The Red Fork mine had been sealed for a hundred years. Reopening it was supposed to save the town. The first blast woke something else.

Beneath the Arizona desert slept a nest of creatures no one should have disturbed: armored predators the size of dogs, pack hunters whose bite doesn't kill—it dissolves. In a record heat wave, the only water for miles draws the whole town… and the whole pack to the very same place.

The road is gone. The phones are dead. No one is coming. For Dolores Vega, a sheriff's deputy who has feared reptiles since childhood, for a teenage reptile geek who knows these things better than anyone, for a stranded herpetologist and a handful of end-of-the-road locals, one truth remains: they'll have to save themselves.

And every time they think they've learned the rules, the monsters change them.