[1] The story takes place following a nuclear holocaust which wipes out every major city east of the Mississippi and leaves the survivors permanently infected with plague.

The girl abandons him; as he travels further, Gary learns that the nuclear attack was combined with bacteriological warfare which infected the entire population with pneumonic plague.

He joins up with a former school teacher, Jay Oliver; they make camp in the hills outside an intact bridge in Kentucky, waiting for the army to allow people across.

The commanding officer thanks him, but makes it clear that he can not join them; they have come from the west, with orders to deliver gold from Fort Knox, and have not been exposed to the virus.

Gary offers to fix a tire, but does so in such a way that it slowly loses air; he catches up with the convoy and through a combination of stealth and boldness, kills most of the men and takes one of the trucks.

He finally realizes that he has no future in the west and returns over the river, to survive for a number of years until he encounters the girl he had met in Illinois.

The plotting is close-knit without being contrived; the style is compact and eloquent; the characters, in Faulkner's words, "stand up on their hind legs and cast a shadow."

"[4] Cyril M. Kornbluth[5] also praised the novel, writing that it was "a book of social criticism which might have had the effect of an Uncle Tom's Cabin or Upton Sinclair's The Jungle".

Tucker's original ending was first published, with the author's cooperation, in the Swedish translation of the book that appeared as "Den långa tystnaden" ["The Long Silence"] in 1979.