The Twin Towers are still smoldering when those odd little anthrax letters kill a few people in Florida and DC and New York. Some nutcase, everyone thinks, but they're not – they're a setup, a precursor to a massive biological attack that leaves the Northeast a quarantined wasteland.

Campus policeman John Rashkil, trapped inside the Zone, chooses to keep doing his job, adding judge and executioner to his resume. He builds a jury-rigged life from what he can salvage and tries to help his teenage son out of the bear-trap that is the new Byzantine America.

But a growing sense of futility shatters his confidence, and he is unprepared when a rabble army seeks to break quarantine and pour into the uninfected lands. Based on an old Irish legend of the same name, Partholon is a brutal look at how the just and the civilized respond to anarchy.