In the two months since they brought the apocalypse down on the world, zombies have reduced everything to a shattered scattering of isolated survivor groups clinging to what’s left of their lives. Living day to day, hand to mouth, constantly fighting amid the ruins of what’s left of a civilization that was over seven billion people strong; it isn’t much, but it’s that or become one more monster.
One thing zombies have going for them is persistence. Zombies never give up, never get tired, and are always hungry. Zombies might be clumsy and slow, but humans get distracted and make mistakes. The patience of death will always win out against the imperfection of humanity. The clock is ticking on the living, not the dead.
Peter Gibson has survived some of the worst the zombies could throw at him in downtown Atlanta, and has managed to help his battered squad carve out a safe spot in rural north Georgia for five thousand souls. But squatting in a tent village, spending the days guarding the perimeter and making scavenging runs for more canned food and dry goods, praying that a zombie horde big enough to roll over the humans doesn’t show up; that’s just a holding action. It doesn’t address the real problem.
Zombies.
What’s left of the government has been gathering itself at an Air Force base in the northern Midwest. They say they’re working on holding and expanding a secured area, eventually aiming to retake the entire continent. When his camp picks up those radio transmissions, that’s what Peter’s been holding on for two months to hear. But it’s eighteen hundred miles from Georgia to South Dakota, and between the Atlantic and Pacific are over two hundred million zombies.
Getting there will take a road trip of nightmare proportions.