A young man's summer vacation on the resort island of Hilton Head, South Carolina is cut short when inexplicable events bring in the Coast Guard and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Strange happenings continue to mount and a government cover-up is exposed. A new virus, capable of replicating itself twice as fast as H.I.V. and claiming a 100-percent mortality rate, threatens to tear civilization apart at the seams. Attacking the brain stem and motor cortex, this new virus, dubbed "The Procyon Strain," strips the host of all emotion and personality, hijacking the body as a vessel for direct human-to-human transmission. Society teeters on the verge of meltdown as government forces seek to curb and contain the growing outbreaks. The officials in Washington, D.C. placate the public's growing concern by denying what they know to be true: a global outbreak of an unprecedented scale lies just beyond the bend, and modern civilization is woefully unprepared for what comes next.