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Readers travel with John, a dedicated family man and courier for Christ Hospital, who is sent to collect a few vials of blood that his employer requests be expedited to the lab. At the lab, John finds a hustle and bustle of a different kind as the presence of two CDC technicians he has never seen or met before overshadows the lab's usual operations. As John ventures from assignment to assignment, readers ride with a man interested in the truth about what's happening in the hospitals to which he travels and in the lab for which he works. Then, John becomes a man who finds himself in moral turmoil after discovering the truth about a new virus threatening the United States. As the virus rampages through everyone except those who possess the B blood type, society slowly crumbles, and gangs rape and pillage. John's family struggles to survive amid the chaos.
This medical thriller opens with the action of a Robin Cook novel and proceeds at a pace as engaging as Contagion. John's moral conflict parallels those faced by medical personnel every day, but especially during times of mass emergency and uncertainty. The protagonist's humanity quickly draws in everyday readers into the struggle to understand the occurrences around him. As society declines in the book, readers enter a dystopian world where little hope exists. However, John's reminders about the power of faith take readers into a realm often unexplored in pandemic-themed literature. The focus on the family, too, deviates from typical, mainstream works that deal with a similar subject matter. By the end of this book, readers have traveled through a world that could have existed had modern pandemics conquered modern medicine rather than vice versa.