When vampires are revealed to be real world monsters that kill quietly in the night, indistinguishable from normal humans during the day, American society descends into chaos and violence. Because people can turn at any time and are unidentifiable as vampires until moments before they kill, there is no way to trust anyone or feel safe anywhere. A college aged girl is trapped on her college campus in a forced quarantine as public health officials desperately try, and fail, to find a cure for the unpredictable and dangerous turning of everyday folks into blood thirsty vampires in the dead of night. Officials find a way to genetically test individuals to identify whether they have the DNA sequence that causes turning. They sort all the students into seven groups, with the black star group identified as those who will turn. The young woman's best friend and chosen family, Katie, is identified as a black star. She opts to stay with her best friend, until one night the college breaks into gunfire after those identified as black stars are given access to guns for the purpose of suicide. The guns are instead used to kill any and everybody, and after Katie kills herself, the young woman must flee, left totally alone in the world. She spends the next years as a vagabond, living with an elderly couple as their live in nurse, and then independently during the nights and with a man who teaches her to hunt and forage during the day. Everyone she meets and connects with eventually leaves or is killed as is common for the now lawless society. One day she finds a house to live in and has a briefly peaceful time there until she is awoken in the middle of the night by a group of men who rape and hold her hostage until she escapes one night. Shortly after escaping, she stumbles upon a mother and daughter who live in an idyllic home in the country not far from where she escaped. The home is hidden so that squatters and vampires will not find it, and there is plenty of food, a greenhouse, and animals to sustain them. She cannot believe her luck, but finally understands that it truly is too good to be true that night when the mother brings the daughter into her room. The daughter has turned into a monster in a subtle way, a shift in her eyes and nothing physical, but the now thirty year old woman has lived in the post-apocalyptic world long enough to recognize evil when she sees it. She realizes the mother invited her into their home to be a meal for her daughter, not out of hospitality. She fights back against the mother and throws her to the child, who devours her own mother with no remorse. The next morning, the woman leads the child back to the house with the men who raped her, saying she is a gift to them. The government has compounds for people with children to stay protected, and she offers the child as a token of forgiveness for her escape and a route to safety for the group. That night, she releases the child and escapes to return to the idyllic home where she will live in peace by herself, leaving the vampire child and the screams of her rapists being devoured by the young girl behind her.