Helen drives with her two twin daughters, Debbie and Julie, out of Atlanta towards Florida. She avoids the major highways, hoping to avoid tourists and cops in the more populated areas. She eventually stops at a campsite in Florida called Alligator Point. She gets a beach campsite and is questioned slightly by the man at the check-in cabin. Helen begins to set up the tent while her daughters play on the sand and she notices an elderly couple sitting in lawn chairs looking at the ocean. The beach smells like fish and it seems pretty abandoned because of the off season. At sunset, Helen watches the old couple enter their tent and remembers the good times that she had with her husband Roy when they were younger.
That night Helen has a dream of her daughters burying a bloody hammer in the sand, but there are large ants all around them. She imagines the ants stinging her feet and then sees a tsunami crash into her tent. Helen wakes up screaming which wakes her daughter too. The girls fall back to sleep and Helen keeps imagining being in her car and seeing an alligator move in her rearview mirror. When Helen wakes up again her girls are gone and she goes outside to see them sitting by the old couple. She gets closer and notices that the old people are actually dead. She tells the girls that they are sleeping and they all pack up their stuff in the car. She takes the hammer she has, which she has thoroughly cleaned and throws it into the ocean. She knows she only has so long before someone finds Roy’s body back in Atlanta. In the car she looks in the rearview mirror and sees something moving.