Beth’s paranoia began to peak. The trouble with getting stoned was that sometimes it opened a moment of great clarity, like a window. Too much clarity was a bad thing. She didn’t always like what she saw.

Tonight she saw herself alone. She felt herself alone on this dark lawn and alone on the planet, as alone as she had ever been.

She knew about being alone. She had known about it ever since her fourteenth birthday, when her mother sent her to a clinic in Portland to defuse a little ovarian timebomb set ticking by Martin Blair, her then-boyfriend, fifteen, saved from reproach by the status of his family, the Blair Realty Blairs—Martin who had actually bragged some to his friends: Yeah, he got a girl pregnant… Alone on the suction table and alone when she came back to school, Buchanan’s youngest suburban slut, according to Martin’s schoolyard testimony. Alone sitting by herself at an empty cafeteria table. Alone but daggered with stares, sniggered at in hallways, propositioned in corners by boys who lacked the courage to speak to anyone real. Alone with shame so intense that after a while she lost the ability to blush.

But that was one kind of alone, and this was another.

All these houses, Beth thought… empty of families, empty of people, full of something else, something that only looked human.

Joey broke a pane of glass in the back door of the Newcomb house and reached inside to open the lock. To Beth it sounded like a cymbal crash, a shrieking announcement of their presence.

Suddenly this wasn’t what she wanted. Not at all.

Maybe to have a normal life, do normal things… she had never let herself even imagine that. But it would be better than this. Better than breaking into an empty house on a rainy night. Better than riding Joey Commoner’s motorcycle down some dark highway. Better than any future she could imagine for herself now that the monsters had taken over the world.

The house smelled like a stranger’s house. Broadloom, air freshener, old cooking. She felt uninvited, unwanted, criminal.

Joey seemed to thrive on the sensation. His eyes were alert, his steps small and agile. The light the Newcombs had left burning was a lamp in the downstairs bedroom; it made long shadows through the doorway. Joey headed for this room first, where he pulled open dresser drawers and tossed their contents, picking out nothing in particular: a handful of twenty dollar bills, probably Mrs. Newcomb’s mad money; an empty keychain with a Volvo tag. Beth was mute, immobilized by her own guilty presence in a bedroom where she didn’t belong. Her eyes registered details she wished she could forget: the Japanese print over the bed, birds on ink-line trees; the oak dresser with cigarette burns clustered at one end; worst of all, Mrs. Newcomb’s nightgowns and Mr. Newcomb’s jockey shorts tumbled together and soaking in the contents of an overturned perfume bottle. Seeing all this was the real theft, Beth thought.

She said, “This is too weird. I don’t like this.”

“It was your idea.”

“I know, but…”

But it didn’t matter. He wasn’t listening. He was gone, vanished into the dimmer light outside the bedroom, and Beth was forced to hurry after or be left here with no company but her conscience.

The worst part was yet to come.

She lost track of time as Joey rummaged through the house. He turned on no lights, seemed to navigate by instinct or animal vision. He wasn’t robbing the house so much as possessing it, Beth thought—making it his own through an act of violation. He was fucking it. No, raping it. He left his mark everywhere: tables overturned, doors flung open, closets stripped. She followed in a daze, inarticulate even in the space of her own skull, waiting for him to finish, waiting until they could leave.

In a hallway closet, Joey found his prize, a palm-size camcorder—since when had he cared about video?—small enough to slip into his leather jacket, which he zipped up around it. Take it, she thought. Then, Christ, let’s go!

She turned away. Turning, she saw red light wash shadows of raindrops against the wall… saw this light blink on and off and on again…

Her terror began before she could pin a word on it and name the dreaded thing. She tugged Joey’s arm, almost pulled him off balance. “Joey, the police—a police car—”

He took her by the wrist and pulled her away from the window. Things were happening too quickly now; there wasn’t time to think. She followed Joey out the back door into the rainy yard. Joey inched along the wall toward the corner of the garage. She kept a hand on his jacket.

We’ll be arrested, Beth thought. Put on trial. Sent to jail.

Or—

Or something worse. Something new.

Please let it be prison, Beth thought. Not some unhuman thing, bugs in the brain, alien punishment.

Her breath hitched, and she wondered if she might begin to cry. But Joey took her hand and pulled her forward, and she was suddenly too busy for that.

He jumped onto the motorcycle and kicked over the engine while Beth scurried on behind.

From here in the shadow of the garage, protected from streetlights, perhaps invisible, Beth had a clear view of the cop car. It was parked at an angle in the street, not blocking the driveway. A Buchanan Sheriff’s Department black-and-white. There was no sound, only that relentlessly whirling dome light. It lit up the street. Red light under dripping eaves, red light spidering up tree trunks and disappearing in the leaves. Nobody had come out to watch—none of the neighbors in their yards or standing in open doorways. Maybe they already know what’s happening, Beth thought. Maybe they don’t have to look.

The Yamaha’s engine screamed; Beth clung desperately to Joey and the saddle as they roared down the Newcombs’ driveway. Now Beth saw the man inside the cruiser, at least the shadow of his face as he turned to track their motion. The cop car had been silent, not even idling; Beth expected its siren to howl, motor gun, tires squeal, perhaps the beginning of a chase, dangerous on these steep wet streets…

But the car remained silent, and Joey leaned into the curve as he pulled out of the driveway, came up short, and stopped with one foot on the road, engine idling—what was he doing? Go! Beth thought.

And then she understood: It was a dance between Joey and the cop.

Beth looked at the cop through his car window and knew from his joyless but placid expression that nothing more was going to happen: no chase, no trial, no jail.

Only this shadowy gaze… this observation.

We know you. We know what you’re doing. A raw shiver ran up her spine.

Arrest us! She aimed the thought at the cop car. Wave your gun! Yell! But there was only a dreadful silence behind the idling of the motorcycle engine.

Then Joey twisted the throttle and the Yamaha roared downhill. Crime and punishment in the new world.

Chapter 15

Meeting

Matt found Tom Kindle waiting in the empty hospital boardroom when he arrived. He had staked out a place by the window, lean and patient in his wheelchair.

“You’re early,” Kindle observed.

“So are you.”

“Nurse wheeled me down before she went off shift. There’s hardly any staff in this building anymore—you notice that, Matthew?”

“I’ve noticed.”

“Gets to be like a ghost town at this hour. Kind of scary after the sun goes down. Makes you wonder what they’re all doing with their time. Watching Dallas reruns and eating popcorn, I guess.”

Matt wasn’t in the mood. He took a notebook out of his briefcase and propped it on the podium, open to the page on which he had outlined every potential emergency and worst-case scenario he had been able to imagine (and there was no shortage) in the last month or so. He checked the clock: 7:30. Meeting was set for eight.