But Zhu finds himself caught between his love for Elena, his duty to the Beacon, and his desire to flee with the villagers. Ever the patriot, though, he will stand with his compatriots to the very last. When the conniving leader of the Beacon, Secretary Guo, tasks Hengyen with rounding up all survivors in the area for a desperate last stand, the military man sees it for the foolish, futile directive that it is. Does he force them to join the settlement or keep their existence a secret? Meanwhile, a veritable typhoon of walkers is headed towards the Beacon of Light. But with the settlement's 3,000 mouths to feed and the scavengers having to travel further and further in search of food, Zhu ends up at his home village, where he is shocked to find survivors. Hengyen was a grizzled military officer of some renown, and a passionate believer in his nation's ability to surmount any obstacle.

Elena was an American teaching English in China while on a gap year before beginning law school. Before this devastation, Zhu was one of the millions of poor farmers who left their rural roots for the promise of consistent employment in one of China's booming factory towns. In one of these settlements, Beacon of Light, scavengers of vastly different backgrounds struggle to provide supplies for the survival of thousands. Across this desolate landscape, large groups of survivors have clustered together for safety in settlements that have been built to protect against the unceasing wave of jiangshi. In the aftermath of a horrifying outbreak, the last remnants of the Chinese government have estimated that one billion walkers (called jiangshi) are currently roaming the country. In this white-knuckled and high-stakes thriller, set in the expansive world of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead series, three different people in China-a rural farmer, an urban military veteran, and an American student-are caught in the typhoon of undead as chaos sweeps over the most populous country in Asia.

The walking dead typhoon