A survival novel. One man's journal from the three years after the Bang — kept in ink, paint, and whatever paper he could find.
Every collapse story is about the event. This one is about what comes next — one man, the eastern foothills, and a journal that slowly turns from a record of grief into a record of how he stayed alive.
He doesn't give his name. He gives his days: the water he found, the mistakes that nearly killed him, the pages of a Ranger Handbook read by firelight until the spine gave out. His sketches start as a way to keep his hands from shaking. They end as maps, diagrams, and the faces of the people who found him.
The Ark is a survival novel told in journal entries and the survivor's own artwork — solitude to community, three years, every skill earned the hard way.
The printed book is a typeset copy of his handwritten journal, the way the first printed Bibles were set from the manuscripts.
The drawings are his, and they change as he does. The early pages are chaos — a hand that won't stop shaking. Then the lines steady: the empty streets, then shelters, tools, routes. And one day, paint.
Nobody paints with watercolor unless they have water to spare. Nobody paints in oil unless they plan to stay.
THE MEDIUM IS THE STORY.
— Day 172 —
Built the fire hole tonight, the way he taught me. Correctly, this time. Two holes, one tunnel, air feeding the burn from below. The fire caught and the smoke that got out was thin and gone within a few feet. First hot meal in weeks I didn't have to watch the treeline.
— Day 876 —
Recon on a village. Guard change every 12 hours. Two dogs. Two towers, both manned. Livestock outside the wall. Seem friendly so far.
Collected Ark Notes on Survival
Field manuals written by the man who kept the journal. Everything in them he learned the hard way first.
Shelter & Security
Where to sleep tonight, where to sleep next month, and how to still be alive in the morning. Shelter first, then the rings around it. I built the wrong thing in the wrong place more than once before I got it right. Some of it applies when there are more of you, and more mouths means more problems.
Finding & Purifying
You can go a while without food. Water decides things much faster. What I drank, what I should never have drunk, and what I did about it.
Fire & Cooking
Fire kept me warm, cooked what I found and boiled what I drank. For the first few weeks I could barely make one. I went through wet wood, wasted matches and a lot of smoke with no heat before I stopped doing it wrong. This is how to start one, keep it going and not let it give you away.
Maps & Movement
No phone, no signal, no signs worth trusting. How I learned to know where I was and get back again. Mostly I learned it by getting lost.
In development · Available as add-ons on Kickstarter
We're not professional writers or artists. Chris writes the journal and draws the narrator's sketches; Mark keeps continuity and style honest and builds the campaign. Every drawing is made in-world, in the narrator's hand, at his stage of the journey. On the bench: one novel in active draft, the CANS. field manuals in development, and a wall of trackers that make sure the story never cheats.
Every item the narrator scavenges is logged. Every skill he learns is paced against what a real beginner could do. If he never found gun oil, his rifle stays dry — and the story deals with it.
Chapter One · The Bang, Minute 1
It was the dead space between Christmas and New Year’s, that limp week where the calendar has days on it but nobody’s using them. Most people were off. A few of us weren’t – single, no kids, no one waiting at home, the kind of guy who collects a paycheck in that stretch without anyone checking whether he earns it. That was me.
The night before, some of the guys from the office had gone out and I’d gone with them, and it ran late the way those nights do when nobody has a reason to go home. I woke up wearing most of yesterday, head pounding, mouth like carpet. I drank a glass of water at the sink, waited for it to do something, and decided a cold walk would fix what the water couldn’t. My exact thought, and I remember it because the universe has a sense of humor, was that a brisk lap around the park would get me ready to survive the day.
I pulled on clothes off the floor, grabbed my jacket, and went out into the cold. The sun sat low behind a flat sheet of cloud, bright enough to tell me it wasn’t mid-morning yet, weak enough that it didn’t warm anything. The park was the usual crowd of usual faces, all of us out chasing the same pointless 10,000 steps.
By the pond my head had started to come back to me – a dozen mallards sitting on the water like they owned it – and I was half-watching my own feet when they all went up at once. Wings slapping, no lead bird, no warning I could see. I actually stopped. I remember thinking, with the deep clarity of a man still slightly drunk, that I didn’t remember the ducks coming out drinking with us the night before. Then I swayed, and it wasn’t the beer.
Something came up through the ground. I felt it in my feet first, then my shins, then it climbed my spine and settled in my jaw and the backs of my teeth – a pressure more than a shake, like standing too close to a speaker playing a note too low to hear. I told myself it was the hangover, because that was the explanation I had. Then it came again, the same climb, feet to teeth, and this time the headache lifted clean off me, gone between one breath and the next. Dead sober, standing by a pond, watching the last of the ducks clear the treeline.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out and there was nothing – no message, no missed call, a blank screen. That was when I noticed the sound underneath the sound. The normal noise of the city had been swapped out for alarms, stacked on each other, near and far, none of them agreeing on anything.
The rest of Chapter One and the Preface, as a PDF. Just your email.
The Ark in hardback and paperback, with the CANS. field manuals as add-ons. Back the campaign and your name goes in the manifest. Followers hear first, and first matters.
Free PDF — the Preface and Chapter 1, styled as journal pages. No spam — field reports only.