Ten-year-old Melanie lives in an underground cellblock with a group of other children. The block is part of a larger base known as “Hotel Echo,” which is situated in “region 6,” 30 miles north of London. The children attend school but do little else. The outside world is forbidden to them, although Melanie listens to the grown-ups’ conversations and garners scraps of information about it: Hotel Echo is home to a “burn patrol” whose job is to clear the land of “hungries”—zombies that have ravaged the countryside. Further south is Beacon, a huge city with the sea on one side and “moats and minefields on the other three” (3). Melanie longs to see it when “the mission” is complete and the children are allowed outside.

Every day, Sergeant Parks and his staff prepare the children for class, strapping them into wheelchairs at gunpoint and wheeling them into the classroom where they learn math, spelling, and history. While trying to calculate the population of Birmingham one day, Melanie’s teacher, Mr. Whitaker, angrily tells her, “Jesus, Melanie, it’s irrelevant. It’s ancient history! There’s nothing out there anymore. Not a damn thing. The population of Birmingham is zero” (7).