Portraits of the Pale

Portraits of the Pale: Volume II – Shadows on the Road

The Pale Drip still spreads. Cities fall silent. The world belongs to the patient and the ruthless.

Aldo Milan leaves the broken streets of Ashgrove with a camera, a sword, and one purpose-find the family he lost when the outbreak began. From Pennsylvania’s haunted turnpikes to the cold Atlantic coast of Maine, he rides through a landscape of ash and echoes, where the living can be more dangerous than the infected.

Along the way he meets survivors who burn themselves into his lens and memory:

Vernon, a false prophet with a barn full of captives.

Nora, a widow who dines with ghosts.

Walter, a solitary lighthouse keeper who still keeps watch though the light is gone.

Rowan, a young woman with a blade and a secret path of her own.

Each encounter is a story of hunger, courage, and betrayal-proof that even as the alien virus remakes the dead, the living will not surrender their humanity without a fight.

But a single note, left by his wife in their abandoned home, drives Aldo onward. To reach her he must cross an unmanned border into the frozen Canadian wilderness, threading through Ottawa and the dark forests above Lake Superior, before turning south toward the rumored safety of North Dakota.

Shadows on the Road is the second volume of Portraits of the Pale, a relentless post-apocalyptic odyssey for readers of The Last of Us, The Road, and Station Eleven-a journey where every portrait is a promise, and every mile west is a battle against the dark.