On Rabbit Lane, the electricity still works, but Lois's and George's cars are gone. Karen is on the floor by the blank, snowstorming TV. Her knees are up to her chin, but her eyes are far, far away. She's shivering madly. Her forearms resemble a freshly plucked chicken.
"Karen? Karen—honey?" Richard says, but there is no response. He picks her up in his arms and is about to stand up when Karen speaks.
"It's happening," she says. "It's here. What I saw back then …"
"I know, honey."
"I tried to run away from it so long ago."
"Karen—I know, but you've gotta tell me. Something big's going on—all over the world. And you know what it is. Tell me, please." Karen squeezes her eyes shut and says nothing. Richard is exasperated: "Jesus H. Christ, Karen, can you tell me what's going on! Speak tome!"
She says, "The world's falling asleep. But not me. I don't know about you."
"Who told you?"
"The voices—they came in clearly this afternoon. I could finally hear them. Him. Jared. It. I don't know."Richard carries her onto the couch, smothers her body in blankets, and ignites the gas fireplace, which throws off considerable heat. He then cradles Karen in his lap and she calms down. Richard collects his thoughts. "Now tell me, Karen, what are we in for? Why us? Why here? Why you and me and … ?"
"Richard, I have a brain the size of a seventeen-year-old's. It's not always easy."
"Does anybody else live?"
"I don't know. I only know about us here close to home."
"What are we supposed to be doing?"
"I told you I don't know. Now stop this."
Richard thumps the sofa. "Jared! Jared! Can you hear me?"
"Don't scare me by thumping like that. Anyway, he, or whatever it is, can't hear you, Richard. He's busy."
"How obvious. I should have known."
"This is not a very good time or place for sarcasm, Richard."
"It's called irony these days."
"Whatever."
23 STEEL MINK BEEF MUSIC
She breathes deeply; the plastic-wrapped beef cool on her cheeks.
The lucky people, thinks Lois, will fall asleep inside their sleep: blissful sleepiness followed with a visit to dreamland forever— heaven—the cold clear hills that graced the world of her youth.
Lois was at Super-Valu in Park Royal, striding purposefully amid the store's glorious aisles of glorious food all gloriously lit, when the sleeping began. She was savoring the waves of admiration sent her way by staff and shoppers who recognized her from the previous evening's broadcast.
"You are so strong," said one young woman.
"A saint," said another. Lois's cheeks burned with pleasure.
Lois was the first shopper to notice a sleeper, a young woman in blue sweat clothing asleep beneath the cauliflower and broccoli bins. Lois bent down to gently tap her on the shoulder; a shank of hair fell from the woman's face revealing her peaceful death mask.
Paramedics were called, and no sooner had the young woman been moved into the back office when a shout came from down the mall outside the Super-Valu—news of another death. A nervous buzz began among the shoppers. "Just the oddest thing, isn't it?" said the woman in line in front of Lois. "Plastic bags, please—I mean, you just don't see something like that too often and then—"
Lois's eyes flared wide open; behind their till the cashier was yawning, falling down onto her knees and taking a nap before them. "Hello?"
The cashier from the next till came over. "Susan? Susan?" The cashier looked up at Lois. "No," Lois said, "it can't be."
The woman grabbed the intercom and beckoned management down to the tills pronto. Another shopper fell asleep on the frozen foods aisle's cold white floor. With news of this, delicate pandemonium broke out. Customers abandoned their carts and dashed for the exits. A voice came over the speakers announcing that due to technical problems, the store would have to close for the day.
Lois watched the shoppers panic. The man behind her squeezed his full cart through the space behind the clerk and left the store without paying. Lois, like some shoppers, moved out of the checkout area and stood silently in one of the main aisles to watch the scene unfold. Two more shoppers keeled over; the mall's tiny first-aid post lost its ability to cope with trauma. From some unknown corner, a siren, dormant since the days of the USSR, woke up frightened and cranky.
At the end of the aisle Lois saw her neighbor, Elaine Buchanan, piling steaks and chickens into a cart. She walked down to say, "Elaine—"
"Lois. If you're smart, you'll do this, too. Whatever's going on is way bigger than any of us." Elaine lurched slightly, putting a Family-
Pak of hamburger into the storage area on the cart's bottom. "That does it—I'm bailing out of here. Better for you, too.""But Elaine—how do we know this isn't just a local thing?"
"Lois, listen to the sirens."
Lois had the strange sensation of being back in the 1960s, back when grocery stores had contests where a winner could keep all the food that could be crammed into a cart within sixty seconds. She had always wanted to win that particular prize.
Many shoppers had taken Elaine's strategy to heart; Lois stood and watched her world go random, shoppers pilfering the shelves as fast as tinned pyramids could topple. There was a scream, a shout, the sound of tipped carts and breaking jars. And then the main lights failed and emergency lighting kicked in. Lois saw panicked silhouettes, like visions of souls in the underworld, percolate over by the front entrance where lazy daylight chinked into the structure. Another body hit the ground.
The lights returned and the store was almost empty of patrons; a few lay conspicuously asleep on the floor. Rather peaceful looking, Lois thought. She bent down to look into their faces and said good night to them. She walked out toward the front of the store and nobody stopped her or prodded her onward. Shrill alarms continued flaring from unknown corners. Turning around, Lois saw that the store was all but abandoned. The lights failed once more and Lois calmly walked around the supermarket bathed in pale orange emergency lights. Nearby, Elaine lay asleep on the floor, a cartload of beef her tombstone.
The Super-Valu was her empire. Today is the twenty-eighth—the day her daughter had foolishly predicted some kind of end. Karen. Who is this child of mine? What did I ever do to deserve her? What did I ever do that led us to this, this collapse of the world? Lois rifled through her memories of Karen's youth, but found no particular incident that might lead her to believe Karen was special—marked for a strange destiny.
Lois thought of Karen and the children who grew up so wild inside the forest. She remembered what the realtor had said when they bought the Rabbit Lane house in 1966. George had asked him if there were any community centers for the kids to go to. The Realtorlaughed and pointed to the forest. "That's all you need." Lois has no doubt that the children did filthy, vile things in there. Drugging. Fucking. Drinking.
She yawns and looks down at the frozen meat section. So cool and comforting. Her upper skull is tingly, and she remembers photographs of Elizabeth Taylor with a bald, scarred head after brain surgery. I think I've had just about as much of this world as I'm able to take. I'm pooped. I'm sleepy. I just want to go home. She lifts her legs and climbs up onto the meat. She breathes deeply; the plastic-wrapped beef cool on her cheeks. She closes her eyes and goes home.
Linus and Pam are filming on location a few miles up the mountain in a vast, stuccoed bunker resembling a cross between a medical/dental center and the compound of a South American drug lord. It is a neighborhood of houses built in the early nineties designed solely to maximize floor space and ignore the outer world save for a postcard city view out the front windows. The view dictated that the neighborhood be free of trees. Even at the best of times, a drive through its unpeopled streets lined with blank white boxes was spooky; on a glum day charged with blood, it is outright haunting.