On a Wyoming sheep ranch, Dan Logan and his young son Chris Logan set out for a simple camping trip, hoping for a quiet night under the stars. The night takes a troubling turn when Chris chooses to sleep outside the tent. By morning, he lies unconscious, his nose bleeding, while Dan discovers that several of their sheep share the same dark sign of injury. At a nearby hospital, Dan endures a battery of tests as doctors struggle to understand what has happened to his family, yet his only focus remains on his son.
In the hospital, the situation becomes more unsettling. Dr. Caldwell arrives, and along with the hospital staff, he faces the mounting concerns raised by Maj. Holliford and Dr. Spencer. Holliford, an Army Major, reveals a disturbing truth: the Logans were accidentally exposed to a deadly, aerially dispersed nerve gas, a toxin known as MX-3. Because Chris slept in the open air, his exposure is far more severe, and Holliford grimly tallies Dan’s prognosis—about a week to live. Behind the scenes, the two doctors keep up the pretense of treatment while secretly studying the toxin’s effects on the Logans’ bodies, all while the Army works to figure out how such a leak could have happened and how to minimize the wider fallout.
Tragedy compounds the tension as Chris dies. Yet the hospital staff insist that the boy is fine, a deception that deepens Dan’s desperation. [Dr. Spencer] explains the grim reality to Dan, who agrees to be shielded from the truth for as long as possible. Holliford orders that Dan remain sedated and guarded, and Christ-like, a sense of quiet dread settles over the hospital. Dan eventually manages to slip from his room in search of his son and, to his horror, discovers Chris in the morgue during an autopsy.
Driven by a mix of grief and fury, Dan escapes the hospital and buys a rifle. He heads to [Dr. Spencer]’s home and threatens him at gunpoint, demanding answers about his son’s fate. The confrontation pushes Dan toward a drastic plan: he purchases dynamite from a trusted supplier, convincing them that he’s clearing rock slides, and then makes his way to the nerve-agent facility. After a violent raid that leaves a guard dead and the building in ruin, Dan guns down a responding officer and plants charges around the factory site.
Kidnapping a stranger to drive him to a military base, Dan speeds toward the heart of the operation, but the symptoms of MX-3 begin to take hold again, curtailing his progress inside the base. He collapses in a field, convulsing as soldiers cluster around, witnesses to a death that is both a personal vendetta and a fatal accident of national consequence. As Major Holliford arrives, he draws blood from Dan’s body, a stark, clinical reminder of how close to the edge the Logan family stood.
The film closes with the next morning breaking over the field where Dan died, and soldiers lingering on the grassy outfield as they play softball, a quiet, unsettling postscript to a story about a father’s relentless pursuit of truth, the cost of a government mistake, and a small family caught in the gears of a much larger machine.
