Phase Six

In a tiny settlement on the west coast of Greenland, two 11-year-old boys Aleq and his best friend Maliq, are trespassing on a mining site exposed to mountains of long-buried and thawing permafrost. After finishing their adventure, they carry what they pick up back into their village with devastating consequences. From that moment Shepard's harrowing and deeply moving story follows Aleq, one of the few survivors of the initial outbreak, through his identification and radical isolation as the likely index patient. As the pathogen spreads, outbreaks that create chaos in rural areas create bedlam in urban ones, and Jeanine, an epidemiologist, and Danice, a doctor and researcher, both investigators with eht US Epidemic Intelligence Service, are sent to Greenland. The devastation they find is horrific. One of them will stay and the other will take the lonely and frightened Aleq to isolation in a Colorado laboratory to try to discover the secret of his immunity.