[Master Hunter 01] • The Stone Scry

The news incessantly runs vignettes describing unrest in the Southwest and hurricanes slamming the Southeast Coast. A ten-year accelerated climate change cycle has begun. Los Angeles born biologist Tom Mason discovers a gene regulating neural growth factor in engineered mosquitoes that prevents disease outbreaks. His world-renowned work drags the Mason family into the secret world of retired pharmaceutical giant Arnold Stone, who envisions other uses for the expression system. Tom raises his son, Sam Mason, in Raleigh, North Carolina as the Earth changes. Tribes form along the Southeast Coast in the wake of civilization's mass exodus into the mountains. Those left behind must carve a living amidst gangs, mutated man-eating animals and plants, pestilent weather, and a swelling barbarian horde. Estranged from his father, Sam moves to Wilmington and joins the Divers, a powerful tribe supplying freshwater to an exhausted, starving Southwest. While Sam competes with sharks the size of a school bus for food, Tom travels into North Carolina's swamplands to collect strange samples escorted by the newly formed, elite Navy swamp stompers. A sadistic interdimensional being coerces Tom to make a deal. Disillusioned by the Divers, worried about his mother alone in Raleigh, Sam defects from the Divers. He must make a choice - leave his tribe alone to fight the horde or help his father fulfill the bargain, sliding into a wasteland rife with mutation and under control by interdimensional beings that harvest energy from the dead. The Stone Scry is part one in a two-part series titled Master Hunter.