It is the year 2024. A devastating plague has swept over the entire globe. The uninfected wall themselves into megacities. Those on the outside the protected confines are left to fend for themselves, while those on the inside imagine the worst. This dystopian tale follows two alternating threads. Inside the city, Detective Bill Wilkins and Detective Jennifer Rodriguez are given a highly classified assignment to find a boy named Garrett. Beyond the city walls, in a time before the Event, and before what the urban dwellers have dubbed "plague lands," we meet the object of their search. Garrett, his friend Johnny, and his girlfriend, Amy, appear to live the lives of normal teenagers until a violent and mysterious storm passes over the town and people start to disappear and to reappear transformed and disfigured.
Meanwhile, as Wilkins and Rodriguez begin to make headway on the case, the city's walls are breached by rebels. The detectives are separated, and Rodriguez comes face to face with WAR, the most ruthless of the Four. Her escape takes her beyond the walls of the city, where she finds safety in a group of nomads, even as Garrett and his friends battle fiery-eyed fiends that have overrun their school and threaten the future of humanity.