Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Ash Land by Matt Harry, which releases on May 4th 2026.
No one knows how to destroy the Ash.
Two years ago, the flesh-eating microbots escaped from a lab in France and quickly spread across the globe. Twenty percent of humanity was killed in under a month. The people who managed to seal themselves inside survived, but now they’re only able to access the outside world through remote-controlled drones or hazmat suits.
Kai Braddock is one of those survivors. He used to be a cop, but the machine plague and a bitter divorce led to him quitting the department. Now he tracks down bounties via drone, eats cricket burgers with his two sons online, and spends every waking hour in a 70 square-foot studio in downtown Los Angeles. But when his partner is murdered while helping him locate a missing scientist, Braddock realizes he’ll have to do what almost no one has done in over twenty-six months:
He’ll have to go outside.
This scene shows the main character, a detective named Kai Braddock, tracking down an escaped fugitive via remote-operated drone. He has managed to corner his bounty in an arcade on the abandoned Santa Monica Pier.
EXCERPT
I nudged the drone forward into the arcade. Thin sunlight filtered through the front windows. The wooden video game cabinets were dark and dusty, but the width of them offered plenty of places to hide. For the first time, I realized how many of them were based around world-ending events. Time Crisis. Mortal Kombat. Jurassic Park. Even Dig Dug was about a guy in a hazmat suit defending himself from monsters. But what all of them got wrong was that when our real doom came, it would be no more scary-looking than a pile of dust bunnies, and nearly every weapon we had would be useless against it.
BANG! The sound blew out my headphones momentarily, and a flash illuminated the dark arcade.
A gunshot.
Luckily the bullet went high, impacting on a ceiling panel and sending out a little puff of plaster. Three bullets left. I yanked back the altitude stick on my controller, dropping the drone to the floor. The barrel of the tranquilizer gun clicked on the linoleum. Keeping the Triton low, I strafed around to the point where the gunshot had originated.
I came to a stop at the south end of the arcade, hovering just beside the clear glass prize cabinet. Plastic necklaces and wax lips were piled inside. The cabinet’s flat surface amplified the high-pitched whine of the Triton V’s rotors, but at least this way I had a view of the entire room. I turned on the drone’s external speakers. What the hell, Nguyen could hear where I was anyway.
“Hey there, Danny. My name’s Kai Braddock.” I switched briefly to the thermal lens, but there were no tell-tale flares of heat yet. I went back to the muddy green night vision. “I’m a private detective. Formerly LAPD. Gotta say, I’m impressed you managed to stay on the run for this long. The cops, they expected to catch you on satellite weeks ago. But I figure you had someone helping you stay out of sight. Am I right? ‘Cause I know you’re too stupid to do it yourself.”
No reply. Damn. I’d been hoping to goad Nguyen into a response. I was beginning to wonder if he’d managed to sneak out some hidden back exit when I finally spotted him. A green lump crouched behind a Star Wars original trilogy game pod. His pupils glowed white in my drone’s infrared camera beam. Then a Beretta muzzle obscured his face, and two flashes made my infrared lens flare white.
BANG! BANG! The gunshots echoed in my headphones, making my eardrums vibrate painfully. I squeezed my eyes shut and banked left, feeling the controller vibrate as the Triton bumped into a nearby change machine. The bullets struck the prize case, sending glass shards plinking off my drone. One bullet left.
I popped the Triton upward, giving Nguyen a good look at me, then immediately dropped back down. Up, and down. Up, down. The fourth time I popped up, Nguyen fired. BANG. I dropped the drone again. His final bullet went wide.
Time to bag my bounty.
I slammed the Triton forward, lining up Nguyen’s torso in my targeting reticule. He was less than five yards away, a sitting duck. I squeezed the trigger —
Just as Nguyen hurled his empty Beretta. Unfortunately, it was his most accurate shot of the day. The heavy pistol struck my drone dead center, cracking the camera lens and spinning the UAV sideways. The tranquilizer dart intended for Nguyen skittered off through the video game cabinets.
Realizing my intentions, he scrambled to his feet and bolted for the arcade exit. I panned my head to track him and fired another dart. This one was closer, thunking off a Skee ball lane mere inches from the perp’s back. He pushed open a side door and sprinted out onto the sunlit pier.
Since I was piloting a lightweight drone, I was forced to circle back and leave the arcade via the broken window. When I finally made it outside, Nguyen was fifty yards away from the building, zig-zagging through the amusement park rides and carnival game stands. He was making for the western end of the pier. His hazmat boots kicked up gray puffs of Ash behind him.
I nudged the Triton upward to about seventy-five feet. The pier’s old Ferris wheel sparkled in the afternoon sun. I zipped over the abandoned churro stands and ice cream shops until I was just above my bounty. The poor bastard was moving like he was underwater. As he reached the end of the pier, he cast a glance behind him. His chest was heaving from his efforts.
I dropped the Triton V down to Nguyen’s eye level. “Dead end, Danny. Now I’m gonna be nice and give you a choice: either you calmly walk back up this pier with me, or my associate comes down and drags your unconscious ass. What’ll it be?”
“Fuck you!” Nguyen shouted, still struggling to catch his breath. “I go on house arrest, I’m dead anyway.”
“It’s not that bad,” I said, inching the drone forward as Nguyen backed toward the pier railing. “From what I hear, you get access to books, food delivery three times a day, and video call visits with your family.”
“I can’t go into custody,” Nguyen insisted. “They told me if I was caught, they’d go after my family.”
He was five yards away now, perfectly positioned for a center mass shot. All I had to do was squeeze the trigger. But I was curious. “Who’s ‘they’? Who’s targeting your family?”
Nguyen turned to look out at the Pacific. The water was a crisp sapphire blue. “Fifteen years,” he muttered. Resignation lay heavy in his voice. “Fifteen years I lived less than ten miles from here, but I never made the drive. Too much traffic, I always said. Too busy.” He gazed out at the water. “It really is beautiful. Except for the last time I was here, when—” He broke off, hopefully remembering the faces of his dead sightseers. Grape-colored skin, blackened veins, eyeballs oozing blood.
“You can still make it right,” I told him. “Turn yourself in, maybe do some community service—”
He laughed, dry and humorless. “Community? Look around you, drone man. This world is already dead.”
Nguyen suddenly ran full-tilt at me. His hands reached for the rotors of my drone, straining to snap them off—
But I pulled the trigger before he could come close. A tranquilizer dart stuck into the man’s chest, making him stagger to a stop. He looked down at the dart like a confused animal. Then he raised his eyes, already wet with tears.
“No,” Nguyen whispered.
With a wince, he pulled the tranquilizer dart from his chest. There was a hiss as the pressurized oxygen began to escape from his hazmat suit.
“What are you doing?” I yelled at him. “The Ash will get in. Use your patch kit, cover the hole, before—”
But instead Nguyen reached up to grab the sides of his helmet. He closed his eyes, then twisted the helmet sideways to unlock it. There was a gasp of air as he pulled it off his head. I could only watch, helpless, as the helmet hit the pier’s warped wooden boards. He turned once more to face the Pacific.
A tendril of Ash spiraled up from the ground, encircling Nguyen’s head like a curious cloud of gnats. He stood frozen for a moment, his eyes and mouth squeezed shut. Then, with his last bit of resolve, Daniel Nguyen inhaled.
“Shit,” I muttered. I dialed 911 from a drop-down menu on my HUD, but I knew it was already too late.
Nguyen’s chest jerked as if an invisible fishing hook had tugged on his ribcage. He doubled over, his limbs twitching unnaturally. I could hear the breach alarm blaring inside his hazmat suit. He fell to the pier, groaning as millions of tiny xenobots burrowed through his body, their leechlike mouths gnawing on muscles and organs. The veins in Nguyen’s face darkened. His eyeballs began to bleed. He retched, and a cloud of gray Ash spewed from his throat.
Then, less than five minutes after Daniel Nguyen had exposed his body to the outside air, he gave one final, shuddering gasp and lay still.
Excerpted from Ash Land, by Matt Harry. IFWG Publishing, 2026. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author:
MATT HARRY is the author of six novels, including Sorcery for Beginners, which was optioned for television by Boatrocker Media (Palm Royale). He has edited over 25 novels, created two immersive plays, and taught hundreds of students in creative fields. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two sons, all of whom (thankfully) like to read.
