“When I first saw Max Random, he was driving his go-kart right at me. He was also wearing goggles, so it was hard to tell if he was dead or alive. I was pretty sure, though, that zombies didn’t know how to drive.

“‘Not dead,’ Max said, as he stepped out of the kart to look at me. ‘You should get in.’”

And so, weeks after watching her principal try to chew up her school teacher, and minutes after she’d just lost her family, 12-year-old Aurora Bonsall begins her odyssey of escape with Max Random in his hand built go-kart, across a ruined map of abandoned studio back-lots, wrecked shopping malls, encounters with the not-quite dead in hospitals and the not-quite-tame when they meet a feral cat. All while realizing that surviving humans can be far more dangerous than the Nano-Z’s taking over the world.

Max, meanwhile, keeps driving them toward a rendezvous where he says they will be safe. But as Aurora discovers he has secrets of his own, she wonders if there can ever be any escape at all.

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