He bumped into Abby Cushman, who gestured left: a doorway. Matt pulled Belanger over the threshold. Kindle was braced against the wall, holding his lantern into the corridor; he saw Belanger and said, “That’s it! Matthew, help me close this door.”

They wrestled it shut. Kindle hawked and spat a black wad onto the floor. “Grab that two-by-four, we’ll nail this thing shut. Then see how people are doing.” Kindle took a hammer from his carpenter’s belt. He drove nails into the framing of the door while Matt braced the two-by-four and struggled to clear his throat.

This was some kind of furnace or plumbing room, from what Matt could see—concrete floor, exposed pipes, a huge water heater. The air in the room was dense with suspended particles, but it was relatively still. Eventually some of this garbage would settle out; in the meantime—“Any of you having trouble breathing, try wrapping a cloth over your nose and mouth.”

Jacopetti, weakly: “This isn’t the linen cupboard.”

“A hank of shirt or something. For those who feel they need it.”

With the door barred, Matt set about investigating injuries. He took the lantern from Kindle and called Beth to help. Tim Belanger first: the City Hall clerk beginning to recover from a bad blow to the head. His hair was sticky with blood, but the injury didn’t appear to be severe—as far as Matt could tell under these primitive circumstances.

Miriam Flett was having trouble catching her breath, but so were they all. He encouraged her to spit if she needed to: “We’re not being formal tonight, Miriam.”

She managed, “I can see that.” She held a ragged plastic shopping bag clutched in her left hand—the journals.

Jacopetti had suffered some recurrence of his angina, but it wasn’t crippling—“That’s normal, right, Doc? I mean if a fucking building falls on you?”

“I think we’re all doing pretty well.”

“We don’t have blankets,” Abby said mournfully. She coughed, gagged, coughed again. “We don’t have anything.”

“There’s water in that tank at the back,” Kindle said. “I checked this place before the storm. Maintenance guys used to come down here for their breaks. We got a card table around the corner and a coin machine full of candy bars.”

“Do we have any change?” Abby asked.

“No,” Kindle said. “But I got this hammer.”

The wind howled on. But the storm was breaking, Matt thought. That was the basic fact. They had come through the worst, and now the storm was wearing itself out on the heel of the continent. Morning would come in a few hours.

Overhead, the wind still gnawed the raw ruin of the building; but the wind had begun to ease.

Tom Kindle joined Matt, sat down wearily with his arms on his knees. Kindle had been a great strength, but he was starting to show his fatigue. His face was caked with dust; his hair was a gray-black tangle.

“If the hospital’s gone,” Kindle said, “there can’t be much left of Buchanan.”

“I guess not,” Matt said.

“Knowing the sentiments of people, once this storm clears, we’ll probably be heading east.”

“Probably.”

“Pity about the town being gone.”

Was it gone? Matt had avoided the thought. But it must be. What could stand up to the wind? Commercial Street: gone. City Hall: gone. The marina: washed out to sea.

Dos Aguilas: gone. Old Quarry Park, a wilderness of mud and fallen trees.

And his house, the house where he had raised his daughter, the house where Celeste had died. Gone. But—

“That isn’t the town,” Matt said. The thought came to him as he spoke it, rising out of his fatigue and his sorrow. “The people in this room are the town. We’re the town.”

“Then maybe the town survived after all,” Kindle said.

Maybe it did, Matt thought. Maybe the town would live to see morning.

Part Four

The Harvest

Chapter 25

Traveller

The boy had come a long way.

He had the skinny body of a twelve-year-old, toughened by his time on the road. His eyes were blue, his hair a dusty brown. He wore jeans, a plain white T-shirt loose at the waist, and a fresh pair of high-top sneakers.

He liked the sneakers. Laced tight, they braced his ankles. They felt good on his feet, a second skin.

He rode an expensive Nakamura mountain bike he had found in a store window in Wichita. The bike had grown dusty as he pedaled north on 15, crossing the border from Utah into Idaho. Last night, camped at an Exxon station, the boy had cleaned the bike with a damp rag. He had oiled the freewheel and the brake calipers, the cables and derailleurs. He had tightened the chain and the crank arm and adjusted the bearings. This morning, the small Nak ran like a dream.

The air was cool. The sky was a hard, glassy blue—the color of a marble he had once owned.

The boy wheeled through sagebrush plains where Interstate 84 followed the Snake River, humming to himself, as absentminded as a bird. He liked the way the wind tossed his hair and snapped his T-shirt behind him like a flag.

In eighty days, he had seen a great deal of the country. He had crossed the Mississippi at Cairo, rolled through Arkansas into Texas, and sheltered for three weeks in the empty city of Dallas while storms raged overhead. He had skirted the Mexican border at El Paso and headed north along the Rio Grande, then west again on 1-40 across the Continental Divide.

He had pedaled through the immense deserts of the southwest, landscapes as large and strange as the moon. A cloudburst caught him in Arizona, filling the arroyos, spiking the arid hills with lightning and drenching him before he could find shelter. But he was never ill; he was never tired.

Now he was looking forward to the Salmon River Mountains, some of the most impassable territory in the continental United States—a wilderness of larch and hemlock, cedar and spruce.

At noon, he stopped at a nameless little farm town for lunch. He broke into a gas station cooler and pulled out two bottles of Grape Crush, drank one immediately and saved the second for later. In some towns, like this one, the electricity was still working—the soda was cool, if not icy. In the Handi-Mart next door he found TV dinners still preserved in a working freezer. That was unusual. The freezers didn’t always last without maintenance, even if the electricity was on. The TV dinners were past their best-by date, but only a little. The boy opened one and heated it in the store’s microwave oven. It tasted okay. He drank the second bottle of Grape Crush. It turned his lips purple.

The boy carried some items in a bag attached to the rear of the bike. After lunch, he opened the bag and took out a hat—a khaki bush hat from a hunting-and-fishing store back east. It didn’t fit too well, but it kept the afternoon sun off his face and neck.

He climbed onto his bike and pedaled down the white line, the precise meridian of the empty road. The wheel bearings sang a high, keen note into the silence.

He passed irrigation farms, big Ore-Ida potato plantations gone brown in the absence of humanity, then more sage prairie as he followed the Snake westward.

Near dusk, as he was thinking about breaking camp, the boy came around a slow curve into another tiny road town where a number of trucks and campers had parked in a string. He saw the motion of people among the vehicles.

The boy realized he knew a few things about who these people were and where they were going.

Their presence was troubling. It demanded a decision.

Paths diverged here. One way: the Salmon River Mountains, a last dalliance before he went Home. The other way: a less certain future.

It was perhaps not an accident that he had come across these people.