In the first winter at Severn City Airport, initial excitement over celebrity passenger Elizabeth and her son Tyler quickly gives way to panic as phones fail, vending machines empty, and medicines run out. A young woman suffering Effexor withdrawal grows dangerously ill; despite searches of offices and cars and an attempt to call 911, no help comes. The group begins breaking into airport businesses for food and supplies, holding bonfires on the tarmac as news broadcasts grow bleaker and then start disappearing.

As power becomes unreliable and the airport shifts to generator power, people drift away rather than keep waiting. Tyrone, a TSA agent who can hunt, brings back a deer, but Lily Patterson—the eighteen-year-old who needed Effexor—walks into the trees and is never found; her driver’s license is left in the Mexican restaurant beside Max’s abandoned Amex card. With televisions reduced to silent test patterns and basic utilities failing, the survivors adapt by melting snow for water and living by daylight. Tyler retreats into rereading comic books and scripture while Elizabeth prays obsessively.

On the fifteenth day a pilot offers a free flight to Los Angeles, and many leave; Clark watches the plane lift off and is shaken by the beauty and uncertainty of it. Another pilot, Roy, soon departs on a reconnaissance flight and never returns, intensifying fears that there is nothing functioning beyond the airport. Elizabeth clings to a quarantine-and-rescue belief, insisting the runway must be kept clear for the military, and her intensity draws others into regular snow-shoveling and nightly bonfire gatherings even as the darkening sky suggests widespread electrical collapse.

Life settles into grim routines: shared language lessons, scavenged clothing, and strained attempts at order. After a rape on Day Eighty-five, the community ties up the attacker and expels him into the forest at gunpoint, accepting that they may be sentencing him to death. As supplies like soap and batteries vanish, Clark proposes a scouting party to learn what exists beyond the perimeter.

On Day One Hundred, Tyrone, Dolores, and Allen leave at dawn and return the next day with carts of supplies taken from an unlooted Chili’s, along with news of a roadblock and a quarantine warning sign that has kept people away by claiming sickness at the airport; beyond it, they saw abandoned cars and bodies. During the tense wait, Clark begins placing artifacts—his iPhone, Max’s Amex card, and Lily Patterson’s license—into an old display case, which others soon add to, forming the first pieces of the Museum of Civilization. Shortly after the scouting party’s return, the first outsider finally walks in from a nearby hotel, crying with relief because he had believed he was the only survivor.