When everything was clean, he wrote a note to Natalie explaining where he’d gone. Normally he would be at work at this time of day, so he invented a story about coming home sick (which wasn’t much of a stretch when you thought about it). He’d retrieve Ben and Brandon from daycare and then hit the store, and if Natalie wasn’t home by then they would set out looking for her.
As long as the power stayed off, nothing was going to be easy. But anything was easier than living another day as a fraud. As a failure to his family.
Maybe this was the apocalypse. Maybe it was the end of everything.
Or maybe, possibly, the heavens had handed him a new beginning.
FIVE
Skylar couldn’t stop watching the side mirror, couldn’t stop turning around to look at the disaster behind them. The smoke was black and dense and rose above the horizon like a mountain range. It made her think of that terrible morning in 2001 when the Manhattan skyline had turned apocalyptic, how she’d been sure the whole world was coming to an end. But the world hadn’t ended after 9/11. It had instead become gripped by fear and tribalism and absurdity. Divisive cable media coverage widened narrow political differences into canyons impossible to traverse, and for what? To sell bad products and even worse ideas? To separate unassuming people from their hard-won dollars?
How frivolous it all seemed now that there was an actual problem to face. Now that the world had been served an apocalypse that was not self-inflicted.
There was also this: If Thomas hadn’t offered to pick her up, if she’d hired a car service, Skylar would never have made it out of the airport. For that matter her decision to land in Dallas had been last minute. Her original flight had been direct to Los Angeles, and if she hadn’t changed her mind, that plane would have fallen out of the sky somewhere over the American heartland.
She wondered if her parents were okay. And her brother. And Roark. Why couldn’t she be facing the apocalypse with Roark instead of a man she’d met only a half hour before?
For the past ten minutes Thomas had been making steady progress on the expressway, dodging cars and declining to make eye contact with hordes of people walking in the median. Now Skylar noticed new movement in the side mirror. It was another operational vehicle, an old red pickup. When she turned around, she could see it was slowly gaining on them, slaloming between stationary cars.
“Hey,” she said. “There’s a—”
“Truck, I know. Get down.”
“Why?”
“Please.”
Skylar was not accustomed to taking orders, especially from someone she barely knew, but the commanding tone in Thomas’ voice was undeniable. She bent over awkwardly, as if she were looking for something in the floorboard.
“This is stupid.”
“We don’t know these guys.”
“But they’re going to see me doing this. I’m not invisible.”
“Yeah, but down there you’re just some random girl and not Skylar Stover.”
Guys who weren’t famous always wanted to handle her like fragile material. They seemed to forget she lived with her fame every day. Of course she loathed the paparazzi, always being stared at, always hearing whispers when she bought groceries or coffee or maybe a book. Who wanted to be asked during dinner to take selfies and sign autographs? What actress was pleased to see her stricken face on the cover of Us Weekly and OK!? But in the end, all the attention seemed like a fair trade for the benefits afforded by celebrity. And if a drooling fan ever got too close, four years of cardio kickboxing might come in handy.
She assumed Thomas would have understood all this, since his first screenplay had put him on the map in Hollywood, but then again writers were a different breed than actors.
“Hey!” a man yelled over the growl of an engine, his voice colored by a deep drawl. “Nice car, boy!”
Thomas didn’t say anything she could hear.
“Where y’all headed? And what’s she doing down there?”
“Lost a contact lens,” Thomas yelled.
“Y’all need help?”
“Nah, we’re good!”
A few seconds passed, and Skylar expected to hear the pickup recede into the distance, but it didn’t. That’s when she realized why Thomas was being so cautious: Even though they were traveling on a highway in the middle of the city, without an obvious or even implied police presence, the two of them were on their own if there was trouble. She was also forced to concede that certain people would be more likely to harass them if they knew she was a famous actress.
“Ain’t this a trip?” the fellow in the pickup yelled. “Whole world’s fucked up!”
“You got that right,” Thomas replied.
“Well, good luck to ya. You got a runnin’ car. I’m sure we’ll see you around!”
“Maybe so,” Thomas yelled back.
Finally, the pickup seemed to pull away.
“Can I come up for air yet?”
By the time they left the turnpike, the pickup was long gone. Skylar hid behind sunglasses while Thomas steered them between stalled cars on surface streets. He didn’t bother to stop at intersections because none of the traffic lights were working, and anyway no one was coming. Since the truck, they hadn’t seen another working vehicle or any sign of electricity.
People were everywhere. They streamed on sidewalks and stood in parking lots and sat in their cars with the doors open, as if their engines would come back to life if they waited long enough. Skylar wondered what they were all thinking. How many people even knew what a pulse was?
That made her remember the suicidal husband. Had the pulse interrupted his plans? Would they ever know without going to check on him? How could they not check on him? Either to help Seth or the family he would leave behind?
She almost said something to Thomas about it, but the dark and determined look on his face convinced her to wait.
Eventually they arrived at an intersection that was completely blocked by stalled cars. A blue Chevy SUV had plowed into the back of a black Infiniti SUV, and several cars had swerved to dodge the accident. These evasive maneuvers had filled all available lanes and even some imaginary lanes. Thomas shifted the transmission into reverse, intending to bypass the intersection through an adjacent parking lot, and when he did, a nearby young woman and her daughter approached the car.
“Excuse me, sir,” said the woman. Her blonde hair was tied behind her head and Skylar could tell she had been crying. The little girl’s eyes looked vacant, as if she had opted out of reality.
“Yes, ma’am?” said Thomas, his smiled visibly strained.
“Why is your car running when others aren’t?”
Skylar noticed other pedestrians drifting toward them. In the distance, over the tops of buildings and trees, black smoke continued to roil into the sky. She tried not to look at the new star, but it was impossible to ignore.
“I’m not sure,” Thomas said. He put the transmission back into gear and began to roll forward. “At this point we’re just trying to get home.”
“Where are you headed? Can you give us a ride? I only live a few blocks that way.”
The woman was pointing in the direction Thomas had been headed. The desperate look on her face and the vacant look in the little girl’s eyes made Skylar want to reach out and hug both of them.