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She visualized a child poking fingers under a paper cutter and then bringing the long blade down.

“You can’t do anything about that now,” she said, and shuddered.

Vic turned, taking in her surroundings for the first time. She was behind a single-story log house, light glowing in a kitchen window. Beyond it, on the other side of the cabin, was a long gravel lane leading back to a road. She had never seen the place before, but she thought she knew where she was, and in another moment she was sure. As she stood astraddle her bike, the back door opened and a small, thin man appeared behind the screen, looking up the hill at her. He had a cup of coffee in one hand. She could not see his face but recognized him by shape alone, by the tilt of his head, even though she had not seen him in more than ten years.

She was at her father’s house at last. She had given the cops the slip and made it back to Chris McQueen.





Dover, New Hampshire


A LOUD CLAP, LIKE THE WORLD’S BIGGEST DOOR SLAMMING SHUT. An electronic squeal. A deafening roar of static.

Tabitha Hutter shouted and flung her headphones down.

Daltry, sitting on her right, flinched but kept his own headphones on for a moment longer, his face screwed up in pain.

“What just happened?” Hutter asked Cundy.

Five of them were packed in the rear of a panel truck that said KING BOAR DELI on the side—fitting, considering they were jammed in like sausages. The truck was parked next to a CITGO station, across the road and a hundred feet south of the drive that led up to Christopher McQueen’s house.

They had teams in the woods, closer in to McQueen’s cabin, shooting video and using parabolic microphones to listen in. The footage and sound were being broadcast back to the truck. Until a moment ago, Hutter had been able to see the driveway on a pair of monitors, rendered in the supernatural emerald of night vision. Now, though, they showed only a blizzard of green snow.

The picture had gone out at the same time they lost their sound. One moment Hutter had been listening to Chris McQueen and Louis Carmody speaking in low voices in the kitchen. McQueen had been asking Lou if he wanted coffee. In the next instant, they were gone, replaced by a furious blast of radio hiss.

“Don’t know,” Cundy said. “Everything just went down.” He jabbed at the keyboard of his little laptop, but the screen was a smooth face of black glass. “It’s like we got hit with a motherf*cking EMP.” Cundy was funny when he swore: a dainty little black man with a piping voice and the trace of a British accent, pretending he was street instead of MIT.

Daltry tugged his own headphones off. He peeked down at his watch and laughed: a dry, startled sound that had nothing to do with amusement.

“What?” Hutter asked.

Daltry turned his wrist so she could see the face of his watch. It looked almost as old as he was, a watch with a clock face and a tarnished silver band that had probably been tinted to look like gold once upon a time. The second hand rolled around and around, moving backward. The hour and minute hands had both frozen perfectly still.

“It killed my watch,” he said. He laughed again, this time looking toward Cundy. “Did all this shit do that? All your electronics? Did all this shit just blow up and wipe out my watch?”

“I don’t know what did it,” Cundy said. “Maybe we was touched by lightning.”

“What f*cking lightning? You hear any thunder?”

“I did hear a loud clap,” Hutter said. “Just as everything cut out.”

Daltry put a hand in the pocket of his coat, tugged out his cigarettes, then seemed to remember that Hutter was sitting beside him and gave her a sidelong glance of wry disappointment. He let the pack slip back into his pocket.

“How long will it take to get video and sound restored?” Hutter asked.

“It could’ve been a sunspot,” Cundy said, as if she hadn’t spoken. “I’ve heard the sun is kicking up with a solar storm.”

“Sunspot,” Daltry said. He placed his palms together, as in prayer. “You think sunspot, huh? You know, I can just tell you went to six years of college and majored in neuroscience or something, because only a truly gifted mind could talk himself into such utter horseshit. It’s dark out, you autistic f*ck.”

“Cundy,” Hutter said, before Cundy could come around in his chair and start some kind of male dick-measuring contest. “How long before we’re back online?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Five minutes? Ten? To reboot the system? Unless there’s a nuclear war going on out there. In which case it’ll probably take longer.”

“I’ll go look for a mushroom cloud,” Tabitha Hutter said, getting up off the bench and doing a shuffling sideways walk toward the rear doors.

“Yeah,” Daltry said. “Me, too. If the missiles are flying, I want a smoke before we get wiped out.”

Hutter turned the latch, opened the heavy metal door to the damp night, and jumped down. Mist hung beneath the streetlights. The night throbbed with insect song. Across the street, fireflies lit the ferns and weeds in gassy green flashes.

Daltry lowered himself down beside her. His knees cracked.

“Christ,” he said. “I thought for sure I’d be dead of something at this age.”

His company did not cheer her but only made her more conscious of her own aloneness. Hutter had believed she would have more friends by now. The last man she’d dated said something to her, shortly before they broke up: “I don’t know, maybe I’m boring, but I never really feel like you’re there when we’re out to dinner. You live in your head. I can’t. No room for me in there. I don’t know, maybe you’d be more interested in me if I were a book.”