On October 1, God is in his heaven, the stock market stands at 10,140, most of the planes are on time, and Clayton  Riddell,  an artist from Maine, is almost bouncing up Boylston Street in Boston.  He's just landed a comic book deal that might finally enable him to support his family by making art instead of teaching it. He's already picked up a small (but expensive) gift for his long suffering wife, and he knows just what he'll get for his boy Johnny. Why  not a little treat for himself? Clay's feeling good about future. 
 
That changes in a jury. The cause of the devastation is a phenomenon that  will come to be known as the Pulse, and the delivery method is a cell phone. Everybody's cell phon. Clay and the few desperate survivors who join him suddenly find themselves in the pitch-black night of civilization's darkest ate, surrounded  by chaos, carnage's, and a human horde that has been reduced to it's basec nature...and then begins to evolve.