Humanity's most fearsome enemy is no longer death. Alpha and Marsoc meet their match. Lurking in the bush is the dark shadow cast by the operators - a terrifying force every bit their equal in skill, ferocity, and sheer resolve...but utterly unconstrained by humanity, compassion, or brotherhood. Now, to complete their mission and save the world, the operators will have to pay with their lives, or their souls, or possibly both.

After recovering Patient Zero, Alpha must escape Africa to end the ZA once and for all. But they can feel the hot breath of a reinforced and vengeful Spetsnaz team on their necks - and there can be no escaping the reckoning of an ultimate sniper showdown between Ali and Vasily, and an incomparably brutal iron-cage Texas death match between Predator and Misha. For the first time, all the teams will come together and must fight as brothers for any chance of making it back to Britain. And only one thing is certain - not everyone is walking away from this one.

The battle to keep the undead tide from the walls of London is lost. Africa is a deadly hall of mirrors, leaving Alpha team riven with dissension and doubt. And the one man who might save the world is crashing to Earth half a world away. Only our greatest warriors can walk through this fire.

In the north, the collapsed section of the Wall is defended only by the decimated remains of 2 PARA. Even reinforced by Jameson and the exhausted Royal Marines of One Troop, it's a doomed delaying action at best - and the last choke point in the entire ZA faces an incoming tide of dead stretching to the ends of the Earth. Meanwhile, hunkered down at CentCom, the unified ranks of our heroes, led by Ali and Fick, work furiously to fortify and reinforce what will be humanity's final fallback position - forever.

With Juice in heavy contact on the do-or-die shore mission, Ali in a blistering sniper duel over the South Atlantic, and Homer all alone and massively outnumbered deep beneath the keel of the JFK, the Alpha operators are in the fight of their lives - against tactically outstanding, pain-invulnerable, and utterly merciless Spetsnaz commandos - and with no guarantees about who will be left standing at the end....

This is it. Alpha team goes once more into the breach. On what will be their final missions ever in the Zulu Alpha - and the fight of their lives — Homer & Ali, and Predator & Juice, launch out into the terminal post-Apocalypse, as London is overrun by the very last rush of death covering the entire planet. Neither mission can fail, but can all four teammates survive? Or will some go down safeguarding the lives of those they love more than life itself?

Mission complete, Alpha team enjoys their first chance to breathe and tend to their humanity. But the darkness leaves them alone with their demons - and those who have found love may yet learn that it is fatally incompatible with duty....

The world's last floating nuclear supercarrier looks into the face of oblivion as her thinned, exhausted, and beleaguered crew face the largest herd of dead ever recorded. Soon the ship's five-acre flight deck will become the scene of a furious and desperate set-piece battle - like no combat any modern army has seen since Stalingrad. The ranks of the dead are infinite, and those of the living are tiny, depleted, and running out of time...and of hope.

Between the fall of man and the arrival of the JFK, the Horn of Africa is a battleground. Salvation. Vengeance. Vanity.

In Canterbury, as the virus rages out of control, one troop of Royal Marine Commandos fights a 360-degree battle for survival while also racing to rescue the Channel Tunnel survivors from a relentless siege, all before Hellfire missile strikes and carpet bombing kill anyone left alive. Across the Atlantic,the crew of the USS John F. Kennedy risks a catastrophic reactor meltdown to get out of the path of a 10-mile-wide tide of the dead.

One Tier-1 Naval Special Warfare Operator, trained at the highest levels of any military, with 20-plus years of operational experience. One ex-cop civilian survivalist, who lived through two years of post-apocalyptic hell, unlike seven billion of her fellow humans. And an entire continent heaving with 400 million dead guys. To save the lives of his children, and rejoin Alpha team and the fight to save humanity, Homer must journey across a thousand miles of undead North America with Sarah Cameron, battling heavily armed bands of marauders who shoot first and ask questions never.

Tucked away in a high-tech Tactical Operations Center, inside an isolated safehouse in the Horn of Africa, sits Agency analyst Zack Altringham. He is Kenyan-born, Princeton-educated, badly burnt-out - and condemned by his language and cultural skills to a lifetime of fighting America's shadow counter-terror wars.

A company of Army Rangers is sent on an interstellar colony ship to secure a foothold on a dangerous, alien planet through violence of action. Leaving behind a warring Earth flung headfirst into a conflict of mutual assured destruction, the Rangers and the accompanying crew of first colonists are guided on a 40-year journey by an unprecedented artificial intelligence. But when they emerge from the frigid embrace of cryosleep, they awake to a nightmare, finding themselves greeted by the same ruthless enemy that brought about the ruin of Earth. 

B Company, 3rd Bat, 75th Ranger Regiment - a unit that's fought in every US engagement from D-Day to Black Hawk Down. They are the last American boots on the ground in the entire Syrian civil war...on the last day before the Fall of human civilization. When they are tasked with stopping a unit of Spetsnaz operators from inserting under the chaos, an advanced Russian Navy frigate becomes the last place left on Earth for the Rangers to find refuge.

Ever since Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick came blitzing out of nowhere in Maximum Violence (Arisen, book 4), he has emerged as the closest thing to a consensus fan favorite character for the series. He is best known and most beloved for his ribald, profane, merciless, and generally hilarious insults, quips, and bon mots, which are so characteristic that listeners have affectionately dubbed them: Fickisms.