When the air turned, killing everyone on the planet over the age of twenty, authority as sheriff was transferred to Shea by declaration of the Legacy Appointment Act.
Electricity dying, internet and cell phone service gone, widespread violence and looting on the rise; their township has been all but abandoned. Faraway, smoke darkens the sky, the result of blazes set by a growing fanatical sect that believes the end is near and the earth must be cleansed by fire. Shea faithfully patrols the neighborhood on her Harley Davidson, the family's retired police dog, Tornado, riding sidecar shotgun.
Her high school friends-still mourning the loss of their parents, hating them for the poisoned earth they left, and facing a death of "drowning in air,"-are not appreciative of Shea's protective efforts. Her dedication is to the job and to her father, whom she could've saved in that gas station, but stood frozen, unable to fire her gun, as a killer took his life. The guilt of his death weighing heavily upon her, Shea has no choice but leave the life she's known when the Legacy President of the United States, eighteen year-old Jenna Stevenson, asks that everyone travel to the capital.
But when intruders breach her home, and flames threaten to consume everything in their path, she has no choice but to gather the very people who resent her authority, and shepherd them across the hundreds of dangerous miles to Washington, D.C., seeking to stop the deaths of those just entering adulthood, before she, too, succumbs to the air.