Months before Samantha Davis is set to graduate college and move across the country, word spreads of an emergent pandemic. Unlike the virus that swept the nation mere years before, this contagion is a prion. The prion has no initial signs of infection, no concretely identified mode of transmission, and no possible cure. The prion destroys reason, erases memories, and brings forth inescapable madness, with death imminent and inevitable. Hundreds, then thousands, and then millions die by the hour. Before her city falls into chaos, Sam and a group of college classmates flee to the abandoned Hearst Castle National Monument on California’s secluded Central Coast.    
    A year has passed in silence and isolation, and Sam and her friends can only imagine the horrors the prion inflicted upon the world. That is until horror arrives at their castle when a contentious member of their group mysteriously disappears. Sam is the only one who seems to realize the terror that may eventually consume them all. She has no idea how to tell if someone is sick with the prion, paranoid, or just fatigued. Is she sick? Are her thoughts already tainted? She doesn’t know and without clarity, needs to find someone to trust before it’s too late to act.