Her eyes rolled back into her head, her vision first went white, then dark, as the walls closed in. She couldn’t get air, each gasp no better than breathing water. Her heart drummed against her ribs, threatened to burst. Tennant wanted to hold her sister, but her arms and legs no longer obeyed her. One of her hands shot out and wrapped around Tennant’s ankles and squeezed so tight the pain brought her back down to the floor. Thick, congealed blood, dark red, nearly black. Blood dripped from the corners of her eyes, from her button nose, seeped out from between her fingers over her ears. On the ground at her feet, Sophie’s hands and arms wrapped around her head, her knees pulled close against her chest. She coughed it back out, forced herself to stand, clawed at the cellar door. (Aug.Tennant had no idea she was screaming, too, until she ran out of breath and choked on the air – dirt, dust, flour – all filling her lungs at once. Other authors have done better with similar material. What they find leads to the direct involvement of the American president, as well as a cardinal who’s “the highest-ranking member of the Catholic Church in the United States.” The implausible plot suffers from a lack of characterization and suspense.
Meanwhile, psychologist Martha Chan is dragooned by the military to join a team of experts including a biologist, a climatologist, and an astrophysicist to determine what flattened part of the nearby forest and crushed all living things in that area.
Then eight-year-old Sophie starts bleeding, curses her 16-year-old sibling, and turns violent. When a sudden, horribly painful noise disrupts the girls while they are hunting rabbits, their parents lock them in a cellar for protection. Sisters Tennant and Sophie Riggin live with their parents in a survivalist community near Oregon’s Mount Hood. Bestseller Patterson and Barker follow 2020’s The Coast-to-Coast Murders with a tired variation on a familiar theme-a baffling phenomenon devastates a community, triggering a massive government response to contain the truth and limit the loss of life.
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