In Southwest Utah during the 1950's, people strive to live simply. They fall in love, rear families, work hard, attend church, and hope for the best. Meanwhile, fallout from the Nevada Test Site rains on them like talons from the sky, and two of them, a man and a boy, who never meet, share an unimaginable and horrific twist of fate. After being wounded in the Korean War, Don moves to Utah to marry Oleta and to join her seemingly idyllic family, but to his dismay, fallout from the Nevada Test Site brings death and economic ruin and great emotional strain to his new family. Don acts. He drives to the Nevada Test Site to speak with anyone in charge, but he is arrested instead. Quarantined and without hope, he, along with eleven other strange men, soon finds himself handcuffed to the inside of a chain link compound, and dangling from a balloon a mile away and 1,100 feet above Yucca Valley is Hood, a 74 kiloton thermonuclear bomb. All this while, Jack, a teenage miscreant, also lives in Southwestern Utah and in the radiation, but he has little concern for society's ills. After being arrested for his illegal activities, he joins the air force to avoid juvenile hall, but his platoon is flown to the Nevada Test Site to participate as guinea pigs on News Knob, seven miles from Hood. After the detonation, his devastated platoon is driven past ground zero, up the hill, and inadvertently to the chain link compound, where Don and the eleven other men are barely alive. In this poignant moment of intertwining fate, both Don and Jack become pawns in a scheme to erase them from history.