It's been two years since a plague turned New Yorkers into flesh-eating corpses. The city's population has dwindled to three hundred refugees on Governors Island, a former military outpost in the bay between Manhattan and Brooklyn. The survivors struggle with supply shortages and flaring tempers, but the monsters they call 'rotters' can't swim. The island isn't comfortable, but it's safe. That sense of safety is shattered when Sarge, the island's head of security, comes face to decomposing face with a rotter while on a routine patrol. There's no way for the creature to have gotten on the island. Worse is that its stone-like skin makes it remarkably tough to kill. Faced with the prospect of an evolving enemy, and desperate to find antibiotics for his dying wife, Sarge has to go into Manhattan, do some recon, forage for supplies, and get out--without drawing the attention of the millions of rotters that now roam the city.