28 Days Later

Jim wakes from a coma in an empty London hospital, tubes still in his arm, machines still running but no one there. He wanders the deserted streets in a hospital gown, not yet understanding what has happened. In an abandoned church filled with the infected — fast-moving, screaming, rage-consumed — he barely escapes, rescued by Selena and Mark, who explain the situation with the flatness of people who have had weeks to get past the horror of it. The Rage virus spread from chimpanzees to humans twenty-eight days ago and broke Britain within a week.

Mark is infected when a splatter of blood catches him in the face. Selena kills him immediately, before he can turn, without visible emotion. She explains: sentiment is a liability. Jim and Selena find Frank and his teenage daughter Hannah fortified in a tower block flat, surviving on canned food and rain-catchers. They pick up a military broadcast promising safety and a cure near Manchester and decide to drive north.

The four travel through an England that has gone silent — abandoned motorways, ransacked service stations, a city with no one left in it. They bond into something that functions like family. Near Manchester, Frank is infected by a drop of blood from a dead crow at the military checkpoint. The soldiers shoot him before he turns. They take in Selena, Hannah, and Jim, driving them to a fortified mansion outside the city. Major Henry West has kept his small unit loyal through the promise of women. His cure is a lie. Jim is to be executed in the woods.

He escapes, circles back, and lets the infected into the mansion, using them as a weapon against the soldiers. He kills West in the chaos. Selena, about to kill Jim before recognizing him, stops herself. They take Hannah and a military ambulance and drive out. West, still barely alive, attacks from the back seat — Hannah drives the ambulance into a crash that sends him through the windscreen into a crowd of infected.

Twenty-eight days after that, Jim, Selena, and Hannah are in a cottage in the Scottish Highlands. They have sewn an enormous distress signal from bedsheets spread across a hillside. A jet fighter banks overhead. The pilot sees it. Britain was the only country infected. The rest of the world waited it out. The signal works.