“Does Mr. Blaise have anything to eat?” asked Ben. “I’m hungry.”
“He might have some bacon left,” said Larry. “We’ll ask before we leave.”
“I still don’t know how the boys are going to walk thirty miles,” Natalie said to Seth in a voice that was meant to be a whisper, but which everyone heard anyway.
“Thirty miles!” Brandon squealed. “How far is that?”
“It will take all day,” said Seth. “But we’ll stop and drink water and rest so you don’t get tired.”
“I probably haven’t walked thirty miles in my whole life,” mused Ben.
Natalie noticed how Larry kept looking at Skylar, as if he wanted to say something to her. Natalie wondered if it ever got old, always being seen, always being noticed; she wondered what it felt like to be so universally desired.
But if the world stayed this way, if no one came along to fix the broken things, being famous would become a relic of the past, just like the Internet and electricity and air travel.
Her stomach growled and her ears rang. Her feet already hurt. But Seth’s failure had opened a vacuum of security left for Natalie to fill, and she hoped like hell she was up to the task.
“I think I know who this guy is,” Thomas said when they veered away from the road and into the woods. “I saw him at a town hall meeting a few months ago. Were you there, Larry?”
“No.”
“Apparently he owns quite a bit of land, and a real estate developer offered to buy it for a couple million dollars. But this guy thought he was being chased off the peninsula by the wealthy elite.”
“Blaise does own a lot of land,” Larry conceded.
“Is he from the northeast? Like Rhode Island, I think?”
“That’s him.”
In places the trees were so dense and choked with vines that they were forced to travel in a single-file line. But eventually the seven of them approached a white fence, which Larry explained was the border of Blaise’s property. A few minutes later the shape of a roof emerged among the canopy of trees, and finally they stepped out of the forest and onto a wispy Bermuda lawn.
“Nice of you folks to come by,” said a voice that Natalie located to a back porch and more specifically a chair. The man’s accent was a harsh Northeastern drawl.
“These people have agreed to accompany us to the warehouse,” said Larry.
“That’s good news. Are we ready to go, then?”
“My boys are hungry,” Natalie said. “Do you have anything they could eat before we go?”
She was close enough to the porch now that Natalie could see Blaise roll his eyes at this request.
“Sure,” he said. “Let’s throw a party all day and leave tomorrow. Or maybe Friday.”
“Please,” Natalie said. “If the boys don’t eat, they won’t have the energy to walk so far.”
“Oh, all right. I’ll cook a batch of bacon. But wait much longer and we’ll be walkin’ after dark.”
A few minutes later Natalie found herself in a tiny kitchen, where Blaise stood over an old white stove, peering through a cloud of steam at an enormous cast iron skillet. She guessed Blaise was thirty-five, his head and face covered in stubble that might have been a week old. The boys and Seth were sitting on an ancient sofa in the living room while everyone else stood in a wide arc around Blaise and watched him cook. The smell of frying meat made Natalie’s mouth water.
“Where did you get the bacon?” asked Thomas.
“Cured it myself. Beverly was her name. I got bread, too, as long as you take it dry.”
“I think I saw you at a town hall meeting once. Your name is—”
“Blaise Bailey Finnegan III. My friends call me BBF. Where your visitors from?”
“Tulsa,” Natalie said. “Thomas brought us here.”
“So I’m curious,” said Skylar to Blaise. “How do you know what’s going on at a warehouse thirty miles away? Did you just come from there?”
“Nah. Spoke to my friend, Tim, on the radio.”
“The radio?”
“It runs on tubes and batteries. I seen this comin’ for a while, don’t you know. Lots of us did.”
“Have you talked to anyone else?” asked Skylar. “About what’s going on in other places?”
“Couple of hams on the East Coast and one guy in Washington State. It’s the same everywhere. The fellow in Boston said half the city was on fire. The guy in Washington saw a mushroom cloud in the direction of Seattle.”
Natalie took in a hitch of breath.
“Like an atomic bomb?”
“Maybe. An even worse problem is nuclear reactors. If you don’t have water to keep the rods cool, they melt down. And if you don’t have working pumps, you don’t have water. Since the pumps are run by electronic controls… well, you can see where this is going.”
“Like Chernobyl,” said Larry.
“Probably worse, because at least the Ruskies sealed their place with concrete. Down the road from here, about a hundred miles, sits Commanche Peak. If no one stops it from melting down, it’ll probably explode and send fallout all over the place.”
No one said anything for a moment. They all stared at the floor.
“If that’s true,” said Skylar. “Why bother with the warehouse?”
“Maybe the wind will blow the fallout away from us. Or maybe they got some failsafe I’m not aware of. Either way, we can’t just sit around and wait. We gotta act as if we’re going to live. Which is why we need to get the heck on the road.”
Blaise transferred bacon from the skillet onto a heavy yellow plate. The bacon had been cooked so thoroughly it looked more like strips of wood than food. While Natalie made a plate for each of the boys, Blaise pressed more bacon into the skillet.
“Do you have anything to drink?” asked Brandon. “With this bread it’s hard to swallow.”
“All’s I got is water,” Blaise said. “In this here jug. It may taste funny but it’s clean. Came out of my pond.”
Natalie found cups in a cabinet above the jug. She half-expected the water to be tinted brown, or contain solid pollutants, but it was as clean as Blaise had promised.
“Just so all of you knows,” he said as the second batch of bacon began to fry, “this whole thing is one systematic conspiracy.”
“What whole thing?” asked Skylar.
“That light in the sky isn’t no star. It’s some kind of weapon built by the government. They did this to us because they didn’t like the way things was going.”
“Blaise,” Larry said. “We talked about this. The supernova is not a local event. It’s—”
“They’ve been working toward this for years,” said Blaise. “We’re supposed to be the richest country in the world and the roads are like the Middle East. When I moved here from Providence I busted two tires on the way. The government is sneaky and liars and they rip the people off. Where the heck you think our taxes go? To the military and fat cats who run the companies. They got some fancy city in the tropics and right now rich people from all over the world are going there while the rest of us starve to death. From all over the world. It’s always been rich against poor. Then came the Internet and us poor saps could talk to each other like no other time. They knew a revolution was brewing, so the fat cats had to kill social media and all that. They had to make it so we was in the dark again.”
Natalie got the feeling Blaise had been rehearsing this speech for a while, and as crazy as it sounded, there was a certain paranoid logic to his theory.
“You’re talking about neoliberalism,” said Skylar, who always behaved as if she knew something about everything.
“Am I?”
“The counterculture in the 60s rocked the foundation of power. Everyone knows the wealthy elite don’t care for democracy. Their solution was to destabilize education, because poorly-informed citizens can be tricked into voting away their livelihood. Even social media was a tool to separate us. They mined our data and turned our posts into battlegrounds.”