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  “We should’ve made all those girls come with us.” Colleen bit the corner of her thumbnail. “I can picture all the awful things that could be happening around that place.”

  “What’s the worst that could happen?” I stupidly asked.

  “Lonny!” Colleen blurted. “You know what that place is? A leper colony. The patients get a place to sleep, they get busywork so they don’t go crazy, next thing they’ll build a chapel and a cemetery the size of a golf course. Doug and I had our honeymoon in Hawaii, so I read all about lepers.”

  “It’s the best place for them, even so.”

  “I don’t even think of her as my grandma anymore,” Franny was saying.

  “Look out there,” I told them. “We’re moving out of tall-grass prairie into the broadleaf forest biome.”

  “We just saw the back of a billboard,” said Megan. “That’s all we can see.”

  “Bet it’s for the Ohio National,” added Franny.

  “Headlights flicker like lost souls,” Clint declaimed.

  “Trash can,” muttered Harv.

  “Shit, I just remembered hen judging’s on Saturday!” yelled Franny. “I bought new Manna conditioner and everything!”

  “I don’t think it’s that much farther into Preston,” said Colleen, fingertips cupping her chin. “Which exit was that?”

  “If we were looking at the map back in class, you’d see us moving out of the beige biome, where we’ve spent our lives, into the dark green,” I said. “Think of that.”

  “Mom,” Megan called softly from the back.

  “What’s happened? You okay?”

  “I just remembered about Dad again,” said Megan.

  Colleen slid her fingers through the window to the back and must’ve taken hold of her kid’s hand. Me, I had Lydia’s passport pictures in the wallet in my pocket, and I could feel that strip of paper’s distinct weight. I never wanted to not feel it.

  “Agh!” Franny yelled behind my head. “I didn’t check my texts. I’ve got texts! A whole bunch from Amber! Aw, damn.”

  “What?”

  “She says, ‘Grace is so fucked up right after you left.’ Here’s the next. ‘Both arms gone and skin off her forehead. In the cooler with Craig.’ That’s it, that’s all she said.”

  “I hate texts,” said Colleen.

  “Me too,” said Megan.

  We stared out at the Ohio brown-grass medians and the huge square trucks thundering toward us in the oncoming lanes.

  At nine o’clock I filled up at a Pegasus station, alongside a little yellow Nissan 350 which I chose to ignore—no spoiler. Inside I asked how far it was to the 91a turnoff.

  “An hour,” said the blue-smocked girl behind the till. “That lady still out in the parking lot? Maybe you could check her blood pressure or something.”

  “I don’t know who you mean.”

  “Well, if she’s gone it’s totally for the best. She wanted bacon to eat, bacon, bacon, bacon, and I was like, ‘We just have candy bars, it’s not a grocery store,’ and she freaked out, started screaming and—”

  “But you know,” said the fuzzy-moustached kid stocking WD-40, “in a way she was kind of awesome. She was so full-on.”

  “Holy!” the girl yelled. “Another one going off on somebody!”

  The stockboy and I collided at the door, but I let him through first because he had a pricing gun in his hand. Outside, an African-American guy in a Redskins cap stood panting behind the Nissan’s back bumper, while Colleen swayed at the front, showing her teeth and holding her telescoped stainless-steel baton in front of her like a lightsaber. She took one step as if to come around the car after him and he took a corresponding step to keep it between them. Damn, damn.

  “Holy Christ, lady,” he yelled, “this car never ran anybody over!”

  The stockboy held his hands up like Moses. Maybe that was the Pegasus technique for allaying crises.

  “Colleen,” I called, “it doesn’t have a spoiler. Take a look at it.”

  She lowered the baton, pulling in a deep breath.

  “It’s the right color,” I said, “you’re right about that, sure, but that’s all. Let’s keep driving.”

  Still squinting at the poor panting guy, she twisted something in the handle so the baton went back to the size of a flashlight, then she stalked between the pumps toward the ambulance. Her door still hung open.

  “Okay,” she said.

  The Redskins guy leaned against his trunk and looked sideways at us, shaking his head. I jogged past him on the way to the ambulance.

  “Really sorry, sir,” I said. “She’s not well.”

  “Put a leash on her!” he screamed.

  I jumped up into my seat and started the engine. Colleen still hadn’t shut her door and had the baton extended in her lap like a piece of expensive plumbing.

  “What the shit is happening?” the kids yelled from the back. “Can we get out?”

  Colleen looked me in the eye, her face all crowsfeet. “Sorry,” she muttered.

  I said, “That’s—”

  Then she was out her door, the baton flashing over her head between the gas pumps before she brought it down on the Nissan’s windshield. I heard the thump, then yelling. I let the ambulance roll across the pavement. I heard three more thumps then a final shattering, and by the time I’d rolled twenty feet Colleen had flung herself back in, slammed the door shut and fastened her seatbelt. We roared across the service road onto the on-ramp, getting up into third before the engine was ready. Another crash behind us as the kids were flung against the back doors.

  “Hey, shit!”

  “Who’s driving?”

  “Um,” I said, once we’d passed a line of dump trucks, “he had it coming?”

  Colleen lowered her window a half-inch.

  “Somebody did.” She picked cubes of greenish glass off her sleeve and dropped them through the gap, her face placid as if she were rolling out pie dough. “Somebody somewhere had it coming.”

  “You guys need bacon?” Franny said through the window. “Is that the trouble?”

  “Give me ten or twenty,” I said. “Jesus, yes.”

  “No, thanks.” Colleen glanced at me, bit her lip. “Never mind, I guess I’d better.”

  “Sounds like there’s another one of us wandering this neck of the woods,” I said while I chewed—because why belabor Colleen’s little quirks? “Some poor woman screaming for the good food, so they threw her out.”

  Colleen sported a strip of bacon between each finger. “God, the poor girl.”

  “Might be a good sign as far as we’re concerned. Maybe a scientist who—”

  “Should we look for her?” Harv asked from the back. “Try to help her?”

  “Nope,” Colleen and I said together.

  I was coursing with so many nitrites by then that the fact I’d been awake for fifty-plus hours didn’t even faze me. I watched the used-car lots flicker past and chewed my bottom lip while I went over the plan I’d constructed for when I actually had an unflappable Penzler executive staring at me from across his or her desk.

  I did not need Penzler to admit that the industrial mishap in Velouria had brought about—how best to phrase it?—long-term medical difficulties. In my paramedic persona I would present that information as a given.

  I’d describe the Dockside workers’ kids who were even now watching their daddies dissolve before their eyes, and in the name of humanity I would request access to the cure for these daddies. The goo could not have gone into production, by anyone’s reckoning, without a cure. Or thoughts of a cure. I would describe the kids more than once, if need be, and their little sweaters wet with tears. My fists like hammers beneath the lip of the desk.

  And if forthright beseeching did not produce results, I would take meetings until someone gave
me a name I could use—“The gal you really should talk to is Dinah Shore in R&D, she’s a big fan of the hippie doctors,” something like that. And if not a name then a place, because the research had to have happened somewhere and I wouldn’t need an invitation to walk into that place, wherever it was. I could knock down walls, I could flip guard dogs off bridges, I could put my hand clean through a person’s chest so that fragments of vertebrae lodged under my nails.

  But before that, I’d be painfully civil.

  “Do you still have Rob’s number?” Colleen asked. “For an emergency?”

  I prodded my pants and felt the crinkle of George Reid’s fax.

  “Hey, G!” Franny called. “Megan says snow is still H₂O, but that’s messed up, right? It’s got to have nitrogen to be so cold!”

  “No,” I said. “Snow’s water, only slower.”

  Like zombies are people only slower, and also gradually melting.

  “Mr. Giller?” This was Harv. “Did you ever read The Sneetches by Dr. Seuss?”

  “Maybe eighty or ninety times.”

  “Okay, but you know the Sneetches, right? Because I said we were kind of excluded but we’re actually more like the Star-Belly Sneetches because we get to hang out together and have the weenie roasts—”

  “Except it’s bacon marathons,” Clint added.

  “Yeah,” said Harv, “and it’s everybody else who has to sit out in the dark on the beaches, that sounds good, right? But Amber says the difference between us and the rest of the world is less arbitrary than if we’ve got belly-stars or not.”

  “Though it’d be cool if we did,” said Clint.

  “Amber’s a very bright young woman,” I said.

  “Yeah,” murmured Harv.

  At 9:15 I found the pine-shadowed turnoff for 91a and felt my stomach knotting. We passed rows of long cowsheds, then, inexplicably, corporate headquarters: Shell Oil behind a tall fence, Toys “R” Us without any fence, an outfit called American Leaf built right against the road. Smoke drifted across the landscape, probably from farmers burning cornstalks in their fields. A sign advised that that particular stretch of 91a had been adopted by Penzler Industries, and the next sign advised that Penzler Industries was fifty yards away. A tall cedar hedge sprang up alongside the road, then distant granite pillars showed where we’d be turning in.

  “How are you going to do it, Gillbrick?”

  “Should I get into the back?” Colleen asked, zipping her tracksuit to her chin.

  I didn’t have a paramedic costume for her, so that seemed like a good idea. I pulled over beside the ditch and she slid down from her seat. A long black helicopter rose above the hedge, then descended again. The hippie doctors?

  “Okay,” Colleen said from behind me. “Do your thing.”

  “Think like an ambulance driver,” said Franny.

  “Will anyone be working on a Saturday?” asked Harv.

  We drove on, and under an x-ray my stomach would’ve resembled a complete pretzel. I intended to make my entrance as an upright citizen. I hit the turn signal with philanthropic gravity.

  But then I had to brake hard because an ambulance was already parked in the entrance lane. The back doors stood open and an African-American woman lay strapped on the gurney, her arms swathed in bandages while the attendant lifted a saline drip. I managed to squeeze between the ambulance and the pillar onto the Penzler grounds—yes, at last—only to discover a dozen more ambulances lined up in front of the first, their top lights quietly flashing, while far across the green-turfed grounds a mob of fire trucks sat in front of what looked like a smouldering football field, that helicopter hovering overhead.

  “The hell?” asked Clint.

  If Penzler hq had been leveled then I had no plan, and my new plan would have to be to keep Josie and Ray in my rearview mirror permanently. A female cop in an orange safety vest waved me into the front of the line of ambulances, and I shut off my engine. Her nametag read holmes. She had freckles across the bridge of her nose, and as she walked past she put her hand on my door

  “The triage people will bring you someone to run into town, okay? Sit tight. Plenty of customers.”

  I guess I must’ve looked pretty forlorn hunched behind that wheel.

  “I know,” she said. “Just keep your chin up.”

  “What happened exactly?” As though I already had a pretty good idea.

  “Accident,” she shrugged. “Explosion. But not a ton of people here on a weekend, thank God.”

  She hurried away up the line—a black tv news van was trying to get past the pillar. Holmes waved it back.

  “When the situation’s not so critical!” she yelled.

  Frantic whispers from behind my head.

  “Mr. Giller,” Clint murmured, “do you think this was where they brought those guys who got bailed out of jail?”

  “How should I know?” I squealed.

  A woman screamed from an ambulance behind us, then a big black sedan with tinted windows steered around the news van on its way toward the smoke, down the hill. I’d have to go down myself, despite orders—maybe some sad-dog-faced researcher in a lab coat was waiting for me with a file marked pink goo, I’d never know unless I had a look.

  “Back in a while,” I said.

  I slid to the pavement, quietly shutting my door, and started down the driveway. I wore the white paramedic shirt but not the really-conspicuous fluorescent jacket. I didn’t want anyone else’s life placed in my hands. The driveway dipped so the fire trucks disappeared below the horizon and for a minute I walked in silence amidst the weird Penzler topiary: shrubs shaped like mermaids, like Pegasus himself, like whatever you call a lion with wings and an eagle’s head. The smoke gusted over them all.

  I climbed the rise. Guys in polo shirts lay dazed on the grass, firefighters yelled through bullhorns and ran, hoses sprayed haphazard water, men in dark suits shouted into each other’s ears, dressed-up women cried on their knees, men with flapping ties wiped their eyes at the edge of the lawn, a table stocked with water and mini-bagels. A plastic tarp swayed over an ad-hoc hospital where a red-haired doctor pressed the heel of his hand against a charred woman’s chest.

  “Just wait for your call on the radio, okay?” A woman with thick black glasses waved a clipboard at me, her hair escaping its ponytail. “Just go back up and wait, we can’t have so many bodies running around down here.”

  We watched as the red-haired doctor closed his patient’s eyes. Blue body bags lay in a row on the lawn.

  “Okay, bad choice of words,” the clipboard woman said.

  I nodded meaningfully to the woman, started back up the driveway then darted around to the back of the hospital tent where I hoped she wouldn’t notice me. The helicopter shuddered down onto the grass, its blades dispersing the smoke from our immediate vicinity, and only then did I finally get a good look at Penzler Corporate Headquarters, 1616 Highway 91a. It looked like our house had on the arson morning, only the back of the hq’s foundation was too far away to even see and a team in yellow hazmat suits walked through the wreckage, holding flashing rods in front of them.

  A cluster of guys in black-visored swat outfits held a conference beside the remains of the wide front steps. A man in a pinstripe suit and hard hat climbed out of the helicopter, then I realized that one of the swat guys was walking toward me, swinging what looked like a cattle prod. I took one step into the tent, found a clipboard on top of a cooler and immediately started checking boxes with a pencil. The swat guy stomped past, his whole face hidden behind the visor and gas mask, and, by God, did I want to kick him in his bullet-proof belly just to show him I was indestructible. According to the boxes I’d checked, my patient was female, of Asian descent, 64–69 years, suffering from arrhythmia and spinal damage.

  I carried that information across the lawn to where Penzler staff, id tags flapping on lanyards, sto
od with their arms around each other.

  “Excuse me!” I called to the cluster of dark-suited men—hopefully a powwow of the Penzler brain trust. “Are any of you in charge of this entire operation? Is there a Mr. Penzler here?”

  “Penzler?” asked a heavyset guy with a white moustache. “He never comes here, thank God. If you’ve got a specific concern you can take it to his secretary—that’s her over there, with the pearls on.”

  The men who weren’t yelling into each other’s ears looked out at the wreckage and whistled sombrely. I consulted my clipboard and furrowed my brow.

  “There’s no way to get a hold of him directly?” I asked.

  “Is this about insurance?” A tall woman with glasses leaned in.

  “Uh, no, not exa—”

  “We’ll collect paperwork today, but we have to convene a meeting of shareholders before we can submit anything.”

  “But this form says I should speak to someone affiliated with Dockside Synthetics—can you tell me who that might be?”

  “Dockside? Nothing to do with us, I don’t know it,” said the heavyset man.

  “Well, does this Mr. Penzler live in the area?”

  “Hell, that’s why we built out here in the first place!” he said. “Values his family’s privacy.”

  “And what business are you in, exactly?” I asked. “These forms have to—”

  “Plastics!” hissed the woman.

  I wrote that down and trotted away before I caused any real alarm. I found the gray-haired secretary talking into her cell phone, but she snapped it shut as soon as she spotted me coming. Along with her pearls she wore a pristine yellow overcoat. The bigwigs were all too clean to have been on-site when it happened.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “the gentleman across the way indicated that you’d be able to supply Mr. Penzler’s home address. We need it for the forms.”

  She just stared at me, big-eyed like a harp seal.

  “I don’t know Mr. Penzler’s address,” she said. “The man likes to be left alone.”