After a Mexican drug cartel steals eighteen million dollars’ worth of Oxycontin from a pharmaceutical manufacturer in Mexico City, it ends up on a truck headed for the Continental Freight terminal in Strickland, Illinois, setting off a chain of horrors that tears through not only Strickland and the nearby wealthy city of Vinings, but the entire United States. Trapped in the middle of it all is Eradicus Purify.

Eradicus, pushed by his mother as a child to succeed in spite of the difficulties growing up in crime-riddled Strickland, is determined to achieve all of his goals: To escape from his childhood city, to get away from the drugs and the violence, to have a chance at a real life, a successful life. Maybe even to date Alexa, if she’ll have him. He’s well on his way too. He’s earned his undergraduate degree; he’ s working toward his MBA in Finance; he’s on the cusp of earning an internship at a prestigious New York City investment bank; he’s even thinking of asking Alexa to dinner. But going to school during the day and working for Continental Freight at night has left him dead-tired, utterly exhausted. So when his uncle, a man who, along with Eradicus’ father, recently attempted to steal eighteen million dollars’ worth of Oxycontin from a Mexican drug cartel, offers him a job that would allow him to quit his day job, he’s too weak to refuse.

And then his life begins to unravel.