In a stark alternate reality, Magnus wakes up to find the Sanctuary in ruins and the entire city destroyed. Helen has no memory of how things went to hell. She ventures into the crumbling city and is attacked by brutally savage humanoid creatures, but is saved by a survivalist group led by Will, who sports a mean mullet.
After being decontaminated in a provocative shower scene, Helen is interrogated by Will who claims the “real” Magnus died three years before. A plague has wiped out all but a hundred thousand or so of the human race. Of the living, the infected ones become enraged cannibals.
Refusing to accept that the end is upon her, Helen works to discover the truth behind the plague’s origins and a cure. Will confesses on his death bed that he has a child named Magnus living in a sanctuary somewhere remote, and Magnus recalls that during a mission in Honduras, she inadvertently released the plague causing contagion which had once destroyed the Mayan kingdom long ago.
Before Helen is brutally savaged by fiends, she is transported back in time to the moment she found the vial, which is guarded by some sort of noncorporeal Abnormal that wanted to show her the potential consequences of her actions. Needless to say, Helen leaves the vial with the disease where she found it and returns to the Sanctuary.