Second Expeditionary Forces

The Second Expeditionary Forces is the army of the Republic of Texas, a disciplined military presence encountered by Peter Jaxon and his companions after their long journey west. Its patrols and command structure connect the survivors’ isolated communities to a larger political and military world, but its capacity to help is constrained by distance, unfamiliar territory, and the need for approval up the chain of command.

Identity and Field Presence

The force’s identity is made explicit when Brigadier General Curtis Vorhees introduces himself as its commander and names it as part of the Army of the Republic of Texas. The encounter follows Peter’s arrival with a small party whose packs have been returned but whose weapons remain withheld. They are described as being under protection: received by the soldiers, but not free to leave as they choose.

Major Greer leads a long-range patrol squad of fifteen men that has spent weeks in the woods. Their camouflage is tightened with belts and loaded pockets; mud and charcoal streak their faces, and their rifles and field gear make them seem almost continuous with the forest they have crossed. The patrol has found Peter’s group by chance along a muddy track marked by hoofprints and tire ruts. Its members are nearing their own garrison, where a hot meal, beds, and shelter await them.

Garrison and Command

The force’s position is not merely a camp hidden in the wilderness. In the commander’s tent, Peter sees a radio operator at work and a large map headed United States Intermediate Political. Beaded pins trace a broad, irregular V: one arm runs north through Oklahoma into southern Kansas, while the other crosses New Mexico and turns north to end near the Colorado border. The map makes the force’s reach visible as a network of routes and occupied territory, even as the old classroom map’s label evokes a political geography surviving in altered form.

Vorhees’s authority is direct and self-conscious. He tells Peter that he is the big dog around the garrison, placing himself at the top of the local command structure while Greer serves as the field officer who has brought the party in. The radio and map also show that the force is connected to communication and planning beyond the immediate patrol, though its decisions are not made solely at the garrison.

Contact with Peter’s Expedition

Peter’s arrival turns a routine patrol encounter into a report from another surviving community. During five days of rain, he speaks for hours with Vorhees, sometimes alone and often with Greer present. He recounts the Colony, Amy, the signal that brought the expedition searching, and the events involving Theo, Mausami, and Haven. Most urgently, he explains that ninety people are waiting on a California mountaintop, sixteen hundred kilometers away, while their lights approach failure.

The force does not dismiss the account. Vorhees says he believes Peter, and recognizes that the bunker Peter describes would itself justify a journey. Yet belief does not produce immediate rescue: Vorhees must take the request up the line to Division, and he estimates that spring at the earliest before such an expedition could be considered. The distance is uncharted ground. The answer leaves the Colony’s need acknowledged but unresolved, with winter and the military’s deliberative chain standing between the report and any possible response.

Infrastructure and the Limits of Survival

The urgency of Peter’s appeal is grounded in the Colony’s failing power system. Its turbines can continue turning in the wind, but its aging batteries can no longer reliably store and regulate the current. Their membranes are spent, and repair cannot restore them; without replacement cells, a windless night could bring the lights down. The estimate is one or two years at most. The force’s potential importance therefore lies not only in its soldiers but in the possibility that a wider military system might reach a community whose own infrastructure is nearing irreversible failure.

That possibility is shadowed by the Colony’s history with communication. The radio was forbidden after it had led Walkers to the settlement in its early days. Seventy-five years before Michael’s account, the antenna was removed from the mountain and the radio dismantled and scattered in the dump, a choice that may once have seemed defensible when food, fuel, and space under the lights were scarce. Now, as the batteries decay, the same isolation that once offered protection makes help harder to summon. The Second Expeditionary Forces thus represents both the existence of a larger surviving order and the uncertainty of whether that order can reach those who need it in time.