In a post-apocalyptic world where food is treasure, pirates will kill for a meal.

A month after the nuclear war ended, Commissioner Qwong and her crew of scientists and soldiers head north. Following a clue found in the logbook of a sinking ship, they search Mexico for a community trading safety for oil. As they follow garbled radio messages and breadcrumb-clues northward from one small band of survivors to another, a picture of the new world emerges.

Sinking cities and rising swamps, fallout-laden farmland and fire ravaged homes, pirate-ridden coasts and zombie-filled shores: the damage is irreversible, and the rescue mission soon becomes an ecological survey, charting the spread of fallout, the location of inland craters, the growth of oceanic dead-zones, and the extent of coastal flooding.

Despite the increasingly bleak discoveries, a new plan emerges, a blueprint for a new haven and a new way of living, a new future for the last survivors of humanity. There is one last chance to save the species, a desperate gamble which will take them to where the outbreak began, and then beyond.

From the Caribbean to the Great Lakes, the full extent of the apocalypse becomes clear as the battle for humanity ends, and the fight for a new future begins.