`Have you ever carried a human limb?" David Graham asked with bloodshot eyes and shaking hands. "Have you ever had someone die in your arms?"
He and his friend, Paul Radford, had just spent the night looking for Paul's brother, Alan. At around 10 a.m. yesterday, they heard that a body in the temporary morgue matched Alan's description. The 17-year-old had been due to get his GCSE results tomorrow. "He'll not need them. He'll not be needing anything," said Paul.
They had gone to the hospital to help and to look for Alan, they said. They had seen dead and dying. One of the injured men had a car wheel embedded in his chest with part of the tyre still on it.
"Alan had been sitting in a restaurant with my mother," Paul said. "Then he just said he was going up town. Three minutes later, it happened.
"We've told her nothing. I'm not telling her until I'm sure it's him. God knows what shape he's in after what we saw yesterday."
Throughout Saturday night, the anguish in the Omagh Leisure Complex was suspended by the hope that missing people were alive in one of the many hospitals receiving the wounded. The damage caused by the bomb, and the heavy traffic created by thousands of callers, led to a breakdown in telephone services in most of the town, including lines to the hospital.
Families and friends, most of them stone silent with shock, gathered all night at the leisure complex hoping to find their loved ones' names on the lists of the injured.
Each tannoy announcement stopped hearts and conversations, the silence broken only by loud sobbing. Local councillors, priests and ministers waited to help. Descriptions of clothes, jewellery and birthmarks were taken to try to match the missing with what was left of some of the dead.
Yesterday morning, RUC men and women in shirt sleeves took families into a side-room. Here, people were told that a body matching the description of their relative had been found.
Omagh's Presbyterian minister, the Rev Robert Herron, waited to accompany those who wanted a clergyman to go with them to the temporary morgue at the Lisanelly military camp, about half a mile away.
"I feel rather annoyed to hear people making political points already," he said. "There is nothing to describe the inhumanity of it all."
Only five of the bodies found initially were believed to be identifiable. At that stage, 21 remained which could not be identified, either because of the extent of the injuries or the absence of any identifying documents.
"Obviously, that's increasing the distress of these people," said the Rev Norman Harrison, from nearby Clogherney. "And as time goes by with no news, things get ominous."
He had been celebrating a wedding; the couple's anniversary would now fall on the anniversary of the worst atrocity in the history of the Troubles. "We are not unfamiliar with death. But this is my first experience of anything like this."
One of his colleagues had seen the body of the 18-month-old baby at the hospital, he said, shaking his head. "Many families like to be able to see their deceased with open coffins. But I, for one, am not looking forward to seeing bits of bodies."
A community development worker, Ms Geraldine Keyes, had organised the weeklong carnival which was due to have its finale on Saturday, with a parade through the town. At the last minute, the route was changed. Otherwise more than 100 children could have paraded right into the blast.
The floats were abandoned and a local publican opened a room above the pub where the children could stay. Some of them were extremely distressed about their parents who might have been in the town.
"There hadn't been a festival in this town for years. People got involved who had never got involved in anything, with street parties, cross-community football matches," said Ms Keyes.
A trip for up to 300 children to Portrush has been organised for Friday. Now parents may be afraid to let their children go, she said.
"I was never as glad to see my four kids," she said. "It could have been any one of them. And there's many a parent thinking the same tonight."
Some 17 hours after the bomb, David Graham had one answer to questions about the peace process.
"What peace process? Sorry, have I missed something here? The only solution is to take an Israeli attitude. Shoot to kill and annihilate the terrorists. Give the RUC, the British army and the Royal Irish Regiment a free hand for 48 hours. Let's see how brave the bombers are then."