16 year old Vivien is filthy rich. She lives in France with her mother, father and younger brother. She has everything she could ever want and more. But after a scrape with the law her parents send her off to the states to live with her cousins on a small farm in Georgia as punishment. In the airport she bumps into a boy her age with an old fashioned pocket watch sweating nervously. Brushing it off she boards her flight. In the air the boy she saw before nervously continues checking his stupid pocket watch every few seconds with shaky hands. Before they can land their plane crashes. Vivien, the boy, and an older graying man are the only survivors. After dragging their battered bodies to a nearby town they discover that all flights in the air crashed at the same time. No telephones or TVs will switch on and cars will no longer start. Vivien soon learns that the mysterious boy with the pocket watch knows much more than he's letting on, and she's determined to get to the bottom of it.