Emergency room doctor Chen Mo comes home after a night shift and passes out with a high fever for three days.
When he wakes, a dried trail of blood slowly seeps through the gap beneath the living room door.
His neighbors have become man-eating monsters.
The entire city is dead.
The world changed in just three days.
Downstairs, he meets a bespectacled young man wearing ancient armor and clutching a drone controller.
In an alley, he rescues a female soldier surrounded by a horde of the dead. Six bloodstained military dog tags hang from her, five belonging to fallen comrades.
At an abandoned gas station, he encounters a retired mechanic lying beneath a car, replacing its transmission.
Four people, one modified off-road vehicle, and half a tank of gas.
Their destination: west, toward a safe zone called the New World.
But the road goes on forever.
Gas stations will run dry, ammunition will run out, and at night, teammates will wake from nightmares, calling out their comrades' names.
And the zombies, the shamblers and the runners, are growing smarter.
Someone on the edge of a residential district has seen them learn to surround their prey.
There is one more thing Chen Mo has not told anyone:
He treated the feverish patient who had returned from Southeast Asia.
There were many other people on that flight.
Where are they now?
On the road heading west, four people who have lost everything are fighting to stay alive.
Not to save the world.
Just so that when they see tomorrow's sun, they can say: I'm still alive.
