Chapter 36
- Chapter 37
- Chapter 38
- Chapter 39
- Chapter 40
- Chapter 41
- Part 7
- Chapter 42
- Book 2
- Part 8
- Chapter 43
- Chapter 44
- Part 9
- Chapter 45
- Chapter 46
- Chapter 47
- Part 10
- Chapter 48
- Chapter 49
- Part 11
- Chapter 50
- Chapter 51
- Chapter 52
- Chapter 53
- Chapter 54
- Chapter 55
- Chapter 56
- Map of The Land
- Acknowledgments
- About The Author
- Also By Neal Stephenson
- Copyright
One Larry Proctor, a blogger who knew his way around the military and intelligence world (or so it seemed, anyway, based on a quick scan of a blog he’d been maintaining ever since his last tour of duty in Qatar), had picked up some traffic that had leaked to the civilian Internet from a .mil site, making a cryptic reference to a possible radiological event in southeastern Utah. Personnel stationed at nearby military bases were reporting that leaves were being canceled and units being mobilized. All of this was probably supposed to be kept under wraps, but nothing could prevent spouses and teenage kids from chattering about it. Someone in DC posted a snapshot of a pizza delivery guy on a Pentagon-bound Metro train, toting a stack of pizzas so high he had to use a two-wheeled dolly. Self-proclaimed experts in the comment thread were climbing all over one another to explain that massive pizza deliveries to the Pentagon were an infallible sign that something big was happening. A fourteen-year-old Texas girl’s emoji-splattered post, featuring grainy driveway footage of her camouflage-decked mom heaving a duffel bag into the back of a pickup truck and burning rubber down the street, went viral and was shown over and over on network news sites for lack of anything more definite from the actual scene of the disaster. Moab was a long way from anywhere, situated at an X made by the Colorado River and a two-lane highway. No Internet or phone traffic was coming out of it.