South

A Broken Home, A Manufactured Madness, And A Soul Seeking Salvation


Seventeen-year-old Cassidy Lierman is fighting to keep her head above water, but the weight of her world is pulling her under. Both inside her home and outside its walls, chaos is closing in.

A year after the devastating accident that claimed her father's life, Cassidy is drowning in a secret, crushing guilt. She believes his death was a punishment for her own teenage vanity, a mistake that drove her to the brink of suicide. Now, trying to rebuild from the wreckage, her home life is a battlefield of unhealed trauma.

Her mother is spiraling through severe manic episodes, while her older brother has become a reclusive alcoholic; struggling under the suffocating pressure of trying to keep the family afloat, even as he drowns his own grief in a bottle.

In the center of this domestic nightmare, Cassidy clings to the one anchor she has left: her faith in God. But keeping that faith alive becomes a brutal test as she steps onto the campus of Pinewood High. The school is warping into something deeply unnatural. A massive corporate buyout by Southern Cuts, a subsidiary of the powerful Cadwell Corporation, has brought strange new dietary products into the cafeteria and a manufactured compliance to the student body.

Guarding this eerie new status quo is a secretive group known only as "The Witches", a radicalized student cell haunting the halls in more than name.

Then, the Hum begins.

It's a vibrating, ominous frequency that blares randomly through the school intercom. Though dismissed as a technical glitch, Cassidy notices a terrifying correlation: every broadcast of the Hum triggers sudden nosebleeds, violent fits of psychosis, and terrifying blocks of missing time among the students who consume the corporate diet.

Torn between the volatile breakdown of her family and the engineered madness of her school, Cassidy is forced to her knees. As the chaos escalates and the hostile environment threatens to swallow her friends, her family, and her sanity, Cassidy realizes she cannot survive by running away. Partnering with Amber Long, her former bully turned unexpected confidante, Cassidy must stand firm in her faith, confront the corporate entity rewriting her world, and find the strength to fight for her family before the chaos consumes them all.