The book was first released on April 29, 2008, through Feiwel & Friends and centers upon a young man named Eli who has been living in a compound for six years.

Bodeen came up with the idea of including cannibalism in the novel after watching a television show where "a dinosaur fed a favorite offspring the bodies of its less fortunate brothers and sisters.

It even has the capability to raise livestock, enabling the Yanakakis family to maintain a stable food supply for at least fifteen years, the time it would take for conditions outside the compound to return to habitable levels.

Angry, Eli confronts his father, who admits that he created the entire thing as an experiment to test how far everyone would go to survive and to what lengths.

Scared, abandoned, and uncertain if his father has managed to escape or not, Eli and his remaining family wait in the woods, not knowing what will happen next.

The book concludes with Eli's mother giving birth and the FBI continuing their search for the whereabouts of Rex Yanakakis.

The story picks up a month after the events in the prior book and follows the Yanakakis family as they must deal with the aftermath of their time in the compound.