California Teal is- well, make that was- a normal twelve year old girl. But when a horrible plague wipes out the earth's population and reanimates the corpses into flesh eating zombies, she struggles to survive without the protection of her deceased mother and her abusive father. Three years later, still the 15 year old mother-like figure of her 7 year old sister, Hazel, she stumbles upon a community within the walls of a prison and finds the boy she thought she'd never see again. Carl Grimes. Suddenly there is a new distraction in the midst of the apocalypse: Love. But California is still vulnerable to the fate worse than death. And nothing can protect her from it.