A large horde of the spiders take over the small village of Newtown, killing all but two of its residents. Laurence Johnson and Chloe Jones have only been together one night after Laurence parted ways with his wife. They find themselves trapped in the house with no way of escaping. Their only hope is to try and stay alive long enough for the army to intervene. Lorna Johnson is on the outskirts of town with nowhere to go and the spider invasion taking control. Her only hope of survival lies with a team headed up by Doctor Michael Briggs. He has a plan to stop the invasion before it gets out of hand. But he is running out of time and he is running out of allies. If he doesn't move quickly then mankind will face the darkest day it has ever known.

    His mother has his life planned out, with a seat by her side, running the conglomerate. Tyler has other ideas. With the help of a great-grandfather who was a United States Marine when there used to be a United States, Tyler changes his face and his identity, becoming Randall Munroe and enlisting in the Fleet Marine Corps, qualifying for the point of the sword, Force Recon. Plunged into an interstellar war against the relentless Tahni Empire, Munroe is stranded alone on an occupied colony and forced to organize a civilian resistance to the enemy. The year of constant violence and death wears him down, yet sharpens him at the same time. After the war, Munroe once again takes up arms, this time against his will, when his uncle, Andre Damiani, the head of the Corporate Council, blackmails him into leading a special squad of trouble-shooters, eliminating threats to Council business among the criminal cabals in the Pirate Worlds. But the real enemy is still the Council, and Munroe vows to take the fight to them, no matter what the cost.

    However, when ten thousand birds fall dead from the New Mexican sky, the woman he loves, an ornithologist with severe facial deformity, begs him to decipher the cause. He grudgingly agrees, a decision that plunges him into a tangle of weirdness as old as the American Southwest. Stick’s investigation reveals that the birds’ mass death is an offshoot of a much larger conflict. On one side, the Good Friends, an underground railroad for undocumented immigrants, wants Stick to oust the man they believe responsible for killing the birds and persecuting immigrants. This same man leads The Minutemen Militia, which covets Stick’s expertise in handling their genetically mutated immigrant-tracking monsters. Meanwhile, a beautiful animal theologian tries to seduce Stick into believing his existence is key to balancing an off-kilter universe. Shady characters whisper of chupacabras loose in the desert. The exsanguinated corpses of strange beasts begin to turn up, some of them Stick’s close pals. At the center of it all lurks an enigmatic antagonist who, so they say, has harnessed the power of God in an ancient hot springs and is using it to herald doomsday.Stick’s journey upends his stable life, shakes apart his fragile relationships, and sets him on a collision course with his family’s secret ancestry. Ultimately, as chupacabra-like monsters, Minutemen, and Good Friends head toward a final showdown, Stick must make a hard choice about his own identity and values.