The four part series is a prelude to The Sixth Extinction series.
We get to see what happened within the first three weeks of the outbreak from the point of view of the five main characters, set out in four new books.
NOAH MORGAN'S STORY
Noah is just an average twenty-one-year-old. He has no aspirations in life, no girlfriend, few friends, and a dead-end job stacking shelves in a local supermarket. He locks himself away in his small flat, playing computer games, while ignoring the world outside.
The story follows him as the infection first starts to spread across the world, city-by-city and then country by country, until it eventually reaches England. Over the next three weeks, the world as he knows it will change forever, and he has no choice but to adjust to the situation or die trying.
RED'S STORY
Red is a nineteen-year-old who struggles to put food on the table for her younger sister, Jasmine, after her mother passed away from cancer, and her stepfather turned to drink to cope. Red's life turns upside-down when she returns from a double shift to find her stepfather has done something inconceivable. Red reacts in the heat of the moment, and then runs away to hide in the local woods, while trying to come to turns with what happened and what she has become.
While hiding from the authorities, and grieving, a virus ravishes the world. By the time she walks out of the woods, to hand herself in, life, as she knows it has changed forever, and not in the way she expected. The world is in chaos, and it is everyone for themselves.
Red has to put her grieving aside; it is now fight or die.
BETTY AND LENNIE'S STORY
Betty is an eighty-six-year-old woman who spends her days annoying the carers in the nursing home, where she was forced to move when the government deemed her unfit to look after herself and her mentally disabled, giant of a grandson, Lennie. Lennie is placed in a home for adults with special-needs and developmental disabilities. They get to see each other only once a week, when a care worker takes Lennie on the train to visit his grandmother.
Then their world changes. The virus outbreak reaches the shores of Great Britain, and the government locks the country down.
However, the care home is forgotten in all the turmoil. The carers stop turning up for work, and the old residents are left to fend for themselves. As the older, sicker occupants start dying, Betty is forced to do things, things which only days before would have seemed impossible.
Unable to reach her grandson, Betty is struggling with her emotions and her body's limitations. Things go from bad to worse when one night the unimaginable happens, and as people are dying all around her, she has to fight to stay alive.
DOCTOR MELANIE LAZARO'S STORY
Melanie was a child prodigy, miles ahead in her classes. At the age of thirteen, she was one of only four people ever to be accepted into Cambridge University at such a young age. At twenty-three, she is now a renowned scientist in Exeter University's Microbes and Disease Department.
However, life isn't perfect; she's had her problems, and her parents are a little distant and eccentric – her mother cares more about her plants, and her father locks himself away in the basement, and due to bad choices, she still lives at home with them.
Then the virus arrives and the government sends in the army to take over the university's facilities, using everything at their disposable to try to create a vaccine.
Doctor Lazaro is drafted in to run the scientific side of the university while the army barricades it off from the rest of the city.
She works around the clock, unable to leave.
She wonders, what is the General keeping from her? Why isn't she allowed to contact to her parents? Why is there a battalion of soldiers walking the perimeters? And why is there screaming coming from the university's large gym?
