Virulent pockets of plague, first reported in China, break out worldwide and spread with mind-boggling speed. CIA black ops agent Chad Halverson flies to Los Angeles to visit his brother after receiving a call that his brother has been hospitalized after a car accident. Halverson's Boeing 737 crash-lands in an eerie Los Angeles shrouded with an impenetrable haze of smog. But that is only the tip of the iceberg of Halverson's nightmare. Lurking in this mist are legions of plague-infected living dead who are driven by an all-consuming lust for human flesh. Halverson's reunion with his brother must take second place to his own struggle to stay alive. As civilization crumbles into chaos, it will take all the skills and wits Halverson and his fellow passengers possess for their hunted party to survive in a world overrun with hordes of flesh-craving zombies. Which will pose a bigger threat to Halverson and his ever-dwindling band—their own bickering as they try to organize and defend themselves, their enemies the living dead, or the new "civilization" of men that is superseding the old?

The world has turned. In this sequel to Bryan Cassiday's "Zombie Maelstrom," plague-infected, flesh-eating zombies now infest the earth. Black ops agent Chad Halverson of the CIA's top secret National Clandestine Service and a motley band of survivors must do everything they can to stay alive one more day, even as they try to find out what caused the pandemic. Fending off the zombies at every turn, Halverson and his group make a mad dash through the plague-ravaged, smoldering ruins of Los Angeles and Santa Monica to evade the clutches of the zombie hordes and reach the sea. A cop with a drinking problem, a politician with a scandalous past, a couturiere who can't find her daughter, a CIA agent searching for his brother . . . characters alienated from society all caught up in the zombie apocalypse. When Halverson finds out the truth about the origin of the plague, he is targeted for extermination by surviving remnants of the government that are hiding underground and will do anything it takes to retain their fragile hold on power. This is a terrifying new world where the living dead rule the land, killer drones rule the sky, and death lurks around the next corner.

Black ops agent Chad Halverson of the CIA's National Clandestine Service escapes plague- and zombie-ravaged Santa Monica with dress designer Victoria Brady and sets sail up the smoldering California coast. Along the way, Halverson and Brady rescue the idealistic Dr. Parnell, the UCSB coed Brittany Pine who is in a state of shock induced by the loss of her boyfriend to the walking dead, and the cynical reporter Blake Reno. Seeking sanctuary from the walking dead in Alcatraz prison, Halverson and his band discover that all is not as it seems on the island haven at the Rock. In fact, they may have more to fear than the walking dead in the person of Alcatraz's reigning "Chosen One," the charismatic proponent of law and order Jefferson Bascomb, who believes zombies have the right to a fair trial. "Cassiday blends thoughtful suspense and pulse-pounding terror to deliver a novel with both bite and creeping dread."—David Dunwoody, author of "Empire" and "The Harvest Cycle" "Written with the epic scope of 'World War Z' and infused with the gritty spook works derring-do of a Robert Ludlum spy thriller, 'Sanctuary in Steel' is full of zombie mayhem through and through."—Joe McKinney, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of "Flesh Eaters" and "Inheritance" "'Sanctuary in Steel' made me feel like I did the first time I watched Romero. Fresh, exciting and engaging like any outbreak story should be."—Iain McKinnon, author of "Domain of the Dead"

alternate cover for 1482767759/9781482767759 The end of America is near. A plague that kills its victims and resurrects them as flesh-eating ghouls has decimated the American population, forcing what's left of the government to take shelter underground in the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center in Virginia. On the West Coast, CIA black ops agent Chad Halverson and a ragtag band of survivors decide to head to Washington, DC, to find out if anyone is still in charge, even though Halverson knows that someone in the upper echelons of the government is trying to drone him. Halverson suspects the assassin is a high-level CIA employee. Whoever he is, he has tried to drone Halverson before and will try again. Of that much Halverson is sure. Halverson and fellow refugees Victoria Brady, Blackfoot Chogan, and Emma Lawson become trapped in Las Vegas by General Quantrill, a militia commandant who runs the strip with an iron hand and has a terrifying secret. Whether America survives or not, it will never be the same.

America has been devastated by both plague and the nuclear weapons used to kill off the infected flesh-eating creatures that roamed across the land preying on human beings. National Clandestine Service black ops agent Chad Halverson and dress designer Victoria Brady take refuge in a blast shelter in the Nevada desert when an A-bomb is dropped on Las Vegas at the behest of the president of the United States. Halverson and Victoria are forced to leave the safety of their cement shelter when they run low on water. They join up with a band of four fellow refugees, who are not what they seem, and head east toward the nation's capitol to find out what remains of the government. However, another band of refugees intercepts them, kidnaps the lot of them, and spirits them away to a massive bunker complex in top secret Area 51, where SS-Oberfuhrer Oswald Gutman's son, Hector Guzman, is conducting mysterious experiments. The billionaire drug dealer Guzman made his fortune in Mexico after growing up in Argentina in seclusion with his father, an unrepentant member of the Order of the Death's Head who escaped Germany via a ratline to Buenos Aires after the fall of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Halverson stumbles onto a conspiracy so diabolical it defies belief, a conspiracy so vast that it already extends into the highest reaches of the US government. Outnumbered and outgunned, as well as besieged by hordes of zombies that survived the nuclear holocaust, he must somehow defeat the cabal before it can achieve world domination.

Finding plague victims inside their camp, survivors of the zombie apocalypse suspect that the zombie plague has mutated and is being spread by spores emitted by infected flesh-eating ghouls. People infected by the spores could be asymptomatic carriers. Not only do the survivors have to worry about being bitten by rampaging flesh-eating ghouls but also about being infected by inhaling spores emitted by a carrier within their camp.