“Don’t be an asshole,” she said. She pushed a CD into the player and a moment later, Zeppelin issued through the Caddy’s crackling, overwrought speakers. She lowered the volume so it wouldn’t wake Ellie. “Close them eyes, bugaboo.”
David considered protesting some more. Instead, he reclined the seat, folded his arms over his chest, and shut his eyes. Night air coming through the cracked windows, cool and fresh-smelling, coupled with the melodious caterwauling of Robert Plant, helped usher him to sleep. At one point he thought he woke up and asked Ganymede some question—what it was, he had no idea—but then he realized he was only dreaming, and so he let himself fall into it.
48
Seven weeks earlier
There was some talk about it on the radio, but before he could catch any of the details, he lost the signal completely. It was his final day at the college—the last of his students had bailed out of their summer courses this past week, a determination David made after several attempts at e-mailing those few remaining students were met with no responses—and he had been only half-listening to the radio broadcast while letting his mind wander on the drive back home. When he finally realized what had happened, he turned up the volume . . . only to lose the station completely an instant later.
He scrolled through the other radio stations, but the rest were all dead, too. However, it wasn’t just static on each channel, but a high frequency trill that emanated from the Bronco’s speakers, a sound that was not exclusive to any one station in particular, but to all of them. It sounded like someone was deliberately jamming the frequencies.
About a mile and a half before his exit off the beltway, traffic snarled to a stop. Up ahead, two large white vehicles with flashing orange lights on the roof were parting the traffic. David could see no windows on either vehicle, and there were large vents on the sides. Despite the nondescript whiteness of them, he could tell they were comprised of bulletproof armor. Government vehicles.
A few people got out of their cars and snapped photos of the vehicles with their cell phones. Other commuters honked and shouted out open windows. David’s own vehicle came to a standstill beneath the shadow of an overpass. When he unrolled his window and craned his head out, he could see traffic on the overpass above at a standstill, too.
I don’t like this.
The radio disc jockey had been saying something about an explosion, a possible terrorist attack. David had missed most of it, but seeing those roving white vehicles with the bulletproof hides caused a finger of panic to rise up in him.
More people got out of their cars and began milling about the road. Many looked stricken. David peered to his right and saw a blond woman behind the wheel of a maroon Subaru, her knuckles white as her hands clenched the steering wheel. A small child was in a car seat in the back. David caught the woman’s eye and she quickly looked away, as if he was some swarthy figure eyeing her up on the subway. She said something, presumably to the child in the back, whom she kept glancing at in her rearview mirror.
When he heard the whirring blades of a helicopter, he got out of the Bronco and stared up at the sky. A chopper soared by, so low to the ground that David felt the wind from its rotors. It was a black, sleek affair with no insignia on it, as far as David could tell.
David squeezed between the Bronco and the Subaru and continued down the narrow slip between the parked cars. Horns blared and people shouted from every direction. Someone’s dog was barking and someone else’s baby was screaming.
“What happened?” David said, coming upon a man and a woman standing beside the open door of an F-150. The man was as thick as a construction barrel, with springy silver chest hair spooling out over the neck of his Harley-Davidson tank top, but when he turned to look at David, his was the haunted face of an asylum inmate.
“I don’t know, brother,” the man said.
“I heard something about an explosion just before my radio went dead,” David said.
“I don’t know, brother,” the man repeated, his voice cracking. “My radio’s out, too. Cops are probably using the channels.”
“They can do that?” David said.
“They’re the cops, man. They do what they want.”
The woman at his side—a meaty biker gal in her midfifties with fatty forearms reddened from the sun—pressed a set of acrylic fingernails into the cleft at her chin. Her eyes cut toward David, and he could see gobs of mascara snared in her lashes. She looked like someone who’d just been told they had twenty-four hours left to live.
“Those ain’t the cops,” she said. “They’re federal. Top-secret NSA shit.”
“No Such Agency,” said the man.
They heard sirens but couldn’t tell where they were coming from or where they were headed. People began climbing onto the roofs of their cars for a better vantage. A second helicopter cut through the sky, this one with a TV station logo on its side.