Katie Villin works for the CDC's Biological Engineering Task Force and has fielded emergency calls from excessive rat populations to malformed calves. Most days, it's a dull, thankless job staring at spreadsheets. So when Katie's team gets wind of a series of impossible sightings near the nation's capital, they opt to investigate, mainly because Washington, DC, has better steakhouses than their remote outpost in West Virginia.

The team expects a few days of compted hotel rooms and expensive dinners until they arrive at the first scene. A man there claims to have killed his wife when she morphed into a sizeable octopoid creature and attacked him. Katie would be her normal, skeptical self if not for the body on his living room floor with tentacles intact and a telltale tattoo. The impossible-to-deny evidence propels Katie and her team into a surreal fight against time as they attempt to stop the spread of dangerous, violent monsters before the entire United States faces violence on the scale of apocalyptic proportions.