The film opens in a small town in rural America called Ogden Marsh,
where we get to meet some of its inhabitants, two of them being Judy, who is a doctor, and Becca,
a young lady who works in the same building. On that particular day, there's a baseball game in
town, and Becca looks for a way to get to the baseball game so she can see her boyfriend,
Scotty. Judy knows what she means, and agrees to her request to leave early that day.
We then get to meet David, Judy’s husband and the town’s Sheriff, who is attending the high school
baseball game. Everything initially seems fine, and David and his partner comment that Scotty is
a fast pitcher. But then, the game stops when the players and the crowd notice that an old man named
Rory enters the pitch, while carrying a shotgun in his hands. Rory seems a bit out of the water, and
David evacuates the pitch, before he approaches the man to try and estimate the situation.
David thinks Rory is drunk and orders him to put his shotgun down, but the man doesn’t seem
to understand his instructions.
Instead, the old man does the opposite and lifts his gun to shoot
at David. Sensing a threat to his life, David is forced to kill him when he raises his weapon.
That night, David requests information about the level of alcohol in Rory’s system from the
medical examiner. He then meets Rory’s family to offer his condolences, and states that he had no
other choice because Rory was drunk and was about to shoot him. Rory’s wife opposes David by
saying that her husband quitted drinking two years ago, a fact that he was very proud of.
Luckily, it's just a polite slap.
David can’t really get a good night’s
sleep after yesterday’s incident, and he gets up early at dawn the next morning to
keep himself occupied. His wife Judy tries to comfort him, and claims that David should
not feel guilty because he did the right thing. In the sheriff’s office, he gets a call from the
medical examiner, and is surprised to hear that there was no alcohol percentage found in Rory’s
blood tests, even though they were performed twice. Eager to find out what really happened,
David revisits the pitch where he shot Rory. Then, he turns around and looks at the town school’s
principal, Ben, being a bit lost. David has to yell Ben’s name several times to take him out of
his trance and be able to communicate with him. Another weird incident takes place in the local
hospital, where Judy is seeing a man brought in by his wife. The man, Bill, tells Judy that his wife
is worrying too much and there is nothing wrong with him other than being a bit tired. However,
when asked a different question, Bill strangely repeats the same exact sentence twice.
We then move to Bill’s home; it seems like his wife’s fears are valid because that same night,
Bill starts acting out like a crazy man.
When she gets out of the house to
check on her husband, she realizes that Bill has left his tractor machines on.
She looks around for him, but then, she hears her son screaming for his mother,
and runs back in the house.
The wife looks around for her son upstairs, and finally finds her son
who signals to his mother to be silent. The little boy says that Bill has a knife and his mother
hides him and herself in the room’s wardrobe. To their horror, they hear Bill’s footsteps walking
up the stairs, so they try to be quiet.
But unfortunately,
Bill soon spots them hiding in the closet, and he locks the room’s door from the outside. He then
pours gasoline all over the house, and sets it on fire, burning his wife and son to death.
When David arrives in the scene, he is informed that Bill was just
mowing the lawn while his house was burning. David and Judy approach Bill,
but the only thing they can get out of him is a weird whistle.
The craziness of this whole situation doesn’t stop there, as some people discover a dead body on the
other side of town while out hunting. It is later discovered to be the corpse of an army pilot.
David and his deputy sheriff, Russell, set out on a boat to investigate the area.
Here they are able to find a plane that has crashed in a river near their town.
We are then presented with a bird’s eye view shot that could be a military satellite,
with the words “Initiate Containment Protocol” displayed on the monitor.
Next thing, David wants to know where his town draws its water supply from, because he thinks
something is off with the plane and there hasn't been any news about an army plane crashing into a
river. He is even more suspicious when informed that the water supply of the town comes from that river,
and the first house
that is reached by the pipelines is Rory’s house. David and Russell have a chat with the town’s
mayor, and ask him to shut the water supply down, but the mayor claims that shutting the water
down will kill the crops and bankrupt their whole city, thus, the water supply will stay on. David,
on the other hand, has another take on the matter, and he decides to break the
law and shut the water supply down himself, also removing the valve so nobody can turn it back on.
Back at the police station, Russell and David then find a bleeding Bill lying in his jail cell,
not moving and probably dead. But as they approach his cell, he wakes up and tries to attack them.
It is at this point that the tables are going to be turned on David,
when he realizes that they have no internet connection and no signal on their phones.
He then ventures out to find that the town has been turned into a ghost town,
and a mysterious black SUV takes some pictures of him. David tries to approach the car, but can’t
catch up with the vehicle. He then tries to check up on Rory’s medical examiner at the funeral home.
Here he discovers a live man with stitched mouth and eyes. As he tries to help him out,
he finds that the medical examiner has lost his cool as well.
David has to fight him off, as the crazed the examiner tries to kill him with a bone cutter.
He manages to kill the man to save his own life,
with a little bit of help from Russell.
When David returns home, he tries to convince his wife to skip town and go to her parents,
but Judy refuses because he isn't leaving either. In a matter of seconds, Judy spots somebody
outside their house, and David walks out to check on their barn, only to be arrested by a military
group. David and Judy are then taken inside a bus, and they meet with Russell, who tells David
that he was abducted by these soldiers as well. The people are taken to a special military camp,
a.k.a. the local high school, and they are guided through various tents, where military
men and doctors scan them for radioactivity and measure their body temperature.
The people with elevated temperatures are forcefully segregated from people with average temperatures.
Unfortunately, Judy’s temperature is higher than normal levels, and the soldiers try to divide her
and David. The sheriff struggles hard, but he is outnumbered, and gets knocked out by the soldiers.
Judy is then taken to a medical unit, and put with some other people that are considered infected.
She tries to negotiate with the military doctors and tells them that she is one month pregnant,
which should explain why her temperature is raised since she
has been having a fever during the last week. Meanwhile, David wakes up in another camp, where
people are being given some bracelets as a form of recognition. Apparently, these are the people that
are not infected, and they will be transferred away from the city. However, David is not going
to give up on his wife, and he’s going to escape the camp. Back in Judy’s camp, chaos breaks out
when a car runs over the fences of the camp, and people start running towards all directions. Since
they are unable to control the riot, the soldiers and the military doctors evacuate
the place and run away, leaving the contained infected people in the room, including Judy.
David makes it back to the sheriff’s station and he gets his gun, intending to go and save Judy.
Thankfully, he is not going to be alone, since Russell has also escaped and is very willing to
go along and help David out.
While Judy is still strapped on a bed, she recognizes her friend Becca
lying on another bed. They check on each other, but shortly after, they are threatened by Bill,
the principal of the high school, who enters the room with an agricultural fork.
He seems to have been taken completely over by the infection.
A strapped Judy and her assistant Becca nervously watch him kill people from their beds.
When Becca is next, Bill is almost ready to stab her, but Judy screams the house down
and distracts him. As a result, Bill now walks towards her, and raises the fork up in the air,
Luckily, David and Russell show up just in time and shoot Bill, saving both women.
Afterwards, the newly formed group of four takes a long walk to make it to safety. In any case, that
has to wait since now Becca wants to check if her boyfriend is okay when they walk near his house.
Once they get to the barn, Scotty is there and seems to be in good condition.
He informs them that his mother is also okay,
and she is gathering some supplies from the house. However, the group has to hide in Scotty’s barn,
when a new group of soldiers arrives and checks on Scotty’s house. They get to his mother and
run a blood test on her, but Scotty can’t get a hold of himself and runs to his mom’s aid.
The soldiers shoot both of them dead, and to make matters worse, they use a flamethrower to set the
bodies on fire. The four watch in horror, as the soldiers are ordered to execute all non-soldiers
and the possibly infected people. The next morning, David takes the group to the house
where they are supposed to raise their baby. Becca and Russell try to repair the defunct vehicle,
as David and Judy go inside their home. David loads essentials in a bag to carry with them,
while at the same time, it is revealed that there’s Rory’s infected wife in the baby's
nursery, staring at Judy. As David makes his way upstairs, he finds Judy in the nursery tied up,
and they immediately get attacked by Rory’s wife and son who have now completely lost their minds.
The mother stabs David’s hand into the floor, and threatens him with his own gun.
Seeing that his wife is about to be shot, David eventually fights back,
and manages to kill Rory’s wife.
However, he still needs Russell’s contribution to deal with the two infected.
Observing Russell’s unusually violent and aggressive behavior, Judy suspects that Russell is also infected by
the virus. Hearing this, David shrugs it off, and the four of them continue on with their journey.
However, Russell starts to think that Becca is infected when he notices that she is coughing,
and everyone gets caught up in an argument with each other. But they soon have to end that
argument and find a place to hide, because a chopper is running circles above them.
David changes the car’s course and enters a car wash, but there are more
surprises waiting for them. As they wait for the helicopters to leave, someone starts the wash,
and the car is pulled inwards, making it difficult to leave.
In a matter of seconds,
a bunch of infected employees get the perfect opportunity to do their job, and attack the group.
They are able to kill the infected, and David manages to get the car out of the car wash.
But then, one of the infected wraps a hose around Becca’s neck and it pulls her out of the car,
making her hang in the air and choking her to death.
As they all get out to check on Becca, the chopper blows David’s car with a missile.
Having nothing left, the three survivors start walking, and shortly after,
they realize that there is an SUV vehicle coming their way. Russell shows his unusual
behavior once more, by setting up a spike trap, which causes the SUV to crash and rolls over.
An agent crawls out of that SUV, and Russell is quite aggressive towards him,
but David wants to have a talk with the man. Here the agent reveals that the plane that crashed was
transferring a prototype biological weapon, which contaminated the town’s water source.
In addition, it is designed to destabilize a population, but the plane crashed when
it was en route to Texas to be destroyed.
Without saying much more, Russell kills him with
his rifle, a fact that makes David realize that Russell is probably infected with the virus. He
tries to take Russell’s rifle away, but Russell regains it and takes hold of all the weapons,
almost treating David and Judy as hostages. After a while of walking, David tries to calm
Russell down.
He manages to retrieve the gun, and Russell now understands that he is unwell,
but he still asks David if he can stick with them for a little bit longer. Later on, the three of
them stumble upon the only road to the truck stop where they can get a vehicle, but soldiers have
blocked it. Russell says that he is going to buy them some time to sneak past the route since he is
going to die sooner or later anyway. David gives him a gun and Russell distracts the soldiers,
while the couple begins to sneak through the area.
Russell is eventually shot, and before he dies, he curses the soldiers for what they've done.
In the meantime, Judy and David make it to the truck stop,
where they find three loaded trucks that were supposed to evacuate non-infected citizens still
parked at the deserted station. Upon further inspection, they discover the dead bodies
that have bracelets wrapped around their wrists, which means that the government intended to kill
everybody in town in the first place, including those were supposed to have been evacuated.
After realizing what is really going on, David finds a truck next to the diner, but he now feels
that leaving this town is not going to be that easy. As he makes the last-minute preparations
to leave, David overhears military communication through an abandoned mobile radio of a soldier.
It is communication between a military command post and a military aircraft,
mentioning that something is about to happen in ten minutes.
The countdown starts, but before they get out of there,
Judy and David have to fight with a couple of infected hunters that are still alive.
After they fight them off, David drives the semi-truck away.
During this crucial moment, they overhear a 35-second countdown on the wireless military mobile
radio. Once the countdown is over, everything goes silent,
and then a bright light takes over the place, followed by the sound of a massive
explosion.
The enormous blast wave produced by the bomb explosion flips the truck on its side.
With their truck disabled, it turns out that David is still alive; he crawls out of the
truck and then pulls Judy out of it.
They take a moment to absorb what just happened,
as their hometown is destroyed and their life is probably never going to be the same.
The film ends with the couple heading towards a new city on foot,
while a view from a military satellite highlights the couple, and then the city they’re going to,
and the words "Initiate containment protocol" appear, signifying a new containment task.