Sometimes, dead just isn’t dead enough.
Seventeen-year-old Annabel Wallis and her family have survived six months of the zombie apocalypse by stealth and cunning. Three families, all that remain of their town, are isolated and what little news they receive is bad and getting worse. However, Dad has a plan.
Annabel has far bigger problems than zombies: the paranormal.
Souls deprived of the ‘good death’ seek out Annabel to fulfill the living’s duty to the deceased and help them move on. She suffers eerie, disembodied murmurs, which haunt the darkest crevices of her subconscious. The voices emanate from a nebulous pool of dark, seething blood. They cry out for attention.
Release, they demand. They demand it of her.
Annabel’s mom has a secret, and an antidote, sans one important measurement. Annabel’s mother gives her a notebook, translated from an ancient Vietnamese manuscript, for safekeeping. Intrigued, she vows to read the occult passages on the journey. Annabel doesn’t know it, but her nightmares hold the key to deciphering the medicine’s ‘wanting measure’.
Annabel must complete the remedy if the infected are to have any chance of surviving the horror. To do that she must stay alive. Worse still, she discovers death is not the exit it once was. The deceased are experiencing their own apocalypse. Annabel’s dead Vietnamese grandmother, revealed as a member of the mysterious Sisterhood of the Xích Quý, provides guidance from beyond.
Annabel must reopen the path to the afterlife before they all face the horror of becoming second dead.
Winter approaches. In the first freeze, the Wallis’s will attempt to reach a cold storage facility on their family farm. Weeks pass and the temperatures plummet. Annabel dreams become more urgent and harder to ignore with each passing day.
The survivors depart, and a horde of undead separate Annabel from the group. She flees into the woods in a desperate attempt to draw the zombies away and save her family. Annabel has another dream from her grandmother who reveals the wanting measure and the destiny Annabel must face. Her family rescues Annabel the following morning. In the confusion of the battle, her younger sister, Laura, is bit. Anna can save her sister if she dares mix the wanting medicine, which has a mysterious ‘irreversible price’.
