“Unit One out.”
Lila racked the mic. In the east, a faint line of Friday morning light had appeared on the horizon. Another day was about to dawn. It would be a rainy one, the kind made for sweet afternoon naps. The litter of her trade lay on the seat beside her: camera and clipboard and Simmons radar gun, banded stacks of fliers, her citation book. She took this last, tore off the top sheet, and turned it over to the blank side. She printed her husband’s name in big capital letters at the top, and then: Put me and Platinum and Mrs. Ransom and Dolly in one of the empty houses. Keep us safe. There might not be any coming back from this, but maybe there is. She paused, thinking (it was hard to think), then added: Love you both. She added a heart—corny, but so what?—and signed her name. She took a paperclip from the little plastic caddy in the glove compartment, and attached the note to her breast pocket. As a small girl, her mother had attached her milk-money, sealed in a small envelope, to her shirt every Monday, in just the same way. Lila couldn’t remember it, but her mother had told her.
With that chore taken care of, she sat back and closed her eyes. Sleep rushed at her like a black engine with no headlight, and oh the relief. The blessed relief.
The first delicate threads spun out of Lila’s face and caressed her skin.
PART TWO
I’LL SLEEP WHEN I’M DEAD
It don’t matter if I get a little tired
I’ll sleep when I’m dead.
—Warren Zevon
The spongy old boards of the porch bow and weep beneath Lila’s shoes. A powerful spring breeze shakes the field of oxtail that used to be her own front yard, and the noise is a beautiful roar. The fabulous green of the oxtails strains credulity. She glances back in the direction she has come from and sees that saplings have risen up through the broken pavement of Tremaine Street. They rock in the wind like the hands of confused clocks, trapped between twelve and one. A blue sky covers the world. In Mrs. Ransom’s driveway, her cruiser, the door left ajar, is scaled with rust. All four tires are flat.
How did she get here?
Never mind, she tells herself. It’s a dream. Leave it at that.
She goes inside her house and stops to consider the remains of the little-used dining room: windows broken, tattered curtains curling and uncurling in another waft of breeze, seasons and seasons’ worth of leaves drifted almost to the top of the mold-spackled table. The smell of rot is pervasive. As she walks down the hall, she thinks this might be a time-traveling dream.
Chunks of the living room ceiling have fallen, littering the carpet with moon rocks. The flatscreen TV is still bolted to the wall, but the screen has gone bad somehow, warped and puffed out, as if it has been baked.
Dirt and dust have whitened the sliding glass doors to opacity. Lila pulls the right one, and it opens, moaning along its decayed rubber track.
“Jared?” she asks. “Clint?”
They were here last night, sitting around a table that now lies on its side. Yellow weeds tower around the edges of the deck and sprout between the boards. Their barbecue, the center of many summer picnic suppers, has been engulfed.
In the pool, where the waters are the brackish color of a fish tank after a long power outage, a bobcat pauses breast-deep in its crossing. A bird is clamped in its teeth. The bobcat’s eyes are bright and its teeth are large and water beads its fur. Pasted to its broad, flat nose is a white feather.
Lila rakes her fingernails down her cheek, feels the pain, and decides (reluctantly) that this might not be a dream, after all. If not, how long has she been asleep?
A good while. Or a bad one.
The animal blinks its shining eyes and begins to paddle toward her.
Where am I? she thinks, then thinks, I am home, and then thinks the first thing again: Where am I?
CHAPTER 1
1
Late Friday afternoon, well into the second day of the disaster (in Dooling, at least; in some parts of the world, it was already Aurora Day Three), Terry Coombs awoke to the aroma of sizzling bacon and brewing coffee. Terry’s first coherent thought was: Is there any liquid left in the Squeaky Wheel, or did I drink the whole place, right down to the dishwater? His second was more basic: get to the bathroom. He did just that, arriving in time to vomit copiously into the toilet. For a couple of minutes he rested there, letting the pendulum that was making the room swing back and forth settle to a stop. When it did, he hauled himself up, found some Bayer and swallowed three with gulps of water from the faucet. Back in the bedroom, he stared at the space on the left side of the bed where he recalled that Rita had been lying, cocoon around her head, the white stuff in her mouth sucking inward and billowing out with each breath.
Had she gotten up? Was it over? Tears prickled Terry’s eyes and he staggered, wearing nothing but his underwear, out into the kitchen.
Frank Geary sat at the table, dwarfing it with his broad upper body. Somehow the inherent mournfulness of that sight—a big man at a tiny table in bright sunlight—informed Terry of everything he needed to know before any words were spoken. Their gazes met. Geary had a copy of National Geographic folded open. He set it aside.
“I was reading about Micronesia,” said Frank. “Interesting place. Lots of wildlife, too much of it endangered. Probably you were hoping for someone else. I don’t know if you remember, but I slept over. We moved your wife into the basement.”
Ah, now it came back. They’d carried Rita downstairs, a man to each end, as if she were a rug, banging their shoulders off the railings and the walls as they descended. They’d left her on the old couch, atop the old quilt that covered it to keep the dust off. Rita was undoubtedly lying there at that moment, surrounded by the other pieces of dusty furniture they’d discarded over the years and intended to yardsale but never got around to: bar chairs with yellow vinyl seats, the VCR, Diana’s old crib, the old woodstove.
Despondency sapped Terry: he couldn’t even keep his head raised. His chin dropped to his chest.
In front of the empty chair on the opposite side of the table was a plate with bacon and toast on it. Beside the plate was a cup of black coffee and a bottle of Beam. Terry drew in a ragged breath and sat down.
He crunched up a piece of bacon and waited to see what would happen. His stomach made noises and swirled around some, but nothing came up. Frank wordlessly added a dollop of whiskey to Terry’s coffee. Terry took a sip. His hands, which he hadn’t realized were trembling, steadied.