This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides -- or are chosen. A world in which good rides on the frail shoulders of the 108-year-old...

As Mother Abigail foretold, Stu, Ralph, Larry, and Glen leave Boulder to follow Harold and Nadine west into the Dark Man's territory, but one of them will fall along the way. In the West, Randall Flagg unmasks and kills two of the spies from Boulder, but Tom Cullen leaves town before Flagg knows who he is. And, although Nadine makes it to Las Vegas and is impregnated according to plan, Flagg's world begins to fall apart.