Since mankind began, civilizations have always fallen: the Romans, the Greeks, the Aztecs…Now it’s our turn. Huge earthquakes rock the world. Cities are destroyed. But something even more awful is happening. An ancient evil has been unleashed, turning everyday people into hunters, killers, crazies.
 
Mason's mother is dying after a terrible car accident. As he endures a last vigil at her hospital bed, his school is bombed and razed to the ground, and everyone he knows is killed. Aries survives an earthquake aftershock on a bus, and thinks the worst is over when a mysterious stranger pulls her out of the wreckage, but she’s about to discover a world changed forever. Clementine, the only survivor of an emergency town hall meeting that descends into murderous chaos, is on the run from savage strangers who used to be her friends and neighbors. And Michael witnesses a brutal road rage incident that is made much worse by the arrival of the police--who gun down the guilty party and then turn on the by-standing crowd.

Where do you go for justice when even the lawmakers have turned bad? These four teens are on the same road in a world gone mad. Struggling to survive, clinging on to love and meaning wherever it can be found, this is a journey into the heart of darkness – but also a journey to find each other and a place of safety.

Review:
After receiving this book in the mail, the cover haunted me. It truly stuck with me and when I finally got the chance to read it, I fell in love with the whole book. It was so amazing from cover to cover that I could hardly believe it.

At first the cover was not my favourite, though it really stuck with me. The eyes haunted me with their black veins and wide crevice in the dry desert-like ground. My other favorite part of this cover is the line of people walking in the distance with the city in the horizon. Something about those people just stuck with me. After a while of seeing this cover, my feelings did change about it because of how well the entire thing came together and how curious it made the reader.

Who was my favourite main character of this book? I simply could not pick. I loved all the characters for how they reacted but more for how they survived and made connections to one another. I also liked how there was variety in the character's background story and the way they took to the apocalypse. If I had to choose one favourite secondary character out of all those covered in the book, I would have to pick Daniel. My reasoning is that he was so mysterious and popped up at the strangest of times. I cannot wait to see where his character, or any of the characters for that matter, go and how they grow.

This story successfully delivered a hauntingly potent story that kept me thinking long after I had flipped the last page, which contain a huge cliffhanger. The ending left me begging for more to the extent that I just could not stop thinking about it. This book was set in multiple points of view and I found it to really work. I loved all the characters for how realistic their responses to the seeming end of the world were. I could very much relate to all of the main characters especially the female ones. Aires and Clementine were interesting to read about since I could really relate with them in particular, but I also enjoyed that of Mason and Micheal.

This was just such a captivating book, that it is hard to find any flaws to fault it on whatsoever. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes dystopian, apocalypse books or a good, thrilling book. Altogether, this book gets a 5/5 for being a realistic, fresh take on the apocalypse without the use of zombies.