“When I lived in that town I always felt like an outcast, like everyone was better than me. All I wanted was to be accepted by the social elite, by any clique at all, but I never was. Except Natalie. No matter what anyone else said or did, she was always kind to me.”
“So you feel sorry for her?”
“I just think she could have been so much more. She was certainly smart enough. But there’s something about the culture in these sweltering Texas towns that stops a lot of people from ever trying to become who they really want to be. Like they see no point in it. Like there’s no hope left in the world.”
Skylar looked away from him and gestured at the road, at the countryside where in the distance a plume of black smoke rose toward the sky.
“Maybe they knew something we didn’t,” she said.
Twenty miles outside of Sherman they came upon a family that had made camp in the grassy median. A heavyset woman approached the shoulder and began waving her hands. When Thomas didn’t slow down, a teenaged boy and a younger girl also jumped to their feet and waved. There was a third child, a baby in a car seat, that someone had protected from the sun with a small white towel. The woman made exaggerated pointing gestures at the ground, and as they grew closer Thomas could see a man lying in the median. He could not find feet or legs, only a great, white abdomen that sloped out of the grass. The man’s faded blue polo had been hiked to his armpits, presumably to administer CPR or some other emergency procedure.
“Are you going to stop?” Skylar asked him.
“And do what?”
“Take him to a hospital. He could have had a heart attack.”
“Skylar—”
Before he could continue, the woman stepped into the road. Thomas swerved to avoid her. The cooler of drinks bounced around in the back seat.
“Jesus Christ!” Thomas yelled.
“My husband is dying!” the woman yelled back. “Please come back!”
“Thomas!” Skylar said.
“FUCK YOUUU!” the woman screamed at them, her voice already fading as they sped away.
“Come on, dude,” Skylar said. “We can’t just leave some poor sap dying on the side of the highway.”
“Imagine a hospital right now,” Thomas said. “Everyone on life support? Dead. Anyone in surgery? Also dead. If you have a heart attack and need a zap with the paddles? Too bad. No power. Hospitals are chaos. They’re death traps.”
“Hospitals have emergency power.”
“Emergency power that relies on electronic controls. It’s all off, Skylar. You know this.”
“But I still can’t believe it. I can’t believe a man can lie there next to the highway, all alone, like this is the goddamned Middle Ages. My parents are going to die in Manhattan. My brother is going to starve to death in L.A. I’m never going to see them again, am I? This is how it is forever. Isn’t it?”
Thomas wanted to make Skylar feel better, but to say anything optimistic would be a lie. He reached instead for her hand, but she jerked it away.
“Not right now,” she said and looked away from him. “I need to be alone for a while if you don’t mind.”
By the time they reached Sherman, the density of stalled cars had increased again, but there weren’t as many stranded drivers on the highway because the median had narrowed. Near the middle of town they saw a couple of pickups and an old VW bus moving on surface streets. A few people called out, but no one accosted them as the panicked wife had. Soon they were through Sherman and a little while later they found a similar scene in Denison.
A few minutes later they reached the Red River bridge and crossed into Oklahoma without incident.
THE ASCENSION OF AIDEN CHRISTOPHER (IN HIS OWN WORDS)
EIGHT
Sometimes I think about all the terrible places you could have been when the power went out, like elevators and underground highway tunnels and window washing in downtown Manhattan. Being in a commercial airliner was surely one of the worst, since those huge, computerized jets had no chance to land safely once they lost power and communications. Even so, the people in the air met their end quickly. Think about astronauts in the space station. They could have had enough oxygen to last for days. They could be alive now for all I know, looking down on our huge, blue planet, waiting for the lonely moment when their oxygen finally runs out, all the while unable to know how things are going down here. Imagine having desperate, end-of-days sex in zero gravity. What a hoot.
I was in Dallas when all this happened, in the upstairs VIP area of a club called Cinnamon, recovering from a night of debauchery with a buddy and some dancer friends of his. The reason I came to Dallas in the first place was for a golf tournament, but after it was over I decided to hang around a few extra days. Ever since I lost my job I don’t keep what you would call a regular schedule. Still, waking up drunk in a strip club on an average Friday morning is pretty nuts… unless, that is, you’re on the town with Jimmy Jameson.
Jimmy runs what he calls a small-time sports gambling Web site, but the cash he pulls from this venture seems remarkable to me. On Thursday night, before the power went out, we were still on our first drink when a muscular friend of his walked in the door carrying one of those vinyl zipper bags people use for bank deposits. The contents of the bag comprised the previous week’s proceeds from the gambling enterprise. I didn’t want to pry into his business, so I didn’t ask how much money it was, but Jimmy’s the kind of guy who always knows what you really want.
“So this week’s total came to just over ninety thousand,” he said. “During football season it might be two or three times more. Then there are the weeks where I get fucked and have to cough up fifty or sixty thousand. You don’t want to be around me when that happens.”
Last year, when I was still employed, I made almost fifty thousand dollars and felt like I was doing all right… at least before I paid taxes and health insurance and tucked a few bucks into my hapless 401(k). That probably sounds like a lot of money to some people, but in the twelve hours we spent at Cinnamon between Thursday night and Friday morning, Jimmy shelled out nearly half of my gross annual salary. In cash. If you think there’s no chance to fuck a stripper in the club, twenty thousand dollars will do it for you. And then some.
By law the club shuts down at two in the morning, but Jimmy is what you call a special customer. He shelled out five grand for use of the VIP room, two-thousand-a-piece to four separate girls, three grand to the manager on duty, a grand to our server, and the rest went to booze. Around midnight the party began to slow down, and I was lying on a sofa next to this dancer named Keri, languidly making out with her. That’s when Jimmy produced two bubble packs of green pills that turned out to be X. Apparently he pays some pharmacist to cook them up. I’d never rolled before, so I didn’t know what to expect, but half an hour later Keri pushed me into one of the private dance rooms, yanked down my pants, and swallowed me like I’ve never been swallowed. Keri is one of the sexiest women I’ve ever laid eyes on, she has the best set of natural tits you can imagine, and that night every square inch of her skin had been rubbed smooth with lotion and sprinkled with body glitter. We are talking the wildest porn dream you can imagine turned into reality by a woman who normally wouldn’t have looked twice at me. But throw a couple grand in her purse and ply her with vodka and MDMA, and suddenly you’re a rock star and she is your groupie. Even if I wasn’t the one who paid for it.