The survivors wake from their long rest to find that while their bodies are nourished, they are plagued by a ravenous, unnatural craving. Katya, Josiah, and the dog Reginald are overcome by a compulsion to lick the plates and pick at crumbs from their clothing and the dirt, acting with a beastly desperation that John, who is spared the craving, finds deeply jarring. They realize this “insatiable hunger” is likely what drove the previous owners of the wagon to succumb to cannibalism, noting that the stone provides food but something else breeds a hunger that cannot be truly satisfied.
As the group prepares to move, Katya is haunted by a memory of the city of Atlanta four weeks prior. In the smoke-hazed dawn following the night of the meteor strike and the attack on her home in Atlanta, she found herself unconscious in the street, guarded with “desperate ferocity” by Reginald until her brother, Yuri Blackheart, approached. Yuri’s hands were already blackened and shriveled by the new world's sickness. Together, they found their mother dead in the street and their father deceased inside their incinerated home.
They fled the city to bury their parents on a familiar hillside. There, Yuri revealed he possessed a new “inner fire” and attempted to use it to heal Katya’s wounds. However, the light in his hands shifted from green to a blinding red, and he began to scream as he burned from the inside out. His eyes literally burned out of his skull, and he died uttering “I love you,” leaving behind only an outline of ash.
Josiah’s thoughts drift to a burned-out chapel outside Philadelphia three weeks earlier. While acting as a chaplain, a soldier named Chip brought in a mother with a child whose eyes had been replaced by crystalline growths. As Josiah attempted a religious rite, a cyclone of black tendrils formed, and a mercurial shadowy beast erupted from the child's body.
In the ensuing chaos, Chip was fatally wounded in the chest. Josiah summoned a blade of energy and defeated the creature, but the act caused him to physically mutate: his arms and legs lengthened unnaturally, and his face elongated into a nightmare shape. He emerged from the chapel to find a line of a hundred people waiting for his help, but he could only tell them to flee to New York or D.C. as he prepared to bury his friend.
John recalls finding temporary peace three weeks prior in an abandoned cottage outside New York. Running from the hundreds of spirits that magnetically haunt him, he accidentally radiated an energy that created a ten-foot bubble of near-silence, pushing the ghosts away.
Inside the bubble was the spirit of an old man named William, who had died peacefully in 1858 but “woke up” with green light behind his eyelids after the meteor. William felt a strange compulsion to be near John, though neither understood why. John, ever the charlatan, attempted to negotiate a way for William to pay him to contact the living, only to realize the “afterlife” was merely the Earth separated by a thinning veil.
Returning to the present, the survivors head Northwest toward a trail of dark smoke on the horizon. To prevent snow blindness, Katya applies cooled charcoal under their eyes. Their progress is interrupted when Reginald catches a scent and points to a ridge.
A humanoid woman—emaciated with sunken skin, sharpened fangs, and inky black eyes—charges at them with unnatural strength. Katya uses blood magic to bind the creature in tendrils of coagulated blood rising from the snow. While the creature desperately chews on the blood-bindings, John assails its mind with “vicious mockery” so foul that even his entourage of ghosts cackles in delight. Katya eventually delivers the killing blow, splitting the woman's spine with a miner's pick.
Upon dissecting the body, they find her stomach filled with bark, stones, and human teeth. Deep in the base of her skull, Katya discovers a glowing emerald stone.
Using the newly recovered stone, the group focuses their collective belief on obtaining transportation. A thick, unnatural fog surrounds them, and the sound of phantom galloping fills the air. Out of the mist steps a single, confused draft horse. Katya calms the animal, and they use their ropes to fashion a makeshift halter so it can carry their packs.
The party enters the outskirts of the town, finding a scene of absolute desolation: broken windows, kicked-down doors, and bloody trails leading from building to building. While exploring, John finds a turtle-shell fiddle that gives off a faint green glow. In a nearby house, Josiah discovers a religious hymnal on a small shrine and a skeleton in a bedroom next to boxes of ammunition and a shotgun.
The episode concludes as John emerges from a house and is confronted by two leathery-skinned men: an old indigenous man and a younger man who has smoke rising from his clothes. The old man warns that they should be quiet because “they”—the townspeople who went mad with hunger—might still be around. As the group debates their next move, the young man, Ishkode, suddenly opens his hands and sends a gout of flame toward a new shuffling sound in the snow, signaling a fresh attack.