Volume 5 in the Adventures of V series It is the year 2158. V, the outcast vampire, and queen of the alien-human hybrids, disguises herself as a Cosmos Centurion, and heads into the Great Central Desert - the desolate wasteland that was once the American Heartland - to discover if any of her fellow alien-human hybrids are still alive. All hybrids and Synthetic Individuals - or SINs - were disappeared in the Great Culling of 2144. Everywhere, the elite Cosmos - rich, militarized, highly cultured - the privileged 0.000001 % - rule the world. The Cosmos live in Domed Cities, protected from the wild torrid climate and its superstorms, and served by robots and the lower-class Subs. The Subs, an inferior social cast without rights, also live in the domed cities. Subs are used as servants, slaves, and for sexual entertainment. Dissidence, for a Cosmos, can lead to re-classification as a Sub, or as Non-Human, or to body and personality redesign, and permanent mental or physical erasure. Most of the world - continents, and oceans - is an arid, storm-wracked, desolate wasteland inhabited by Burbites, Mutants, and Outlanders. The Burbites, miserable uncultured barbaric incontinent suburban folk, cluster, outside the domes, around the domed cities. The Mutants, products of unregulated and criminal bioengineering, chemical pollution, and radiation accidents, and, live in underground desert colonies, in the central wasteland that was once the heart of America. The Cosmos hunt them down. Outlanders are rare human eccentrics and religious or ecological fanatics who wander the wilds. Synthetic Individuals (SINs) are super individuals, products of bioengineering; they are, potentially, immortal. Hybrids are alien-human hybrids who are very powerful, extremely intelligent, and, potentially, immortal; they are all products of V's alien-human DNA or descended from V. In a Human Species Purification campaign, the elite Cosmos eliminated the alien-human hybrids, V's tribe, and the Synthetic Individuals - SINs - in the Great Culling, directed by the President-Leader, fourteen years ago. V disguises herself as a Cosmos intelligence officer and joins a Cosmos Centurion military column into the Great Central Desert to discover if any of her fellow hybrids are alive. When the Cosmos column is destroyed in an extraordinary ambush, V continues her quest, with one survivor, Lieutenant Kat Jackson, a beautiful black Cosmos elite warrior, an implacable foe and hunter of hybrids. Farther out in the Central Desert, two elite Cosmos women, 14-year-old Miranda Hughes and her mother, Niki Hughes, survivors of a plane crash, have been captured by Mutants, and are about to be sacrificed, on a flaming cross. Aided by handsome young Caliban, Prince of the Mutants, Miranda escapes. But attacked by Zombie-Bats - followers of a fundamentalist prophet, the Boy, and caught in a sand blizzard, Miranda is separated from Caliban, she gets lost in the desert. She ends up with a family of cannibal ghouls. Caliban, searching for Miranda, finally finds her. She is naked and lecturing the ghouls on the mystical implications of cosmology. Suddenly, Caliban and Miranda, and Miranda's ghouls, are surrounded by a horde of Zombie Bats - grotesque creatures created out of his True Believers, by an evil fundamentalist religious prophet, the Boy, or el Niño. While this battle rages, and while V and Kat speed through the desert, Miranda's mother, Nikki, is about to be crucified, burned alive on the Cross of the Mutant Goddess Dolly, the first cloned mammal.