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The episode begins with a farmhouse in the pouring rain, where a woman is giving birth on a kitchen table. Three deformed men surround her, aiding the birth with forks and scissors. After the baby is born, the men take the baby out to a field and bury it.

The next morning, during a baseball game, one player discovers the baby buried under home plate. Scully and Mulder are called to the small town of Home, Pennsylvania to investigate. They are met by a sheriff named Andy Taylor, to which Scully remarks that the town reminds her of Mayberry. Taylor tells them the town is small and has always been peaceful. They have no suspects for the baby's death, although the baseball diamond is near a rundown farm owned by the Peacock family. The family built the farm during the Civil War, and the family has been living there ever since. The farm has no electricity or running water, and they raise their own pigs and cows as food. Three men are the only survivors, since a car accident supposedly killed their mother and father ten years earlier. The sheriff implies that they are all in-bred, and that they couldn't have committed the murder because they are too "feeble."

They take the baby's body to the sheriff's station, where they have no morgue and Scully does the autopsy in the bathroom. Scully finds that the baby has virtually every birth defect known to medicine. She also finds dirt in the baby's lungs, implying that it was buried alive. She speculates that it would take generations of in-breeding to create a child this deformed, and believes the Peacocks are to blame. Mulder argues that the Peacocks are all men and there is no mother. Scully sends the baby's DNA to a lab for testing.

Mulder and Scully go to the Peacocks' farm, where they find the bloody kitchen table, shovel, utensils, and footprints that match one found on the baseball field. They find the house empty and assume that the Peacocks have fled and need to put out warrants for their arrest. They don't notice a pair of eyes looking out from under the bed. That night, the Peacocks return and drive their broken-down Cadillac to Sheriff Taylor's house.....the Peacock boys break into Taylor's house and beat the sheriff and his wife to death.

The next morning, Scully and Mulder arrive on the scene, where Deputy Barney Paster found the Taylor family's bodies. As they survey the death, Scully reviews the baby's DNA test results and believes the test is wrong, because it shows the baby had three fathers. Mulder speculates that all three of the Peacock boys fathered the child. Scully says that could only happen if the mother was a female member of the Peacock family. Scully, Mulder, and Deputy Paster go to the Peacocks' farm to arrest them. When the deputy tries to break down the front door, a booby trap swings an axe into him. The Peacocks come out of hiding and tear him apart in animalistic fashion. Scully and Mulder decide to lure the Peacocks out by releasing their pigs, and sneak into the house while the boys chase them down.

Inside, they find photos of the Peacocks throughout generations, going back to the Civil War. They find a deformed woman under the bed with no arms or legs, strapped to a wheeled board. The woman matches one of the women in the photographs; she is the Peacocks' own mother. She refuses to leave, and relates to them that she and the other Peacocks feel no pain. After the car accident, her sons took her home and treated her injuries. The Peacock boys realize Mulder and Scully are inside and attack. They fight, and the Peacocks take several gunshots before being killed, one impaled on their own booby trap. Afterwards, they discover that the oldest Peacock boy (Edmund) and the mother are gone.

On a lonely highway outside of town, the Peacocks' Cadillac is parked and we hear the mother telling Edmund that they'll start a new family somewhere else. Edmund climbs out of the trunk, starts the car, and drives away.

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