Ben Fogelvee isn’t having his best apocalypse. His madcap last-hurrah road trip from Chicago to Disney World ended in disaster; he lost his closest friend, and he’s spent the 3 years since weighed down by spirits and haunted by tragedy.

He’s found a shred of purpose back on Horace’s train, operating the rails and teaching fresh Red Caps how exactly to guard the dwindling freight. When the train is certainly beset by bandits who steal a particularly precious piece of cargo, Ben heads out into the high desert of the about Post-Apocalypticon Colorado-Utah borderlands on a post-apocalyptic mission to reunite what he’s dropped. He’s not alone, though . he gets the memory of Patrick Deen to guide him at every turn-for better or for even worse. Using a desert filled with snakes and cults and messengers and cliff-dwellers and everything manner of after-doomsday weirdness ahead of him, and also a sinister blonde girl thundering dangerously along his trail, hunting him for reasons he can’t probably fathom, Ben is required all the assistance he will get.

But when he learns the true reason for the teach robbery-and of the mysterious doctor who all controls the bandits and performs gruesome experiments about M-Day survivors in his remote control laboratory, protected by an military of dusters-well . . . this might be one adventure he can’t machete his way to avoid it of.