The UK population has been ravaged. Nate must support his family, and Ruby is looking for somewhere to call home. And then tragedy strikes upon tragedy."The ground was a carpet of flesh and bones; thirty - or even twenty - feet away, it became almost impossible to distinguish body from body, body part from body part. Death's great road roller had been this way and slain everything in its path. Yet there were shimmers of movement, hands that answered classroom questions and arms that swam against a tide of innards where coils of intestines held them back. Faces without jaws; half-faces, eyeless faces, skinless faces; faces a mother would no longer recognise. Jagged and sharp were the protruding cheekbones and half-hanging bridges of noses. The mass was whole. It squirmed with life - the longer they looked, the sicker they felt. And yet it was impossible not to stare in awe; this beach of flesh that represented the humanity of now: nurses and doctors, labourers and homeless, the aged and the young; all just threads in this tapestry."