“If we turn on each other,” replied Kirk, “everyone’s gonna lose.”
“Which is why we’re leaving,” said Blaise. “The situation here is unsustainable.”
“Maybe so,” said Kirk. “But I can’t say I like your chances. We send out men every morning, but all the stores and restaurants have been stripped bare for days. The roads coming up from Dallas are packed with refugees. My men said the tollway was like a war zone.”
“We still want to see what’s out there,” said Blaise. “Even if it’s a risk.”
“That’s your prerogative. Check in with our men at the bridge and they’ll note you as residents. The main fellow up there is Billie Joe.”
“Thank you,” said Blaise.
“Excuse me,” said the young guy in the tight T-shirt. “Are you Skylar Stover?”
Larry, standing just behind Skylar, stepped forward. His need to protect her from overconfident creeps felt biological.
“Yes,” she said. “Thomas is a friend of mine.”
“Holy shit!” said the third man. “I didn’t even recognize you. You’re a lot smaller in real life than in the movies. How’d you end up in Lakewood Village?”
Larry glared at him. At all of them. As if Skylar could ever care about these plebeians! Why did she waste time answering their questions?
Finally, they continued east, past a few large homes and vacant fields. It would have been a clear day if not for the smoke, yet nowhere Larry looked could he find sky that could believably be called blue. And for the first time during this entire ordeal, he felt a tickle in his lungs from breathing smoke.
No one spoke for a while, and beyond the sound of their footfalls, the silence was overpowering. Larry had never considered until the pulse how much he’d come to depend on the constant hum of the world. Refrigerators clicking on, cars going by the window, mobile phones buzzing, hard drives whirring, the quiet roar of a distant highway, a plane flying by, the shriek of air brakes, the screech of tires against concrete, the lovely whisper of a beautiful woman’s voice, a man yelling Get out of the left lane, fuckface!
The makeshift security gate was a row of six hay bales arranged to create an entrance and exit. Once they were through it, the bridge stretched before them, six lanes of bright concrete marked here and there with vandalized cars. By now the smoke was so thick the eastern shore of the lake was shrouded in a dreamlike haze.
“Well,” said Blaise. “This is it. If any of you have second thoughts, you’ll want to turn back now.”
“It’s too late for that,” answered Larry. “Let’s go.”
As they left the peninsula behind, as land disappeared beneath the bridge, Blaise began to tell a long, improbable story about his confrontation with a Rhode Island judge over a speeding ticket. Larry didn’t even pretend to pay attention. His consciousness reached past Blaise’s northeastern drawl to listen for the gentle lapping of waves beneath them. Haze hovered over the water like fog. In the distance he saw, or thought he saw, a group of boats on the water. As Blaise lied about his verbal attack on the judge, Larry, grimy now with sweat, imagined diving straight over the low wall of the bridge. He would take Skylar’s hand in his, they would slice into the water, and together the two of them would find a new life in the murky depths of the lake. He imagined how they might adapt. Evolve. In such low light their eyes would grow large and sensitive. Their ears would discover new sounds, like the ringing chimes of freshwater fish. The two of them would grow gills and webbing between their hands and toes. Eventually their legs would fuse into great, green tails, and Skylar would shed her clothes, her beautiful round breasts swollen with milk that he would drink and drink and drink.…
Larry looked over at Skylar and saw her staring straight at him. He smiled seductively before he realized he was erect.
Bits of conversation floated by as they approached the eastern end of the bridge. A mass of humans had gathered along the shore on both sides of the road. When Larry looked closer, he noticed several men and a few women standing in waist-deep water with fishing poles in their hands.
A young, frightened-looking couple broke away and approached them. The two might have been newlyweds.
“Sir,” said the groom. He was tall and lanky, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts and flip flops. “You just came from the other side of the lake? Is it safe over there?”
“People are starving over there the way they’re starving here,” said Blaise, continuing to walk.
“I mean from the fires. We keep having to move north, and I don’t know what’s going to happen if we can’t stay on the lake anymore.”
“First of all,” Blaise explained, “that’s not the other side of the lake. That’s Lakewood Village, and they aren’t letting anyone on the peninsula who isn’t a resident. You should carry as much water as you can and go find somewhere else to set up camp.”
“But it’s so hot,” the bride said. “We need the lake to stay cool.”
“I’m sorry for you,” said Blaise. “We have to keep moving.”
For a while they walked without speaking, and though Larry tried to keep his eyes on the road, he was helpless not to examine this new world that was both familiar and bizarre. Here was a Sonic and a Subway and a Starbucks. A bank and a church. And in every green space, like baseball diamonds and soccer fields and vacant lots, families were camped under the brutal and still rising sun. Mothers clutching babies and a man yelling at another man and a skinny, bearded fellow playing an acoustic guitar. Larry noticed there was order to the way people had settled themselves, clusters of white families and Hispanic families and black families, an arrangement that seemed perfectly natural when there wasn’t a cultural pundit nearby to render judgment.
A little while later they passed a long, open field that was bordered near the road by power lines. A couple of the poles stood near each other, connected by a horizontal third, which made them look like uprights on a football field. Suspended between these poles were three cylindrical power transformers, painted gray and charred near their tops. One of them had been split down an apparent seam.
The damage from the pulse was almost inconceivable. He wondered which nearby star had gone supernova. He wondered exactly how far away it had been. Anything inside twenty-five light years would eventually kill them all, because an onslaught of gamma rays would erase the ozone layer. Even one hundred light years might not be far enough to save humanity in the long term. Irradiation by cosmic particles could cause widespread cancer and genetic mutation that would lead to a mass extinction event or change the course of evolution. None of this could be known, or even measured, which in a way rendered their struggle meaningless. If Larry could get sick and die in weeks or months, what was the point of anything? Why fight to survive? Why not renounce social norms and become a merman and marry a beautiful mermaid actress?
He wondered if these strange thoughts were his own, or if someone had written him to look like a creep. He considered that his sense of time passing had become untethered from measured time. Without clocks or the rhythms of life, if Larry wasn’t watching television or counting the minutes until his first whiskey of the day, these discrete points and units became meaningless. Time’s passage lost focus until it became the ringing of a giant bell that threatened to shatter his brittle reality into a billion tiny pieces. Timey pieces. If he didn’t keep track, he would quickly forget which day it was. Which month it was. Did measuring time really matter when a civilization lapsed into chaos? Clocks and calendars, after all, weren’t tangible objects. They were mental constructs meant to organize and approximate reality. And when the math didn’t add up, you added leap years to make it right.