Dryden took in the words. Tried to get his head around the implications—the scale of an accident that would require that kind of response.

“Jesus,” he whispered.

“My unit was assigned to a roadblock straight north of town,” Moss said. “I think it was the major county road that went right through Ashland. I couldn’t see the town from there, and for a while there was no word at all, as far as what had happened. Then some of the higher-ups put together a kind of headquarters right there, near that blockade, in a field next to the road. A whole bunch of tents, generator trucks, comm equipment. I overheard just a bit of what was happening inside the town. They said there were buses going in to bring out the wounded and the dead, and taking them to triage sites on the southern boundary of the exclusion zone.”

Dryden watched Danica’s reaction to all of it. It seemed to match his own: a struggle to take in the magnitude of the thing.

“I asked one of the men in charge if I could be transferred down there,” Moss said, “to where they were treating the casualties. I was the medic for my unit; I’d been through med school on a military scholarship. I’d actually just finished up my required time in the Army, for that scholarship, which meant I could quit if I wanted to. But as of that morning, I was still planning to stay in for a while. A few more years, maybe. Anyway, they told me to stay put on the roadblock. They didn’t need any help, thanks.”

Far away across the camp, a handful of people laughed. A joke over a fire somewhere. Dryden barely heard it. He kept his focus on Moss.

“For a long time not much else happened,” Moss said. “We got those little bits of news, like drips out of a faucet. Nothing more. Finally, a couple hours after sunrise, two MPs in an open Jeep came up the road out of Ashland, and parked. When they got out, I could see the back seat. That’s when I saw you two.”

At last the man lifted his gaze from the firepit. He looked back and forth between Dryden and Danica, maybe trying to reconcile their faces with those of the two children in his memory.

“You weren’t hurt,” Moss said. “Not physically. But you looked awful. You looked like you’d been through something no little kid should ever go through. I remember thinking you had the thousand-yard stare that soldiers talk about. Shell-shock.”

A couple in their sixties wandered past on the dirt road, with a small dog on a leash. Moss nodded at them; he waited for them to pass by before he spoke again.