Bruce W Perry

The Last Bruce W Perry

It's 2026. Emma Wallace Blair, a Scottish national, is a pandemic research scientist for the World Health Organization in New York City, where a highly transmissible and virulent form of influenza A decimates the city and spreads throughout world capitals.

"The Last" is part dystopian survival adventure and part medical mystery.

H7N11 is thought to have emerged from melting permafrost that exposed an ancient elk, which was carrying an infectious agent akin to Deer Wasting Disease. But some scientists fear a bio-weapon gone rogue from a Pentagon-contracted lab in Denver.

From there, infected airline passengers launched the pandemic.

We first meet Emma at a remote farmhouse on the Isle of Skye, where she harvests and scavenges for food and water, battles loneliness, and ponders whether the 99.999 percent catastrophe has left her the only uninfected female of her species. H7N11 attacks the Central Nervous System and causes acute dementia-like symptoms. When five or more of the virus victims "herd" together, they roam the countryside in an implacable swarm of what Emma calls "reivers."

New York, the Scottish Highlands, and especially Edinburgh and London provide detailed settings during the pandemic. As the story evolves, Emma formulates an H7N11 theory that involves the endocannabinoid system and the possibly protective properties of CBD oil and cannabis.

The badass and brilliant Emma Blair uses a small axe and a notched cricket bat to fend off reivers, and rescues a dog named Hepburn from a sinking ferry that is infested with reivers on Loch Ness. She ends up in London with a heroic sidekick, a former trainman for ScotRail for whom survival and good nature appear to come naturally.