Before the Zombie Apocalypse

Dr. Elias Shayne didn't set out to end the world. He set out to save soldiers' lives.

Somnus was supposed to be humane - a weapon that put enemy combatants to sleep instead of killing them. Buried beneath a DARPA facility, tested on patients nobody outside those walls would ever ask about, it worked exactly as designed. Until the night a desperate son broke into a bunker to save the woman his girlfriend loved most, and walked out with three stolen vials and a truck he was never authorized to drive.

Twenty years later, Konnor Roland has heard Doctor Shayne tell the story of the outbreak a hundred times. He has never heard this version - the one Shayne has never had the courage to confess. The car crash a few miles from the bunker. The paramedic who answered the call. The hospital ward where a father named Chris Roland was admitted for what looked like nothing at all.

And two hundred miles above it all, aboard a space station called Horizon, four astronauts are about to lose contact with a ground control that will never call back - with no idea that the last cargo shipment they're about to receive is carrying something that shouldn't be alive.

This is the story no one meant to tell. The confession that explains everything Konnor thought he already knew - and the beginning of everything still to come.

Before the dead walked. Before the compound. Before Konnor Roland knew any of their names.

This is where it started.