Eight months after the Chernobyl disaster, a Chernobylite woman that stayed behind to care for her sick mother gives birth to a mutated daughter. She wakes up after giving birth to find her mother gone. Masha, isolated and suffering from cataracts from the radiation exposure, becomes fearful that soldiers will take her contaminated baby. While attempting to reunite with her family in Kiev, the blinding mother and infant become lost in a forest. Masha sees a figure chasing her and believes it's a soldier that wants her child.

Blaze Forrester is a high school junior in a near-distant post-apocalyptic future where the gene that turns people into zombies has infiltrated the human race. She carries this gene, as does her 12 year old brother Dax. They must conceal this fact for fear of being exiled outside of their sector (the city of Los Angeles) walls. Unfortunately, this is not possible as Dax confides in Blaze one evening and their father overhears, turning them in the very next morning. Naomi, Blaze's beautifully spirited, completely human girlfriend, gets exiled with them as well (guilty by association). They must fend for themselves in a desert full of loose zombies and questionably abandoned government experimentation labs, for if Blaze and Dax do not find some raw meat to consume quickly, their urges to devour Naomi may cause them to lose control of their mutation.