When a twenty-seven-year-old women shoots a couple of drug dealers to escape sexual assault, she turns to the forty-four-year-old deputy sheriff--who happens to be her dead mother's lover--for help. The deputy goes so far as to kill a man to cover the woman's tracks, allowing her to escape without notice.

A Black man living in the south flees to his friend's mother's house after shooting and killing someone.

In 1989, two friends from high school, now in their late-twenties, reunite in Santa Cruz and search for a rare mushroom as earthquakes begin to shake the Northern California landscape.