World of Trouble

1.

Here is how I know that she’s not dead: because she’s never dead. Like that time I found her in White Park, tucked fairylike in the shade beneath the slide, after Dad’s funeral. You thought I was gone, too, didn’t you, Hen? And she was right, I had thought so, and she’s given me periodic occasion to think so ever since. Since the year that our parents died I have carried this foretaste of her doom like a sourness in my stomach, this cold certainty that one day she too would slip away: one of her dimwitted underachieving boyfriends would involve her in a drug deal gone wrong, or the junk-shop motorcycle she drove around her sophomore year would catch a patch of ice and flip, or she would simply be the kid who drinks too much at the party and is carried off in a stretcher while the others stand like cows, staring and swaying in the red flash of the emergency lights.

And yet again and again she has managed to swim successfully through the tides of her life, a fish flashing through the dark foam, even in these last terrible months. It was not her, but her deadbeat husband, Derek, who disappeared, sacrificed to the murky goals of her crackpot organization. And it was not her but me who nearly died in a fort in southeastern Maine, shot in the arm on the hunt for a missing man. It was Nico, that time, who rescued me, coming up over the horizon in that shocking, impossible helicopter.

Still, though. Nevertheless. Now she’s gone again, and the fear grows in my gut like illness, the knowledge that she is dead somewhere or dying, and I have to remind myself that always, always she has been okay. Not a scratch on her. She’s somewhere. She’s fine.

Only one road leads from the police station down into the town proper, and, this being the heart of the American Midwest, that road is called Police Station Road: a pastoral quarter mile of gentle downhill pavement, snaking past horse fencing and a country-red barn. A windmill is off to the right, back from the road a ways, listing rightward as if someone tried to push it over and then got bored. Houdini lies coughing in the basket on the handlebars. The empty wagon rattles along behind us, waiting for its load.

It’s sunrise, drizzling still, and with the muted rain-wet golds and scarlets of the trees, with the crickets calling to one another, the crows doing their plaintive cawing, I find myself imagining for a minute what a peaceful world this’ll be when the people are gone, when the paved expanses are reclaimed by wildflowers and the birds have the full use of the sky.

I know, of course, that this is just another dream, another piece of widely held wishful thinking: the virginal and pastoral postapocalyptic world, wiped free of mankind’s dirty cities and loud machines. Because these auburn Midwestern trees are going to burst into flames in the first burning moments. Trees around the world will go up like dry tinder. In a short time the clouds of ash will block the sun, put a hard stop to photosynthesis, snuff out all lushness. The squirrels will burn up, the butterflies and the flowers, the ladybugs crawling in the tall grass. Possums will drown in their holes. What is about to happen is not the reclaiming of Earth by a triumphant Mother Nature, a karmic repudiation of humanity’s arrogant ill stewardship.

Nothing we ever did mattered one way or another. This event has always been in the cards for man’s planet, for the whole scope of our history, coming regardless of what we did or didn’t do.

“Rats,” I say, spiraling down the exit ramp, as the massive parking lot comes into view below me. “Rats, rats, rats.”

The SuperTarget has been taken. I see people with machine guns wandering around on the roof of the store and I instinctively start counting them—one, two, three, four,…—although even one person with a machine gun on the roof of a big-box store is plenty. Five metal staircases, those wheeled stair sets that move up and down the aisles to help customers access high shelves, have been rolled out of the store and pushed to the parking lot entrances, stationed like guard towers. There’s someone at the top of each staircase. Closest to me is a trim middle-aged woman in a red softball jersey, a red bandana holding back a tumble of black hair, a machine gun of her own.

I get off the bike and raise my hand to the lady with the gun and she raises a hand back and then she shouts, “hey-yuh,” and from the far side of the parking lot someone on one of the other moving staircases—also in a red jersey, though I can’t tell from here if it’s a man or a woman, young or old—calls back in kind, “hey-yuh,” and then there’s another call and then another, the syllables carried around in a ring, and at last a white Dodge pickup roars around from the back of the store, belching vegetable-oil exhaust and kicking up gravel off the pavement. The truck screeches to a halt a few feet from me, and I step backward and raise both hands.

“Good morning,” I call out.

There is a squeal of feedback from a bullhorn mounted on the roof above the driver’s seat. I wince. The woman in the guard tower winces. Then someone starts talking through the bullhorn from inside the truck.

“Is this your—” The voice is swallowed in a new burst of feedback, and then there’s a muttered “oh, hell” and an adjustment of the volume. “Is this your place?”

“No.” I shake my head. He means the parking lot—the store—did I, or did I and some band of compatriots, maybe all dressed in sensible blue pants and tan blazers to keep track of each other, like these guys are all in softball jerseys, did we already call shotgun on this SuperTarget? Did we declare it to be our base, our temporary encampment, or were we intending to pick the bones of the shelves for food or entertainment for the last week before impact?

“No,” I say again. “I’m passing through.” The woman on the moving staircase is watching with mild interest. I’m keeping my hands in the air, just in case.

“Oh, okay,” says the voice through the bullhorn. “Yeah, us too.”

The people on the roof of the building have clustered at the edge, watching me. Machine guns, red jerseys. From the corner of my eye I can see around the corner to the backside of the SuperTarget, where there’s a blur of figures busy at the loading dock. They’re cleaning it out. Box loads, full pallets wrapped in clear plastic sheeting. There wasn’t much left in the store when we were there, but what there was is coming out. I feel a flash of desperation. All I need is that sledgehammer.

“There’s an item in there,” I say. “Something I really need.”

“Well—” Another squealing tide of feedback. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” the man says, and the sound stops abruptly as he shuts off the bullhorn and opens the driver’s side door and leans out. Glasses, mild expression. Red jersey also, with the name ETHAN stitched above the breast pocket. A soft paunch on an athletic build. He looks like somebody’s middle-school basketball coach.

“Sorry. Stupid thing. What is it that you need?”

“A sledgehammer. There’s one in there. A Wilton with a fiberglass handle.” I step forward to him, make eye contact, smile and raise a hand, like we’re meeting at a barbecue. “I really need it bad.”

“Well, huh. Okay, hold on.” He scratches his cheek, uncertain, raises one finger, and leans back into the truck. I hear him talking on a CB or a walkie-talkie. Then he leans back out and peers at me smiling while he waits for an answer from whoever decides. He’d say yes, I can see it. Were it up to just Ethan I’d be good to go. It’s still raining; endless steady mild rain. I run my hands over Houdini’s fur. I take a look at the woman on the moving staircase, and she’s looking off into space, bored, letting her mind wander. A year and a half ago she would have been checking e-mail on her phone.

The walkie-talkie blares from within the truck, and Ethan leans back in and listens for a moment, nodding. I watch his face through the windshield until he pokes his head back out.

“Listen, bud. You got anything to trade?”

I make a rapid internal inventory of my possessions: Jacket and pants, shoes and shirt. Notebook and pen. A loaded SIG Sauer P229 and a box of .40-caliber shells. A tattered high-school yearbook photo of a missing girl.

“Not really,” I say. “Unfortunately. But that sledgehammer. The truth is, it’s mine.”

“What do you mean, it’s yours?”

I don’t know what to say. I saw it first? I need it real bad?

“One thing,” I say, hearing my voice travel into a pleading, desperate upper register. “It’s just the one thing.”

Ethan rubs his chin. He feels bad. Everybody feels bad. “What about the wagon?” He looks up at our friend in the guard tower, who looks skeptical. “Maybe you could trade us that wagon.”

I look down at the battered Red Ryder. We brought it from Concord. The wheels are bent.

“The thing is, if I give you the wagon, I can’t get the hammer back to where I need it.”

“Well, heck, then.” The man sighs. “You got a, uh—what do you call those again?”

“Catch-22?” says the woman on the staircase.

Before I can say something else, someone shouts “hey-yuh” from the loading dock, and then someone else yells it from the roof, and then the man at the next staircase over yells it, too, and Ethan’s gotta run: he pops back into the truck and pulls the door closed and does a rapid three-point turn in the parking lot and heads back the way he came. The woman with the bandana looks at me, tight-lipped, and shrugs, what can ya do?

“Shit,” I say softly.

Houdini barks his rattling phlegmy bark, and I bend to scratch his ears.

I don’t know what happens if I go back without the sledgehammer.

Cortez will have more tricks up his sleeve, or else he won’t, and if he doesn’t we sit on our hands drinking weird bad coffee and making disjointed conversation until Wednesday around lunchtime, when the conversation stops and everything stops.

The town of Rotary is small, but it’s bigger than Pike, where the SuperTarget was. It’s bigger than anything else around. There’s got to be a hardware store.

There’s a church spire and another one, there’s the fat onion bulb of a water tower with the word ROTARY painted in mile-high letters in the classical small-town style. Autumn dogwoods along the sidewalk, leaves orange and red, branches drooping with rain. No people, no sign of people.

It’s got to be here: towns like this one still have hardware stores, or they did until last year, the mom-and-pop operations, beloved by the locals, losing money every year. There will be a sledgehammer at the hardware store, a row of them, a display, and I will take one and strap it in the wagon and mule it back up Police Station Road.

We go from door to door up Main Street: ice cream store, pizza parlor, pharmacy. A bar with an old-timey saloon theme called the Come On Inn. No one anywhere, no signs of life. “Blue town,” I say to Houdini as we’re poking around an abandoned ice cream shop. He’s nosing into an empty box of sugar cones, trying to get his teeth into something that’s food. There is a utility closet in the basement of the one-story redbrick municipal building, with an acrid reek of ammonia and mop water, a stack of bright orange safety cones, countdown hatch marks scratched in the wall by some bored custodian. No sledgehammer. No tools of any kind.

We called the towns with color names because of the package of multicolored Post-it Notes that Cortez had; he had them left over from his Office Depot warehouse. When we left a town behind us we would assign it a color, just keeping track, just to keep ourselves amused. All the degrees of dissolution, the differing extents to which each town or city had collapsed under the weight of all this unbearable imminence. Red towns were those seething with active violence: towns on fire, towns beset by marauding bands, daylight shootings, food foragers and food defenders, homes under siege. Only occasionally did we encounter active organized law enforcement: you’d see National Guardsmen patrolling red towns in small clusters, whether officially or unofficially it was hard to say—brave young kids, hollering for order, firing their guns into the air.

Becket, in the Berkshires, was a red town: ten teenagers tailed us on puttering mopeds, chanting for blood like savages. Stottville, New York, was red. De Lancy, Oneonta. Dunkirk, the town where we saved the small family from the fire but left them defenseless on the firehouse steps—bright red.

Green towns were just the opposite, communities where it seemed like some sort of agreement had been made, spoken or implied, to plug along. Folks raking leaves, pushing strollers, waving good morning. Dogs on leashes or bounding after Frisbees. In Media, Ohio, we were astonished to hear the SpongeBob SquarePants theme song being sung lustily by three hundred or more people in a public park at dusk. After the sing-along everyone hung around on the village green: there was a knitting circle, a book club, a demonstration on making candles and another on making bullets. A local sport-shooters association had organized a hunt-and-gather system, traversing the local woods and farmland to bring back venison and beef and distribute it by priority: women and children, the old and the infirm.

A sure sign of a green town was some sort of a garbage system. A trash pyre burning outside the city limits, or even just a dump still in use, people hauling their bags of refuse down there, going out of their way for the mutual benefit. If we didn’t see garbage heaped on curbs, Cortez and I, when we rolled into a certain spot, we knew that town was okay for a night of rest.

Black towns are empty. Blue towns feel empty, but they’re not, they’re just so quiet they might as well be. They’re empty except for occasional scurrying, nervous souls darting from one place to another, some feeling safer in the day, some at night. Peeking out of windows, clutching guns, measuring out what they’ve got left.

By noon we have worked our way through downtown, and Houdini and I reluctantly turn our search to private homes. I set the protocol as knock, wait, knock again, wait again, push in. I find houses cluttered with small personal items: unseasonal clothing, waffle irons, trophies, the sorts of things people leave behind when they leave in an emergency. But tool sheds are empty, like the fridges, like the pantries and the gas cans. At one tidy little aluminum-sided one-story I knock, wait, knock again, wait again, push in, and find a tiny, very old man asleep on an armchair, with a faded Time magazine spread out on his chest, like he fell asleep a couple years ago and is about to wake up to a terrible surprise. I tiptoe backward out of there and creep the door shut.

Blue town. Classic blue town.

It’s two o’clock now on the Casio. At some point the sun has burned the clouds away. Time passing and passing.

The thought comes from nowhere, unbidden, big as a hovering spaceship, filling the sky: She’s dead, back there. Back there in the woods. Somewhere I didn’t see her.

Or else she’s down in that hole and she’s not coming out because she doesn’t want to, and what I’m doing here is I’m wasting time until the end.

Keep walking, Hen. Keep searching. Do your job. She’s fine.

On Brookside Drive, six short blocks from the American Legion hall, is a small brick ranch house, partially surrounded by some kind of blast wall, a ten-foot-high barrier of concrete. Serious business, like this modest one-story home is an American embassy in Baghdad or Beirut. Thick concrete, smooth face, with slits in the surface, as if for arrows. This fortification was built to withstand not the end, but the events leading up to the end. Thieves. Bandits on the road.

“Hello?” I call up toward the slits. “Hello?”

The sky erupts with the deafening clatter of machine-gun fire. I drop down to my knees. Houdini goes bonkers, chasing himself in a wild circle. Another rip of live fire.

“Okay,” I say, yelling into the muddy lawn, where I threw myself down. “Okay.”

“I still have the right to defend my home,” says a voice, thick and hoarse and slightly manic, from somewhere beyond the wall. “I still have the right to my home.”

“Yes, sir,” I say again. “Yes, sir, I know.”

This is a blue-town man. I can’t see his face, but I can feel his fear, his anger. I look up slowly, very slowly, and get a good look at the gun muzzle, long and stiff like the nose of an anteater, poking through one of the slits.

“I’m going,” I say, “I’m sorry to bother you,” and I go, I crawl away, nice and slow, butt up in the air and hands down.

Worming my way out of there takes me right past the base of the wall, and I see where the man who built it—whoever built it—put a tradesman’s stamp in the stone. It’s a single word, colored in a deep somber red: JOY.

2.

The only suicide victims I find in Rotary are in a screened-in sunporch on Downing Drive: gunshots, husband and wife, a pitcher of lemonade on the glass-topped front-porch table between them, sugar crystals clinging to the sides, lemon wedges rotting at the bottom. The husband still holds the rifle, clutched between his hands, sunk into his lap. I get a quick read on the scene, instinctively, without even wanting to. He was the shooter, he killed her first, cleanly, and then himself; he took one high on the cheek—a first try, a miss—and then a second shot, under the chin and correctly angled.

I feel a quick swell of good feeling toward the dead man, the bottom of his face a red hole, for having honored their bargain. First his wife and then himself and he followed through, as promised. The lemonade pitcher buzzes with bees, attracted to the fading sweetness.

They don’t have a sledgehammer. I check their garage, and then even inside, in the closets. It’s just not a common household item.

Houdini and I step down off the porch on Downing Drive into a warm wafting smell, buoying up off the road and surrounding us, and I swear we look at each other, the dog and I, and obviously he can’t talk but we do, we say it to each other: “Is that fried chicken?”

Saliva fills my mouth, and Houdini begins whipping his little head this way and that. His eyes are shiny with excitement, like glossy marbles.

“Go,” I say, and Houdini bolts for the source of the smell and I bolt after him. We’re sprinting along a side street I had not yet explored, a long narrow one-laner dwindling westward off of Elm Street. More shuttered small houses, a filling station with the pumps torn from the ground. As I run after the dog my stomach starts to growl and I laugh a little, a little jagged riff of madman laughter, contemplating the possibility that this is some sort of desert-island mirage: the madman running for the hazy sight of water, the tall hungry policeman hurtling after an illusory bucket of chicken.

The road slopes upward a little, passes through a couple of stoplight intersections, and then to the right is a parking lot—at the center of which, disconcertingly, is the instantly recognizable form of a Taco Bell. The garish exterior in purple and gold, the cheap stucco walls, one of a million such small purpose-built structures that bloomed in the outskirts of small towns in the last half century of American civilization. But there is no question of it being cut-rate Mexican, the smell now billowing thickly around Houdini and me. It’s fried chicken, rich and smoky and unmistakable. I wipe my chin. I’m drooling like a cartoon character.

There’s music playing, too, that’s the other odd thing. We are crossing the Taco Bell parking lot, slowly, me first with gun drawn, Houdini behind me at my pace, inching forward at my feet, and we hear big beat-driven music blaring from the restaurant—from behind the restaurant, it sounds like—raucous music, fuzzy guitars, sing-shout vocals.

I stop moving and whistle sharply at the dog, and he grudgingly heels beside me. I take a good look at the building, smashed windows showing plastic booths inside, linoleum tables, napkin dispensers. The front doors are propped open by a telephone book.

It’s the Beastie Boys. The music, blaring from the other side of the parking lot. It’s “Paul Revere,” from that really big Beastie Boys record. The chicken smell wafts toward us on the breeze, along with the music.

“Sit.” I point at the dog. “Stay.”

He obeys, more or less, making small fidgety motions while I edge along one side of the tacky little building. “Hello?” I say, back to the wall, gun up, tiptoeing my way around. “Who’s there?”

Nobody answers, but I can’t be sure I’ve made myself heard above the music. I was never a huge Beastie Boys fan. I had a friend, Stan Reingold, who was into hip-hop for about a week in junior high school. A bunch of years ago I heard that he had enlisted and ended up in Iraq with the 101st Airborne. He could be anywhere now, of course. I raise the SIG Sauer to chest level, take a big step over the hedges and into the drive-through lane.

I no longer seriously suspect that this is a mirage. The smell of the cooking chicken is too strong, mingling with the gritty tar odor of the asphalt, damp from the rain. Maybe it’s some sort of a trap, someone luring unsuspecting passersby with party music and delicious smells and then—who knows?

My view of whatever is going on back here is blocked by a gigantic RV, twenty-five feet long, backed up to the rear of the restaurant and extending perpendicularly out into the parking lot. The massive boxy vehicle is up on blocks, doors all wide open, windows down. Articles of clothing are draped over the windshield and across the popped front hood. There are red stripes along the long tan sides, and the legend HIGHWAY PIRATE is airbrushed in fanciful calligraphy along the flank. The music is coming from inside the RV, it seems like. Houdini gives a small yelp at my feet—he gave up on waiting. I bend down and pat him on the neck and hope he stays quiet. He’s not really a very well-trained dog.

The music stops, there is a breath of silence, and then it starts again, Bon Jovi now, “Livin’ on a Prayer.” We keep moving, Houdini and I, we creep along the side of the RV, and when I come around the back of it I can see the parking lot, and there is a man there with a shotgun pointed at my head.

“Stop in your tracks, brother,” he says. “Quit movin’ and tell the dog to quit.”

I quit moving and thankfully Houdini does, too. There are two of them, a man and a woman, both half naked. He’s shirtless in boxer shorts and flip-flops, dirty brown hair in an overgrown mullet. She’s in a long, loose flowery skirt, red hair, black bra. Each of them has a beer in one hand and a shotgun in the other.

“All right, brother, all right,” says the man, squinting at me. Big sweaty biceps, ruddy forehead. “Please don’t make me blow your head off, all right?”

“I won’t.”

“He won’t,” says the woman, and she takes a pull off her beer. “I can tell. He’s a good boy, right? You’re a good boy.”

I nod. “I’m a good boy.”

“Yes. He’s gonna be real good.” She winks at me. I stare at her. It’s Alison Koechner. The first girl I ever loved. The lean white body, wild curls of orange hair like ribbons on a gift.

“I’m Billy,” says the man. “This one’s Sandy.”

“Sandy,” I say, and blink. “Oh.”

Sandy grins. That’s not Alison. She looks nothing like her. Not really. What is wrong with me? I clear my throat.

“I’m sorry to stumble in on you like this,” I say. “I mean no harm.”

“Shit, man, neither do we,” says Billy. His voice is warm and boozy, soaked in laughter and sunshine.

“No harm in the world,” says Sandy.

They clink their bottles together, both still smiling, both still holding their shotguns, raised and pointed. I smile back uneasily, and then there’s a long moment, everybody assured of everybody else’s good intentions, everybody nevertheless frozen with guns drawn. The way of the world. Behind Billy and Sandy, between their RV and the back of the Taco Bell, is the little private universe they’ve created. A big old charcoal grill, heavy and black and belching smoke like a steam engine. A rickety beer-making apparatus, a tangle of plastic hoses winding around cylinders and barrels. And there, behind a low wire fence, running around on a ragged layer of straw is a bustling tribe of chickens—rushing past and around each other on their weird alien feet, cackling like merrymakers on a parade ground, waiting for a concert or an execution.

Billy breaks our tableau, stepping forward one step, and I retreat one step, aim the SIG at his face. He squints and pulls his head away, mild annoyance, like a lion ducking back from a mosquito.

“Here’s the story, brother man,” he says. “I got the beer and I got the gun, you can see that, right? You can take the beer and hang out for a bit, we’ll even feed you somethin’ before you shove off. We got a chicken on the cooker right now, since it’s coming up on suppertime. It’s a big one, right, baby?”

“Right,” she says. “Claudius.” She grins. For a confusing half second I think she’s calling me Claudius and then I realize that’s the chicken. “Three birds a day,” she says. “It’s how we keep track of the countdown.”

Billy nods, “That’s right.” Then he sniffs, tosses his hard-rock hair. “Or, option B, you do anything hilarious, you try and fox one of our chickens, and Sandy’ll shoot you dead.”

“Me?” she says, laughing with astonishment.

“Yeah, you.” Billy smiles at me, like we’re in on this together. “Sandy’s a better shot’n me, especially when it gets later and I got a buzz on.”

“Shit, Billy,” she says. “You always got a buzz on.”

“Like you don’t.”

This woman looks nothing at all like Alison Koechner, it is clear to me now. The resemblance has receded like a tide.

“Well, brother?” says Billy. “A beer or a bullet?”

I lower my gun. Sandy lowers her gun, and then at last Billy lowers his and hands me the beer, which is warm and bitter and delicious. “Thank you,” I say, as the two of them step back and gesture me into the courtyard. “My name is Henry Palace.” The dog shuffles in behind me, staring warily at the fat feathery strangeness of the chickens.

A new tune is blaring from the speakers, something heavy metal, something I don’t recognize. There are two hammocks suspended on ropes between the restaurant and the RV, swaying above paper plates littered with old chicken bones. Chinese lanterns are hung from the trees around the edges. The speakers are mounted on the outside of the vehicle; the engine is on and idling, powering the tunes, the lights, the world.

I wonder in passing how Trish McConnell is doing, back at Police House. Dr. Fenton, at Concord Hospital. Detective Culverson; Detective McGully, wherever he ended up. Ruth-Ann, my favorite waitress at my favorite restaurant. Everyone back somewhere in time, doing something else.

“Serious, though, man,” says Sandy, laying a hand on the small of my back. “You fuck with our chickens, and we blow your mopey face off.”

The chicken is delicious. I eat a polite portion, but Billy and Sandy tell me to take more so I take more and feed a bunch to Houdini, who eats with vigor, which is nice to see. I offer up three bags of honey-roasted peanuts as a side dish, which my hosts accept with delight, raising a series of enthusiastic toasts to my generosity.

They’ve been living here, “at this particular location,” for about a month, maybe six weeks, they don’t know for sure. It’s their third site, though. “Third,” says Billy, “and you gotta figure last, right?” The chickens they rustled up from their second site, a farmhouse between here and Hamlin, the next town down the highway coming up from the south. They’re snug on the hammock and I’m on the ground beneath them, sitting with my back against the vehicle while we enjoy the last of the peanuts. The chickens, Sandy says with a happy shake of her hair, were “a goddamn gift from the gods, man.”

“We got sixteen of the little emperors left, at this point,” she says. “Three chickens a day times five days equals fifteen.”

“Plus a bonus chicken,” puts in Billy.

“Oh, yeah, right, bonus chicken.” Sandy squeezes his arm.

They’re nice to listen to, these two; they’re like a little show, a mild comedy. Their pleasure in each other combines with the twilight and the misting rain to create a kind of anesthetizing fog, and I lean my head back and exhale, just listening to them talk, finishing each other’s sentences and laughing like kids. They hang out all day, they tell me, smoke cigarettes, fool around, drink beer, eat chicken. They both grew up here, as it happens, right here in Rotary, Ohio, went to prom together at Cross-County High School, but they hadn’t resided here as adults. Billy had lived “just about everywhere,” he’d done a little time, was out on parole—“still on it, officially,” he says, and snorts. Sandy for her part had gone to a two-year college in Cincinnati, married a “world-class dingleberry,” got divorced, ended up waitressing at some diner outside Lexington.

They got back in touch in the early days of the threat, back in late spring or early summer of last year, when the odds of impact were low but rising fast; low but high enough to start looking up lost loves and missed opportunities. “We found each other,” says Billy. “Facebook and that shit.” Summer burned away into fall, the odds inching up and up and up. The world started to slip and tremble, Billy and Sandy wrote each other funny e-mails about hooking up again, seeing the world out together.

“But by the time the damn thing got to be a hundred percent, the stupid Internet was gone.” Billy tosses his hair. “And I had never gotten her damn phone number—what a bonehead, right?”

“Yep,” says Sandy. “Course, I never got his, either.”

He grins at her, and she grins back, tilts her head, drinks her beer. He’s telling the story and she’s popping in now and then, adding detail, gently correcting, stroking his sweaty biceps. I am aware of an insistent internal voice telling me to keep moving on, stay on target, find a sledgehammer and get back to that garage—but I find I’m rooted in place, my back planted against the RV, my knees drawn up, slow-drinking that same first beer, watching the sunset color the tops of the trees. Houdini’s head a furry white teddy bear in my lap.

“So basically I said, screw it,” Billy says. “I fired up the Pirate and drove down to find her. And can I tell you something—sorry, man, what…”

“Henry,” I say. “Or—Hank.”

“Hank,” says Sandy, as if she was the one who asked. “I like that. Crazy part is, I was all packed. I was waiting for him.”

“You fucking believe it? She was waiting for me. Says she knew I’d be coming to find her.”

“I did,” she says, nods firmly, a mild drunk smile in her eyes. “I just knew.”

They shake their heads at their mutual good fortune, clink the long glass necks of their beers. I watch their small movements, Billy making a little ashtray out of tinfoil and tapping his cigarette into it, Sandy doing a modified, seated version of the Robot to some old-school beatbox hip-hop number coming from the speakers on the RV.

I close my eyes for a minute and drift in and out of a doze. On some level, of course, I am aware that my illogical insistence on certain ideas regarding my sister—in particular my dogged belief not only that she is alive, but that I will find her and bring her home to a city that doesn’t even exist anymore—that all of this magical thinking has extended itself, grown outward like the halo of light around a candle. If Nico has managed to stay alive by clinging to her crazy idea that the asteroid crisis is avertable, that the threat can be eliminated, then maybe she’s right. Maybe the whole thing isn’t going to happen.

Nico’s fine. Everything is going to be fine.

I blink awake after a minute or two, shake a crick out of my neck, and get out my notebook and get to work.

No, Billy and Sandy have no sledgehammer. No gas-powered jackhammer or drill. What they’ve got is fuel, enough to keep the RV running another couple days, just for the tunes; they’ve got beer and they’ve got chicken and that’s about it.

Then I figure, what the heck, and I reach into my pocket and take out the yearbook picture from the plastic Concord Public Library sleeve and unfold it carefully, because it is beginning to crumble around the edges.

No, they haven’t seen her. They haven’t seen many people at all, and definitely no adult version of this high-school girl with the glasses and black T-shirt and the wry expression. No one like that around here at all.

3.

Billy and Sandy’s little campground takes on a shabby glamour at night; they spare enough power to light the lanterns and do some close dancing under the yellow globes, weaving in and out of the cooker’s fragrant plumes. Sandy bobs her head lightly to the booming rock and roll, her long tangled red curls moving up and down, Billy’s hands wrapped around her waist like a life jacket.

I stand up and brush the dust off my pants and watch them in the starlight glimmer and think about my dead parents. Maybe it’s missing Nico, looking for Nico, maybe it’s just the intensity of these days, wondering on some level what they would have made of it all.

Every gorgeous New Hampshire September, when the leaves were in the first flush of turning and the sky woke up perfect blue, day after day, my father would say something like: “September is the queen of months. Not just here—everywhere. Everywhere in the world. September is perfect.” He’s standing out front with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, leaning forward with his palms flattened on the wood rail of the porch, breathing in the crisp smell of someone burning leaves a couple doors down. And then my mother, shaking her head, giving him that gentle tsk-tsking smile. “You’ve never been anywhere else. You’ve lived in New England your entire life.”

“Oh, sure,” he says. “But I’m right.” Kisses her. Kisses me. “I’m right.” Kisses little Nico.

The next chicken is named Augustus and he will be served at midnight, but I’ve got to get going. I’ve got work to do. I look past the RV, out at the street, and the street looks so black.

Billy wanders back over to their ramshackle Rube Goldberg brewery to fill up his bottle, leaves Sandy swaying on the dance floor, and I find I have one more line of questioning to pursue.

“What do you know about the police?” I ask him.

“Say again, Hank?”

He gazes at me while beer foams out of the dirty tap into his bottle.

“Local law enforcement. In Rotary, I mean. Do you know anything about the police around here?”

“Oh, they’re total assholes. Like all cops.”

He clocks my expression and snorts, spraying liquid out of his nose. “Oh, no!” He laughs, swipes beer off his chin with the back of his hand. “I had a weird feeling about you, I totally—” He cuts himself off, hollers to Sandy, who is swaying, eyes closed, mumbling along with Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” “Sandy, he’s a cop!”

She keeps her eyes closed, raises one hand in an absent thumbs-up, keeps on swaying.

“Listen, man, don’t bust me on the open container, all right?” He’s laughing, he can’t believe it. “It won’t happen again.”

“I’m not a cop anymore,” I say. “My position was eliminated.”

Billy pulls another big swig. “Shit, you know what? That’s what everyone should say. Whole planet, man.” He snorts. “Our position has been eliminated.”

“So,” I say. “The local cops.”

He shakes his head. “Yeah, like I said, no offense, man, but the cops around here were just your classic bully cops. They were when I was growing up, anyway, and it only gets worse, you know?”

“How long did they keep working?”

“With the big news, you mean?” Billy considers this, runs a beer-wet hand through his hair. “About two fucking seconds, most of ’em. Even the chief, Mackenzie, first-class pig that guy was.” He turns again. “Hey, Sandy, remember Dick Mackenzie?” Another eyes-closed thumbs-up from Sandy. “Pig, right?” Her thumb raises higher.

“Shit, man,” Billy says, turning back to me. “As soon as this got to be a serious thing, it was fuck it like a bucket for most of those guys.”

That’s the same story I got from Detective Irma Russel’s big leather log book—I can see it clearly, the notebook page where she wrote Jason quit, triple exclamation points. That’s how I ended up with my own brief employment as a detective in the Concord Police Department, Adult Crimes Unit. People quit, people died. A slot opened up unexpectedly. Silver lining.

“Guess some of ’em kept at it a while, though,” says Billy. “The good ones. Till the riot.”

“The riot?” I’m interested now. I squint to focus, shaking my head, shaking off the mild effects of my one beer. “What riot?”

“Prison riot. State pen.”

I blink. “Creekbed.”

“Right, that’s right. This was—man—Sandy, do you remember, when was Creekbed?”

“May,” she calls.

“Nah.” Billy scrunches his face. “June, I think.”

“June 9,” I tell him.

“If you say so.”

I nod. I do say so. Irma Russel’s last entry, June 9, neat handwriting, Heavenly Father keep a good eye on us, would ya?

“This is from a buddy of mine who heard about it from a guy he knows, a meth head that was in there, who bragged about it apparently, sick fuck. Way the meth head says, everyone still walking around with a badge got sent down there to Creekbed State Penitentiary. I guess the guards had took off, left the bars locked, you know, and the inmates were getting cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs down there. Started basically thinking everyone’d forgotten about ’em, and they were gonna die in there.”

Right. Which they would have—like caged rats—like Cortez’s mom’s boyfriend Kevin, the ex-marine. All the people who’ll be caught somewhere when Wednesday comes: all the prisoners, all the elderly or incapacitated on life support, those morbidly obese people who can’t leave the house without a piano mover. Everybody, really, all of us, trapped in place, like the damsel in distress in the old movie, tied to the tracks with the train barreling down.

“So they set the damn place on fire,” says Billy.

“The cops?”

“No, man, the bad guys. My buddy’s buddy and his pals. There were like a couple hundred or more in there.” Billy’s beer is empty again; he presses the spigot to refill it. “They set their own joint on fire, just to call some attention, and whatever cops was left around here, the cops and the fire folks, the what do you call ’em—ambulance guys. All went down there. And then I guess things—uh, things got real nasty.” He looks over his shoulder at Sandy, and then leans in to continue the conversation sotto voce, as if to protect her from such conversations, from wasting a moment’s thought on this stuff. “Real nasty. As soon as a couple of ’em were rescued they were taking guns off the cops, shooting at the cops, the firemen and all. Locking folks in the fire, you know, just for…” He shrugs. “Just ’cuz.”

He looks down into his bottle. “I mean, I don’t like cops”—he laughs a little—“no offense, like I said. But this…”

He trails off, clears his throat, tries to pull the glimmer back into his smile.

“Anyway, so that was about it around here, as far as police. Since then it’s every man for himself, you know?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Sure. I know.”

“That about the story where you came from?”

“Yeah,” I say, and I can see it, Concord on fire, the statehouse dome gleaming red with flame. “Just about.”

Red towns, blue towns, black. It’s almost over. It’s almost here.

I record the conversation about Creekbed in my little blue notebook: the date, the sequence of events. I am considering as I write whether there might be some crossover here, some connection to Nico and Jordan’s group and their presence in Rotary, Ohio. What I know is that Nico was summoned out here as of mid-July, after this scientist with the clandestine plan was located in Gary, Indiana. Even if that much of it is true, which it probably is not, it is hard to imagine Jordan and his allies mustering the resources and strategic thinking to arrange a prison riot, a terrible fire, just to clear the few cops remaining from the Rotary, Ohio, police station.

Still, though, I write it down. The thin pages of my notebook are smudged with new question marks.

My grieving for Detective Irma Russel I condense into five seconds. Ten seconds. Not my story. Not my case. Still, though, you can picture it, the fiery prison, rescuers rushing in, gunshots, flames, people pounding on cell walls, screaming and burning behind thick glass doors.

“Oh, and Billy, what I wanted to ask: Do you know anything about the station itself?”

“Nah.”

“When it was built? Whether there’s a basement?”

“Man, I just said I don’t know anything about it.” Billy’s big tailgate-party smile wavers. Sandy wanders over to the home-brew setup, smiling vacantly. Billy is asking himself, how long am I supposed to give this guy? How many minutes out of however many minutes remain for the stranger with the notebook and the questions, who can offer nothing in return?

“Thank you, Billy,” I say, and close my notebook. “You’ve been very helpful.”

“No sweat, brother,” he says, walking away. “I gotta go and kill Augustus.”

Now it’s time to leave, it really is. The moon is up.

But I stand inside the RV with Sandy, watching Billy select and slaughter the final chicken of this twenty-four-hour period. Houdini remains outside, at the edge of the coop, his chin lowered in his paws, staring warily at Billy as he stalks among the waddling birds. Now there’s nothing left. Billy has got long yellow gloves on, pulled up almost to his elbows, and a heavy butcher’s apron over his bare upper body, tufts of black chest hair sprouting up over the top of the apron. The coop looks new; the crossbeams, connecting from post to post to post and strung with chicken wire, are of pine wood, smooth and regular two-by-fours, newly cut and precisely measured. The posts themselves are concrete. At the base of one of the posts of the coop is stamped a small three-letter logo, the single word JOY in all caps.

“Hey. Hey,” I say suddenly. “Hey, Sandy. That chicken coop.”

“Nice, huh?” She’s transfixed, watching Billy in his yellow gloves lift doomed Augustus out of the crowd.

“Sandy, who built that coop for you all?”

“The chicken coop?”

“Yes, right. Who built it?”

“This guy,” she says through a yawn. “This Amish guy.”

“Amish guy?”

Billy and the chicken a blur at the periphery of my vision. My mind rushing and racing. Billy lifts the bird by the neck, lifts it high as if considering the weight. Houdini’s eyes follow the squawking, flapping victim.

This Amish guy, Sandy says, Billy encountered down in Rotary proper. “He was in town, putting up signs, basically. Odd jobs, concrete work. Will work for food, you know.” She looks at me, sees my intent expression—concrete work, I’m thinking, just two little words, concrete work—she keeps talking. “It was funny, actually, I was just telling Billy we had to make ourselves a coop for these damn things, and he says he’s got no idea how to do that. Half hour later, we run into these guys.”

“These guys? There were more than one of the Amish guys?”

“No. One Amish guy. A big guy, older guy, big thick beard, black with gray in it. Must have come from down county, that’s where they live out here. But he had a couple of foreigners with him, you know?”

“Foreigners, as in CIs.”

“Yeah. Exactly. CIs. Confused-looking sons of bitches. Chinese maybe? I don’t know. But they didn’t say a word, they just worked. Worked hard, by the way. The Amish guy, though, he was calling the shots.”

“Did you get his name?”

“You know what? I did not. I know Billy didn’t. I think we just called him Amish Guy for the four hours he was here. He didn’t laugh, but he answered to it.”

Billy presses the chicken’s small pinched face down on the top of an upside-down wooden crate to hold it still. The chicken angles his head upward by instinct so it seems to be staring straight ahead, while Billy’s big hand steadies the wriggling round body. He brings the axe down in one long sweeping arc, slams the blade through the chicken’s tiny neck, and blood shoots out in all directions. Billy turns his head away, just for a second, an expression of pure horror and disgust. The chicken’s body jumps and he holds it steady with his hands. Houdini comes to life, barking like mad, watching the twitching corpse of the chicken, the blood spouting from the open neck.

I pick up the pencil again and I get back into it with Sandy, taking everything down, writing quickly, all the new information, progressing rapidly toward the end of the notebook. Amish guy, up from down county—how far away is down county?—down county is forty miles. Two catastrophe immigrants on the crew with him—Asian men, anyway—but you’re sure he was the boss—he was the boss. Concrete work—you asked him to do the coop in concrete—no, he suggested it, he knows concrete, the hell do we know…

My fingers gripping the pencil in the old familiar way, my heart doing the thing it does when I’m working, soaking up facts like a sponge, really gunning and going. Sandy’s eyes are wide and amused as I nod and nod and echo her words, circle back to get things right, breathing fast, experiencing a welcome burst of self-confidence, a belief in myself as possessing the instincts and the intelligence to do this work properly. Five years? Ten?

I realize that my eyes are closed, I’m thinking hard, and then I open them and find that Sandy is staring at me—no, not staring, gazing, looking me over with a kind of abstract interest, and for a brief strange second it’s like she can see into my skull, watch the thoughts in there rotating and spiraling and orbiting each other in patterns.

I clear my throat, cough slightly. There is a trickle of sweat running down her chest, disappearing into the space between her breasts.

“What was her name?” she says.

“Who?”

“The woman. Any woman. One of the women.”

I blush. I look at the floor, then back up at her. She had reminded me of Alison Koechner, but it’s Naomi that I say. I whisper the name—“Naomi.”

Sandy leans forward and kisses me, and I kiss her back, pressing myself against her, my excitement about the investigation rolling over, accelerating, transforming into that other big feeling, that exhilarating and terrifying feeling—not love, but the thing that feels like love—bodies rising to each other, nerve endings opening up and seeking each other—a feeling I know, even as it floods into my veins and my joints, that I will probably never feel again. Last time, for this. Sandy smells like cigarettes and beer. I kiss her hard for a long time and then we pull apart. The moon is up and full and bright, coming through the kitchen windows of the RV.

Billy is there. He’s watching in silence, holding the chicken by the stump of its neck, the plump body rotating in his fist, steam rising from the hot dead animal. Billy’s taken off his apron and there is a slick of sweat on his neck and shoulder muscles, blood flecked on his bare chest, blood splattered along the hem of his underpants. He smells like charcoal and dirt.

“Billy,” I begin, and Sandy shivers slightly beside me, drunk or fearful, I don’t know. How absurd it’ll be if I just die here, right now, the end of the line, how ridiculous to die on day T-minus five from a shotgun blast in a lover’s triangle.

“Hang out another half an hour,” he says. “Eat more chicken.”

“No, thanks.”

“You sure?” he says. Sandy crosses the small space of the RV kitchen, hugs him around the waist, and he squeezes her back while he holds the chicken aloft. “I just gotta pluck him.”

I could stay, I really could. I think that they would have me. I could stake out a space in the dirt by the Highway Pirate, slump down low in it, and wait things out.

But no, that’s not—that’s not going to happen.

“Thank you. Really,” I say. New facts. New possibilities. “Thanks a lot.”