Like most college students, all Callie Norton has worried about for weeks was passing this semester’s finals. After a night out celebrating, she and her friends wake up, sick with way more than the hangover of the century. All too soon, Callie realizes that this is not just a common cold she’s suffering from—and when she wakes up from a coma in a quarantine tent as the sole survivor, lack of food and water aren’t her only problems.

A lonely 18-year-old, Kris Robertson left his mountain hideaway only to discover a deserted city of isolated individuals scrambling over the debris. Young girls being abducted, wild dogs attacking people. Scared young people hiding from raiding parties and each other. Scavenging for a life among the remains of the past. There is no community, no one in charge. Kris must decide whether to assume that responsibility or walk away.

At the end of the world. Nick Peterson never expected to be stuck with a bunch of kids. A 17-year-old boy shouldn’t be responsible for keeping other people alive. But he didn’t have much choice in the matter. That’s what happens when everyone else dies.

Two teenagers find a frozen corpse in the middle of the woods and decide to bring it back to town. They have no idea they just sparked the zombie apocalypse. In the morgue below the hospital, the dead begin waking up and attacking the living. The infection spreads rapidly, turning the place into a slaughterhouse as those inside fight to survive against the undead.

Senior Chief Cotton Wiley thought he had left his days of fighting behind in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the world had other plans. First a deadly virus ravaged humanity and then the attempt at a vaccine turned most of the survivors into genetically engineered cannibals. Now the former SEAL has a new mission: Get his daughter through the wasteland of what was once America and to a place where she has a chance at a future not soaked in blood.