In the seventh year of the apocalypse, twenty thousand people are crammed into the Iron Fence outpost. He has no name and lives in a shack on the edge of the ruins. All he owns is a bucket of muddy water, half a bag of starch, a biology textbook he found, and a white-core zombie rat. Every day, he collects rations, hauls broken bricks, and scrapes off fungal growths, living like a speck of dust. Then one day, he pushes open the iron gate of the Hunters’ Guild. He only went to report an abnormal fungal mat, but they shove a reserve recruit registration form into his hands. Now he has to pick a codename and learn how to hold a knife, how to run, and how to survive a zombie’s jaws. Something stirs beneath the ruins, and the fungal mat keeps spreading toward the ration station. In his pocket, he has five bullets, an old gun, and a question he has yet to answer. No one knows these ruins better than he does. He understands zombies better than anyone. But now he has to learn something else: how to go from scavenging broken bricks to becoming a hunter.
