The Twelve: Justin Cronin

Book I of The Passage. It seemed like a good idea at the time...infecting twelve death-row prisoners with an ancient virus in order to create human weapons. Instead the virus turned them into ravening unstoppable monsters - and when the Twelve broke out of the underground facility where they had been born, all hell broke loose. In a world now ravaged by a viral plague, humanity is reduced to stubborn pockets of resistance. But if the human race is to have a future, survival is not enough. Against terrifying odds, they must hunt down and destroy the Twelve in their lairs. But the virals' behaviour is inexplicably changing - and all the clues point towards the Homeland, a sinister dictatorship where an unlikely trio are re-imagining humanity's destiny : Horace Guilder, a veteran of the original experiment with a blood-curdling vision of immortality; a mysterious woman whose tragic past has driven her into a world of fantasy; and Lawrence Grey, a man whose hunger for intimacy has been fulfilled in the most gruesome ways imaginable. And then there is Amy - the Girl from Nowhere. Once the thirteenth test subject and now the only human who can fathom the Homeland's secret and truly enter the hive-mind of the Twelve. But what she finds there may spell the end of everything...