7 Days

Summary

SEVEN DAYS. SIX FAMILY MEMBERS. ONE WAY OUT.

Thursday begins with a crying baby, a missing school shoe and coffee you do not have time to finish. Your partner leaves for work with the nine-month-old, the older children head to school and you join the morning rush through Manhattan. It should have been an ordinary day.

By lunchtime, the dead are getting back up.

Your family is scattered across New York when the outbreak begins. Your partner and baby are trapped near Midtown, your thirteen-year-old is in the East Village, the younger children are stranded on the Lower East Side and every route between them is filling with frightened people and the newly infected. Then the authorities close every bridge and tunnel leaving Manhattan.

Finding your family is only the beginning. Six people need food, clean water, medicine, somewhere safe to sleep and enough nappies and formula to keep a baby alive. The infected turn within minutes, push their bodies far beyond normal human limits and refuse to remain as predictable as everybody first assumes.

You have seven days to get your partner and four children out of New York City. Every person you stop to help costs time, everything you carry adds weight and every escape route risks placing the people you love in a different kind of danger.

Can you keep all six members of your family alive long enough to leave Manhattan, or will the city take somebody before the seventh day arrives?