Trevor's world collapses one sunny afternoon as he watches his son, Drew, drive over a weak portion of their street and be swallowed alive by a sinkhole. Although first responders try for days to recover Drew and his car, they can only find the vehicle, not its driver. Trevor's family becomes haunted by the missing body, from his wife's strange distance to his daughter's insistence her twin brother is still alive. Trevor speaks with specialists who tell him the sinkhole is actually the collapsed entrance to a mine that closed in 1927. The deeper he metaphorically digs, however, the more Trevor realizes just how disturbing the mine's history is. From violent strikes by miners to the abandonment of hundreds of still-living men in collapsed tunnel systems, the closure was beholden to a lot more than bankruptcy. Some theorize the miners discovered an impossible structure deep beneath the earth. Ginny, Trevor's wife, tracks down the grandson of a miner who was paid a settlement in a dozen acres of land. She ties up the grandson and discovers that his family has been guarding a secret - and a mine entrance. Equipped with oxygen masks, Trevor and Ginny descend into the tunnels to find answers. They discover the structure the miners found, what their captive calls a "creation engine" that emits a mist capable of causing bursts in evolution. Mutated corpses lie nearby, the remains of miners exposed for months to the engine of creation and evolution. They discover their son, kept alive by the mist but becoming the monstrosity the miners transformed into. Ginny kills him in an act of mercy. Trevor discovers the last mutated miner still alive and kills him too, thinking there must be nothing crueler than the gods who deposited the creation engine millions of years ago.