The year i s 2112. The crippled U.S. government and its military forces are giving up the century-long fight against an undead plague. Born of an otherworldly energy fused with a deadly virus, the ravaging hordes of zombified humans and animals have no natural enemies. But they do have one supernatural enemy: Death himself. Descending upon the ghost town of Jefferson Harbor, Louisiana, the Grim Reaper embarks on a bloody campaign to put down the legions that have defied his touch for so long. He will find allies in the city’s last survivors, and a nemesis in a man who wants to harness the force driving the zombies — a man who seeks to rebuild America into an empire of the dead. Hailed as “A MACABRE MASTERPIECE OF POST-APOCALYPTIC ZOMBIE GOODNESS” on the Library of the Living Dead podcast, Empire brings stunning new twists to a shattering and unforgettable scenario of the not-too-distant future

Orson Scott Card is a master storyteller, who has earned millions of fans and reams of praise for his previous science fiction and fantasy works. Now he steps a little closer to the present day with this chilling look at a near future scenario of a new American Civil War. The American Empire has grown too fast, and the fault lines at home are stressed to the breaking point. The war of words between Right and Left has collapsed into a shooting war, though most people just want to be left alone. The battle rages between the high-technology weapons on one side, and militia foot-soldiers on the other, devastating the cities, and overrunning the countryside. But the vast majority, who only want the killing to stop, and the nation to return to more peaceful days, have technology, weapons and strategic geniuses of their own. When the American dream shatters into violence, who can hold the people and the government together? And which side will you be on?

The dead refuse to stay dead. The Reaper is here to put them down. As winter sets in and America's survivors struggle to rebuild a semblance of civilization, terrifying new enemies are gathering-both in the lawless badlands and within the walls of the safe zone. Most fearsome of all is the "King of the Dead." His zombified troupe of sideshow curiosities is but a fraction of his growing pack. The Reaper's quest to safeguard the humans he has befriended places him on the trail of these feral undead. But he is sorely unprepared for the return of the zombie transformed by his own flesh, the Omega-a fiend driven by something more sinister than any virus. Meanwhile, Death's questions about his origin haunt him, and he is close to the answers… but the worst of both the living and the dead are rising in his path, and he'll have to cut them all down to reach the cosmic endgame