Michael Archer is a Social Worker from Murphy, NC. His boss recruits him for a moonlight stint interviewing the hapless denizens of a nearby cluster of tumbledown shacks at the request of a pharmaceutical company in Atlanta. It seems the firm has found a cure for Alzheimer's and the ingredients they need to manufacture the drug are buried deep beneath Lucas Ridge. The job seems straight-forward at first but when a co-worker ends up dead in a mosquito-infested swamp, Michael begins to wonder whose calloused hands are tugging on his personal puppet strings.