“Abigail, what is the name of the town in Ohio?”
“First you have to help me,” she says, and reaches out her hands in their latex gloves and covers my hands. “I can’t do it. I’m too scared to do it.”
“Do what?” I say, but I already know, I can feel it pouring out of her eyes. She pushes one of her semiautomatics across the table to me.
“I know the name of the town. I have a map. But then you do it and do it fast.”
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.”