Tom Wilson is fifty-five, widowed, and prepared. His farm outside Tyler, Texas has a hand pump, a root cellar, and enough fence line to hold. What he hasn't prepared for is Cole Hargrove — a quiet, watchful man he meets on a Gulf cruise the week the world ends. When a rapidly spreading outbreak grounds the ship and then grounds civilization, Tom and Cole make their way back to the farm with a small group of survivors in tow: a teenage boy pulled from the wreckage of a cruise ship, a retired physician, a neighboring family with young children, and a handful of others who find the farm before the farm finds them. 13 Days is a novel about what people build when building is all that's left. It's a love story set against collapse — quiet, practical, and told in the particular register of two men who are better at doing things than saying them. The world doesn't end dramatically here. It ends the way most hard things end: gradually, and then all at once.