The Road to Des Moines

When the satisfying satisfying satisfying satisfying office bathroom becomes a blood-soaked killing floor, Harper’s ordinary life ends in seconds. Armed with nothing but a plastic wet-floor sign, she caves in her coworker Brenda’s skull—and steps into a world where the dead walk and the living are worse. Rescued by Grit, a cold-blooded survivalist who shoots first and never asks questions, Harper is dragged into a brutal education. Every lesson costs blood. Every hesitation invites death. On a fortified farm in rural Iowa, she transforms from a terrified office worker into a lethal fighter—learning to shoot, to kill, and to bury what’s left of her conscience. But the dead aren’t the only threat. A ruthless warlord named Silas commands a militia that weaponizes the infected, turning the countryside into his personal empire. When Grit is captured and their sanctuary burns, Harper must wage war against both the living and the dead to rescue the man who saved her. Driven by a desperate hope that her family survived in Des Moines, Harper fights her way across a collapsing America—one bullet, one blade, one impossible choice at a time. In a world stripped of mercy, she discovers the most dangerous thing isn’t the monsters outside. It’s what survival turns you into.