The girl behind the counter was Meg Tilson, who had graduated from Dex’s history class last year. She said, “Are you sure you want all this?”
The man was sweating and a little breathless. “All of it. How much?”
The register was down, of course, so Meg began to total everything on a pocket calculator. Dex lined up behind the man. “You seem to be in a hurry.” Another blank look. The man was dazed, Dex thought. He persisted: “So you know something we don’t know?”
The man in the John Deere cap turned away as if the question frightened him, but then seemed to relent: “Shit,” he said, “I’m sorry if I got in your way. I’m just…”
“Stocking up?”
“You bet.”
“Any particular reason?”
“A hundred seventy-six eighty,” Meg announced. “At least I think so.”
The man pulled two hundred-dollar bills out of his pocket while Meg, stunned, rummaged in a shoebox for change.
“1 was supposed to drive to Detroit, this morning,” the man said. “For my sister’s wedding. I wake up late, so I throw the tux in the back seat and I drive out Beacon and turn south on the highway, right? But I only get about a mile and a quarter past the city limits.”
“The road’s blocked?”
The man laughed. “The road’s not blocked. The road just ain’t there. It stops. It’s like somebody cut it with a knife. It ends in trees. I mean old growth. There’s not even a trail through there.” He looked at Dex. “How the hell could that happen?”
Dex shook his head.
Meg put the groceries in two boxes and gave the man his change. Her eyes were wide and frightened.
“I think we’re in for a long siege,” said the man in the John Deere cap. “I think that’s pretty fucking obvious.”
Meg toted up Dex’s bill, all the while casting nervous glances at the man as he loaded his boxes into the back of an old Chevy van. “Mr. Graham? Is what he said true?”
“I don’t know, Meg. It doesn’t seem likely.”
“But the electricity doesn’t work. Or the phones. So maybe—”
“Anything’s possible, but let’s not jump to conclusions.”
She looked at his collection of canned goods and bottled water, not too different from the previous order. “Should we all be—you know, stocking up?”
“I don’t honestly know. Is your father around?”
“Upstairs.”
“Maybe you should tell him what happened. If any of this is true, or even if rumors start flying, there might be a crowd in here by this afternoon.”
“I’ll do that,” Meg said. “Here’s your change, Mr. Graham.”
He put the groceries in the trunk of the car. It might have been wiser to go straight back to Evelyn’s, but he couldn’t let the matter rest. He drove past the house on Beacon, connected with the highway and turned south.
He passed a couple of cars headed in the opposite direction. Through traffic, Dex wondered? Or had they hit the mysterious barrier and turned back? He decided he didn’t believe the John Deere man’s story; it was simply too implausible… but something might have turned the man around, perhaps something connected with the power failure and the explosion on the old reserve.
The state highway wound through low pine punctuated with back roads where tar paper shacks and ancient cabins crumbled in the noon heat. He saw the city limits sign, LEAVING TWO RIVERS; a billboard ad for a Stuckey’s ahead where the state road met the interstate; LEAVING BAYARD COUNTY. Then he rounded a tight curve and almost rammed the back end of a Honda Civic parked with one wheel in the breakdown lane. He stomped the brake and steered hard left.
When the car came to a stop he let it idle a few minutes. Then, when it occurred to him to do so, he put it in park and switched off the muttering engine.
Everything the man had said was true.
Three vehicles had arrived here before him: the Civic, a blue Pinto with a roof rack, and a tall diesel cab without a trailer. All three were motionless. Their owners stood at the end of the road, huddled in confusion: a woman with a toddler, a man in a business suit, and the truck driver. They looked at Dex as he climbed out of his car.
Dex went to the place where the road ended. He wanted to make a careful observation; wanted to be able to describe this with scientific accuracy to Howard Poole, the graduate physics student back at Evelyn’s. It seemed important, in this senseless moment, to register every detail.
The highway simply stopped. It was as if someone had drawn a surveyor’s line across it. On this side, two-lane blacktop; on that side—old-growth forest.
The road seemed to have been cut by something much finer than a knife. Only a few particles of asphalt had crumbled. The graded road was lower than the forest floor on the other side. A hump of loamy soil rose above the road surface and had dropped crumbs of moss and composted pine needles onto it. The smell of the soil was rich and strong. Dex picked up a handful. It was moist and compacted easily in his fist. It had been here a long, long time.
An earthworm crawled across the white divider by his knee, sublimely indifferent.
The truck driver ground a cigarette under the heel of his boot and said, “It’s real, all right. Nobody’s driving south today.”
Beyond this line of demarcation there was no road and had never been any road. That much was obvious. The forest was deep and trackless. Not so much as a deer trail passed through here, Dex thought.
“It doesn’t seem possible,” said the woman from the Pinto. She was hugging herself and kept glancing at the forest, furtively, as if it might disappear between peeks. The toddler pressed at her thigh.
“It isn’t possible,” said the man in the business suit. “I mean, there it is. But it’s not, I mean, possible. I don’t think possible has anything to do with it.”
Still cataloging details, Dex went to the side of the road where a string of telephone poles followed the right-of-way. The phone lines had been sliced as neatly as the road. The wires dangled limply from the poles.
“That’s not all,” the truck driver said. “Even the trees don’t match. This side’s been burned off a couple of times, I think. Over there it’s all old growth. Go a little ways in that direction, there’s an old pine sliced right up the middle. All the heartwood exposed and the sap leakin’ out. The bugs aren’t at it yet, so it must have happened just recently. Like last night.”
Dex said, “You come from out of town?”
“Yeah, but I spent the night in Two Rivers. Had the alternator replaced. I sure as hell wish I could leave, but it’s the same at the other end of the highway, about three miles beyond the quarry. Dead end. I think we’re locked in, unless there’s some side road they missed.”
“They?”
“Whoever did this. Or whatever. You know what I mean. Maybe there’s still a way out of town, but I doubt it.”
The woman repeated, “How is that possible?” By the expression on the truck driver’s face, Dex guessed she had been saying it for a while now.
He couldn’t blame her. It was the right question, he thought. In a way, it was the only question. But he couldn’t answer it; and he felt his own great fear treading on the heels of the mystery.
Howard Poole chased the ladder company as far as the old Ojibway reserve. As he came over the rise where Chief Haldane and his crew had recently been, and as he saw the research installation in its veil of blue light, a memory came to him unbidden.
It was a memory of something Alan Stern had said to him one night—Stern the physicist, who might have perished in the trouble last night; Stern, his uncle.
Howard had been sixteen years old, a math prodigy with a keen interest in high-energy physics, about to be launched into an academic fast track that both excited and frightened him. Stern had come to visit for a week that summer. He was a celebrity: Alan Stern had appeared in Time magazine, “preeminent among a new generation of American scientists,” photographed against a line of radio telescopes somewhere out west. He had been interviewed on public television and had published journal articles so dense with mathematics that they looked like untranslated Greek papyruses. At sixteen, Howard had worshiped his uncle without reservation.