The world of Rot & Ruin is set about fifteen years after a zombie apocalypse. Benny Imura is a fifteen-year-old boy who lives with his older half-brother Tom. They share the same Japanese American father who remarried Benny’s mother while Tom was barely twenty. On First Night, the night when the world awoke to a zombie attack, Benny’s mother had handed him to Tom and told him to run. Although Benny was only eighteen months old at the time, it left a memory that burned deep within him and caused an emotional rift between him and his brother that grew wider with each passing year. The brothers live in the safe community of Mountainside where a number of survivors reside. Inside the walls of this safe zone, life resumes as normal. Food is …show more content…
The mayor and the sheriff are his biggest fans while Benny’s friends put him on a pedestal. The women in town love Tom. He’s a hunk who carries a Katana; a tough guy with a gentle heart. But Benny doesn’t see what everyone else sees. All he sees is a coward who ran while his parents died on First Night. The other bounty hunters in town such as Charlie Pink-eye and the ignoble Motor City Hammer are the real heroes. They’re the ones who boast amazing stories of survival, they’re the ones to be feared and revered. If people only knew what a coward Tom was, they wouldn’t be putting him up on a pedestal. Tom begins to train Benny on how to fight and survive in the great Rot & Ruin which is the zombie-infested land surrounding their community. When Tom realizes that Benny has no idea what he does for a living, he takes his younger brother out for a journey into the Rot & Ruin to show him the difference between what he does and what bounty hunters like Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer do. And there is a big difference. Just as Benny is starting to see his brother in a different light, a feud between Tom and the other bounty hunters erupts. That’s when Benny learns about Gameland, a hidden camp in the Rot & Ruin where corrupt bounty hunters take kidnapped children