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Vic collected the phones and brought them to the kitchen. She put them in the oven, on the top rack, and turned the dial to BROIL. Hey, it had worked the last time she needed to fight Charlie Manx, hadn’t it?

As the oven began to warm, she shoved open the windows, switched on the fan.

After that, Vic sat in the living room and watched TV in her panties and nothing else. First she watched Headline News. But there were too many ringing phones in the CNN studio, and the sound unnerved her. She switched over to SpongeBob. When the phone in the Krusty Krab rang, she changed the channel again. She found a sports-fishing program. That seemed safe enough—no phones in this kind of show—and the setting was Lake Winnipesaukee, where she had spent her childhood summers. She had always liked the way the lake looked just after dawn, a smooth black mirror wrapped in the white silk of early-morning fog.

At first she drank whiskey on the rocks. Then she had to drink it straight, because it smelled too bad in the kitchen to go in there and get ice. The whole town house stank of burning plastic, despite the fan and the open windows.

Vic McQueen was watching one of the fishermen struggle with a trout when a phone began to chirp, somewhere near her feet. She looked down at the scatter of toys on the floor, a collection of Wayne’s robots: an R2-D2, a Dalek, and of course a couple of Search Engine figures. One of the robots was a Transformers thing, black with a bulky torso and a red lens for a head. It visibly shivered as it chirped once more.

She picked it up and began to fold the arms and legs inward. She pushed the head down into the body. She snapped the two halves of its torso together and suddenly was looking at a plastic, nonfunctional, toy cell phone.

The plastic, nonfunctional, toy cell phone rang again. She pressed the ANSWER button and held it up to her ear.

“You’re a big fat liar—” said Millicent Manx. “And Daddy is going to be mad at you when he gets out. He’s going to stick a fork in your eyes and pop them out, just like corks.”

Vic carried the toy into the kitchen and opened the oven. Poisonous black smoke gushed out. The cooked phones had charred like marshmallows dropped in a campfire. She threw the Transformer in on top of the melted brown slag and slammed the oven shut again.

The stink was so bad she had to leave the house. She put on Lou’s motorcycle jacket and her boots and got her purse and went out. She grabbed the whiskey bottle and pulled the door shut behind her, just as she heard the smoke detector begin to blat.

She was down the street and around the corner when she realized she hadn’t put anything on besides the jacket and her boots. She was tramping around greater Denver at two in the morning in her faded pink panties. At least she had remembered the whiskey.

She meant to go home and pull on a pair of jeans, but she got lost trying to find her way back, something that had never happened before, and wound up walking on a pretty street of three-story brick buildings. The night was aromatic with the smell of autumn and the steely fragrance of freshly dampened blacktop. How she loved the smell of road: asphalt baking and soft in high July, dirt roads with their dust-and-pollen perfume in June, country lanes spicy with the odor of crushed leaves in sober October, the sand-and-salt smell of the highway, so like an estuary, in February.

At that time of the night, she had the street almost to herself, although at one point three men on Harleys rolled by. They slowed as they went past to check her out. They weren’t bikers, though. They were yuppies, who were probably creeping home to wifey after a boys’ night out at an upscale strip club. She knew from their Italian leather jackets and Gap blue jeans and showroom-quality bikes that they were more used to Pizzeria Unos than to living brutal on the road. Still. They took their time looking her over. She raised her bottle of whiskey to them and wolf-whistled with her free hand, and they grabbed their throttles and took off, tailpipes between their legs.

She wound up at a bookstore. Closed, of course. It was a little indie, with a big display of her books in one window. She had given a talk here a year ago. She had been wearing pants then.

She squinted into the darkened store, leaning close to see which one of her books they were peddling. Book four. The fourth book was out already? It seemed to Vic she was still working on it. She overbalanced and wound up with her face smooshed to the glass and her ass sticking out.

She was glad book four was out. There had been moments when she didn’t think she would finish it.

When Vic had started drawing the books, the phone never rang with calls from Christmasland. That was why she had started Search Engine in the first place, because when she was drawing, the phones were silent. But then, midway through the third book, radio stations she liked started playing Christmas songs in the middle of the summer and the calls began again. She had tried to make a protective moat around herself, a moat filled with Maker’s Mark, but the only thing she had drowned in it was the work itself.

Vic was about to push away from the window when the phone in the bookstore rang.

She could see it lighting up over at the desk, on the far side of the shop. In the gusting, warm silence of the night, she could hear it quite clearly, and she knew it was them. Millie Manx and Brad McCauley and Manx’s other children.

“I’m sorry,” she said to the store. “I’m not available to take your call. If you’d like to leave a message, you’re shit out of luck.”

She shoved away from the window, a little too hard, and reeled across the sidewalk. Then the sidewalk ended and her foot plunged over the edge of the curb, and she fell, sat down hard on her ass on the wet blacktop.