The Spare Parts Club

Profile

The Spare Parts Club is a support-group brotherhood of disabled combat veterans that becomes an improvised resistance force when the Christmas Day invasion reaches South Carolina. Badly wounded veterans travel with celebrity veteran influencer Trigger and a younger armed companion in the last running car, heading for the countryside as Chinese paratroopers arrive. An IRGC kill team hunting the Club over an old score turns their escape into a personal war, and the group ultimately becomes part of the defense of a small Southern town.

Before and entering the war

PREWAR FILE // The Club exists before the invasion as a network formed around combat injury, recovery, shared humor, and veteran identity. That history gives the group cohesion ordinary strangers would not have when the lights fail. Their bodies impose real constraints, but their military experience also gives them knowledge a peacetime community suddenly needs.

What this character or entity does in the story

The Club is the ensemble protagonist of the novel. It carries the book’s central argument that 'broken' is a civilian label, not an operational verdict. The group also supports the story’s distinctive tone: gallows humor and questionable nicknames coexist with genuine disability, prior trauma, invasion, and lethal resistance.

Capabilities and constraints

Collective combat experience, deep interpersonal trust, adaptation around multiple disabilities, improvised mobility, rural survival, small-unit decision-making, and the willingness to defend civilians. No single member has to do everything because the Club’s capability is inherently distributed.

Notable actions and decisions

Escapes the opening invasion in the last running car; moves into rural South Carolina; survives pursuit by an IRGC kill team; turns from escape toward defense of a small town; participates in an improvised resistance effort that includes a homemade kill-dozer.

Key relationships and operational links

TRIGGER // Celebrity veteran outsider-insider traveling with the Club.

STRIPPER / STUMPY / LOREDO / SLOTH / PIMPWALK // Named wounded veterans forming the core personality of the group.

IRGC KILL TEAM // Personal pursuer with an old score, adding a second enemy system beyond the Chinese invasion.

SOUTH CAROLINA TOWN // Civilian community that converts the Club’s mission from escape to defense.

How the file changes through the conflict

Veteran support network → escape group after the EMP → hunted rural survivors → improvised resistance → community defenders whose earlier injuries and experience become central to survival.