It opened on a monologue about the difference between hunger and love — saying that hunger can be satisfied but the need for love is one that can never truly be filled, essentially.
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On an airplane that’s about to land in New York from Berlin, a flight attendant is called to the back of the plane via the in-flight phone. Along the way, she stops and sees a goth-type guy who boasts of his celebrity (I can’t tell if he’s supposed to be a Criss Angel-style performer or a rock star) and is giving her a hard time about turning off his tablet for the descent. She sees a little girl and talks to her in German for a moment. She heads s to the back, where another attendant is sure that he saw…something…on the plane. The two get on the floor near the door to the cargo hold to listen, and think they hear something. The female attendant opens the door, hears/sees nothing and closes it again — but then immediately something starts pounding on it from below. Both flight attendants stand away from it as the door blows open and a shrouded form leaps out, snarls at them and the camera cuts away.
Air traffic control is worried becuase the plane landed and then immediately went totally dark, turning everything off and not responding to any communication. There are 210 people on board the plane, they say, and so they go out to check on it and the plane is already cold to the touch, with all of the shades drawn except for one. The guy in charge of air traffic control tells his worker to get everyone on the line and says that nobody in the tower calls home until they have an assessment of the situation.
In New York, we meet our hero, Ephraim Goodweather. He seems frankly like a jerk, parks in a no-parking zone and then tells the guy outside the building he’s entering to cover for him if a meter maid comes, saying that it’s “official CDC business.”
Inside, he’s ten minutes late for his court-mandated custody counseling. He’s an ass during that, too, shocked that his workaholic tendencies have driven his wife away. He’s legitimately shocked and hurt when she reveals that during their separation she has let her boyfriend (the guy outside) move in with her and their son.
He keeps getting calls throughout the session, which he ignores until a point when a second, apparently emergency-only, cell phone he has buried in his jacket pocket goes off as well. With both phones ringing, he answers and tells his partner, who is on the other line, that he wants control of the plane and that she needs to keep the other organizations jockeying for position at bay until he can get there.
At JFK, there’s no contact from anyone inside the plane. Homeland Security wants to treat it as a terror threat and burst in, but Goodweather gives them a lecture about how contagion works and why the CDC can call dibs in this situation.
Elsewhere in the city, a pair of young men, one of whom seems to be suffering withdrawal, attempt to sell an old man in a pawn shop an obviously-stolen silver watch. While he’s examining it, one of the kids tries to reach across the counter and rob his open till, but the man grabs the kid’s arm and threatens to cut his artery open with a blade he has handy. The second, non-tweaking of the two has a gun, but the old man — Abraham — makes him surrender it and kicks them out. Returning to his work, he sees a news report on what’s going on with the plane and somehow knows what it means once he hears the plane was from Berlin. He goes back into a hidden den behind and under his store, where he sheathes a sword to look like a cane.
He sits, talking to something in a jar on an altar. It looks like a discolored (pale) heart. It starts to twitch as he talks to it, so he feeds it something that seems to be blood from what it does to the water. Little worm-like tentacles come out of it to meet the meal.
At the airport, Goodweather is distracted by his family situation. Dressing for a biohazard, his partner wants him to stay focused and tells him that sometimes things just end — that what they had did. Apparently they had an affair and he never told his wife, becuase she filed for divorce before he got around to it. The CDC officers board the plane in their haz-mat suits and determine that whatever happened, seems to have taken place quickly, without struggle and with a minimum of pain. Those on board the plane all appear to be dead but nobody is out of their seats except the flight attendants, who they haven’t found yet. There’s an abundance of ammonia present, which shouldn’t be on a plane, but it’s not toxic as such. It is, however, near the one open window shade.
They find the little girl from earlier, whose MP3 player is still going when they pull the earbuds out of her ears. Turning on UV lights, they see strange patterns all over the plane that are visible only under that light. As they’re moving toward the back of the plane, one of the bodies’ hands twitches.
They reach the bodies of the flight attendants and notice the open door to the cargo hold. Whatever it is that’s showing up under the UV light is EVERYWHERE in and above the cargo area.
While Goodweather is looking at this, his partner moves to the cockpit, where the door is ajar and the pilots are dead too. Their aide on the other end of the line wants them to get out of there, since the cockpit door should not be open, but they continue on. Moments later, the pilot, the Criss Angel guy, the twitchy guy and a fourth woman all revive.
At the Stoneheart Group building in New York, there’s a man on an elevator whose eyes have a creepy affect of blue incandescent lids that blink sideways under his regular eyelids. He goes to a lab where there’s a young, black man caring for an older man.
The man with the odd eyes delivers the news about the plane.
Back at JFK, the NTSB shows up and asks how bad it is. The CDC fills them in and then announce they’re going to quarantine the four survivors. The NTSB objects at first but there’s nothing he can do to stop them. Goodweather’s partner, Nora Martinez, makes the NTSB guy promise there will be no press when the CDC has to talk to the families of the victims.
In the holding area, the Captain is confused and can’t remember anything after landing. The female survivor is a lawyer, who gets belligerent more or less immediately. The twitchy guy says he has ringing in his ears. The Criss Angel guy asks about Demerol.
The cargo area of the plane has a huge, gold box in it that is not on the manifest; it’s adorned with grotesque carvings and hieroglyphs. They lower it to the ground and open it, to see it seems to be full of soil. Goodweather asks them to take samples. That’s when Nora notices that the box latches from the inside.
His family is watching at home. His son texts to see if everything is OK, and he tells him that it will be and he’ll talk to him tomorrow.
As people are re-wrapping the box, the NTSB guy starts to hear ringing and voices in his ears and wanders through the holding area where the the cargo has been emptied. He finds a bloody mass, which takes a shape, grabs his throat with a hand that seems to come from its face and then something comes out of the hand and starts sucking his blood. It’s done draining him quickly, and then grabs a handy large object, smashes his head into paste and apparently eats what’s left before disappearing into the night.
The two crooks from earlier are messing around in the street, pretending to fight, when the guy with the weird eyes comes to them. He dismisses the tweaker and has a deal for the other of the two: his mother’s immigration status and his brother (the tweaker)’s legal problems will go away if the kid does this job for the man with the eyes.
He has to go to the airport, present a black business card which will apparently grant him access, pick up a payment in a locker and then go pick up an item which must be returned before dawn, without any stops, and which must not be examined.
The old man from the pawn shop, Abraham, arrives at the airport first. He’s stopped by security guards in a spot where all the victims’ families are gathered to protest, but fakes a heart attack and gets the aides from earlier — Jim — to help him find the authorities.
Goodweather comes, finds the media there, and has a brief statement where he admits he can offer little hope — that there are only four survivors and that they have no idea what killed the others OR what made these four survive. The little girl’s father makes his way through the crowd, hits Goodweather, but Goodweather tells security to let him go and promises some news in 48 hours.
The medical examiner calls to tell them that all of the bodies have non-traumatic incisions that look razor sharp on their necks, and that their body chemistry has been altered so they aren’t decaying normally and no blood is pooling.
At the airport, Abraham tells Ephraim that he knows what’s going on here and that the corpses must be destroyed, as must the coffin (which he calls a coffin). He tells them it’s imperative that the coffin not cross over the river into the city.
Jim and Ephraim, noticing the guy’s sword in his cane, have him arrested.
The medical examiner is looking at a body under UV light when he see sthe same weird patterns from the plane.
Back at the airport, Nora asks about the coffin thing and Ephraim thinks Abraham is just crazy. They find a small worm, which repeatedly tries to make contact with their skin; they reason that it’s a parasite looking for a host. They package up that worm and keep talking, until Nora finds a whole bunch of worms balled around each other.
They go to look for the coffin, but it’s already missing; security tapes show what looks like someone or something moving very quickly to remove it from custody. They call out to Jim to stop all vehicles large enough to move the coffin, reasoning that the box is still likely on site. Security do stop the crook, but the business card he was given to present gets him support from Jim, who lets him go, telling him that he now owes nothing to the people whose card that is.
The medical examiner is looking at the bodies when one starts to move a little. He hears a noise, puts down a heart in a scale to go investigate the noise and the heart starts to beat, shedding worms. One of them burrows into the heel of the medical examiner’s hand and he frantically manages to remove it. By the time he does, though, there’s an army of undead waiting to pounce on him.
Back at the airport, Nora and Ephraim are demoralized by the loss of the coffin but Goodweather just decides the worms will have to be a starting point for their investigation.
Abraham is moved into general population at jail, told that he will have to stay there over the weekend because charges have been pressed and there’s no judge to hear the case. Another inmate notices that Abraham has a Holocaust tattoo.
At Stoneheart, we discover that the old man and the creepy-eyed guy know who Abraham is and the guy with the eyes is going to “take care of” him. The old boss-man is happy, saying that he has “everything I need.”
At 4:55 a.m., the crook in the stolen van with the coffin in it starts to cross the bridge.
