Accelerated Times

Accelerated Times

Jason McGathey

Published by Jason McGathey at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Jason McGathey

Also:

Night Driving (2001)

One Hundred Virgins (2006)

"We are not a complicated people. But these are accelerated times. It’s kind of hard to imagine now. John and Paul driving across London just to find the one kid who knew this particular D chord. But that was back then, decades ago. Nowadays, everyone you know can play three different instruments. We’re not bad singers, either. Everyone you know can dismantle and rearrange a personal computer at will; we’re competent skiers, we rock climb, we mountain climb. We can handle a 40 foot yacht like nobody’s business. Half the people you know can pilot an airplane. File their own taxes, construct their own web pages. Most commonly, can not only steer their own vehicles down the highway at 80 miles per hour while simultaneously fiddling with the radio, talking on a cell phone, and checking out their appearance in the drop down visor’s mirror, but can repair whatever inevitably goes wrong with said automobile. Thanks to a glutton of police procedural television shows, most of us know if not every last protocol of forensics and crime scene investigation, then nearly so, and doubly so the language. Most of us speak more than one language. Most of us have visited more than one foreign country. We’ve explored a little more than ever before that which is closer to home, too, meaning each other. Sexual partners in numbers that would have seemed eye-popping even in the supposedly swinging decades of yore, commonplace now. And forget those old jokes about not being able to program a VCR. More like hooking up a complete entertainment center blindfolded, surround sound and digital television, six different remotes all cued in together - no problem.

We are not a complicated people. Small town people, sure, okay, and all this, this is just what it takes to get by these days. Even in our small towns. As ordinary as postal service, these functions by rote. Accelerated times like these, though, it never fails to fascinate where the fault lines still are. The breaking point at which a cluster of people will part for an automobile creeping in their midst, that magic number where it becomes a big enough mob they don’t have to budge, and don’t, they stand and stare doing whatever it is they’d been doing all along.

And sure, a similar breaking point in relation to the government, and the control it exerts. Apathy gives way to carte blanche, for awhile. Government turns its screws harder and harder, and the common man stands for it up to a point. Or rather, sits down with a six pack up to a point. Eventually, however, the same bright idea seizes most at roughly the same instant, like a chorus of insects - strength in numbers. Meaning, your neighbor across the street appears to be doing whatever he feels like doing and getting away with it and most of your coworkers do whatever the they want and get away with it, so will you. Because the masses are just too great to control. And those allegedly in power, you turn their lassitude against them."

Part One: CLEANING CARPETS

Well, this got us away from our tv sets, at least, notes the girl in the summer dress, puffing away on a cigarette.

Formerly a convenience store, the stripped away logo of that discontinued franchise is still visible on the brick exterior, the way the sun and elements have faded those bricks unevenly where the letters were. In more recent times it has headquartered a tiny carpet cleaning empire - tiny, but the largest in the northwestern quarter of the state, owner Marty Gregory has always told anyone who will listen - and it was true, too, at least up until the point that meaningful measurements could be made. But now? Small town people have always found fewer weapons with which to kill time, and even those were basic. You take a take a rural Ohio community of barely a thousand, formerly a thousand, and reduce that to thirty five, well, and if in one sense measuring everything becomes the equivalent of a head count in single meeting room, then it’s also more difficult at the other extreme to convince yourself it matters, and to make sense of anything at all.

Thirty five. The head count comes exact because Marty has tallied them, and because those present universally agree they are aware of no one else left unaccounted for remaining here in town, that they haven’t seen anyone else leave town except for that one young man on his bicycle a few days ago. Granted, a thorough sweep of the county’s lone minuscule hospital has not been forthcoming, and there may be a withering sack of bones dying in agony alone in one of the scattered nursing homes. All but gone, and too much to think about now.

This look shouldn’t work for anyone, but it does for him, somehow. Always has. Marty stands at the same podium he used to address his carpet cleaning fleet each morning, for their daily ten o’clock pep talk, here in the carpeted board meeting half of this converted convenience store. Stands in his neatly woven gel helmet, which tumbles down in neat brown curls: a look some might refer to as a mullet, except his is too orderly, too well crafted, too of-a-piece and unique. Large round glasses wafer thin but bordered in bright blue, and with an ever present strap holding them in place upon his head for no known reason. At least the rest is marginally more sensible, that of the grey and black horizontally striped button up shirt, long sleeved despite the unseasonable spring heat, tucked into just barely faded tailored jeans. Capped off by blinding white sneakers, brand new.

Not that anyone ever quantifies such, but a sensible man would have bet that the daily drink per capita here in Middelfork trended toward the high end of the spectrum. Thus, the first wave of full bore madness hit this town hard, tapering off abruptly as other, larger cities were just beginning to grasp the full extent of the problem. But though Marty, as one of the town’s most prominent businessmen for a decade and a half now, and pretty much the only even remotely commanding presence left, even though he is the most natural choice to address this miniature mass - twice so given the setting - he is on a personal level almost entirely unscathed by what has gone down. Thus feels inappropriate in this role, inadequate, that his ever present cheer is indecent under these circumstances.

What can he possibly say? His own wife Janice three years gone, and the three girls they had raised went with her. No other relatives to speak of on his side, and only the most distant on hers - if still alive, a point he hasn’t had the time or the means to verify. Phone lines down, both land and cellular, this certainly compounds the unlikelihood he will. And the kind of guy who’s well liked by everyone who’s met him but only in the vaguest sense, because there seems so little depth to him, they sense, he may as well be a sitcom character. And so no real close friends, either. In consideration of all this, he suffers a rare bout of frozen nerves, and fumbles in handing the reigns over to Natalie.

Let’s start with what we know, Natalie begins, and for a girl whose most memorable job ever was a radio commercial, the words are curiously hard to come by, her mouth seemingly too dry to function.

Those damn commercials are still the bane of her existence, even though, for all she knows, radio doesn’t even exist anymore. They didn’t even pay that well. For all she knows, there was never a single person outside her immediate family and one equally regrettable ex-boyfriend aware that it was identity attached to that voice, that spot. Yet whenever she would see a stand up comedian or late night talk show host reference this commercial - and they still had, some two years after the fact - she pulled the covers up over her eyes, blushing even if alone in bed, she wanted nothing so much as to crawl into a corner and hide.

January 16, last year she rasps, a phrase forced out of her at last as a diversionary tactic, to appease the sea of faces pointed up at her, all of whom she imagines hostile though they’ve no reason to be. She’s still grappling with how to extend the sentence, but in the time it takes her to come up with something, the crowd at large assumes this is a standalone sentence, akin to blurting Pearl Harbor, or 9/11 and looking around the room for the next ninety seconds. Some shake their heads, and one guy in the back actually whistles, in the manner of a good ol‘ boy showing his approval.

Every major media outlet reported that effective February first, alcohol sales in the United States would permanently cease.

Natalie had been taking some broadcasting courses at the low budget community college here in Middlefork. With a student body numbering only in the hundreds, one didn’t drive to class every day imagining that celebrity lie just around the corner - not in the wake of graduation, and certainly not before it. But one spring day out of the blue in her sophomore year she had shown up, and her professor said some production company nearby - she didn’t know anything existed anywhere in the county, but then again, who ever gave thought to where stuff like this was generated - had called up and asked if they had any girls around with pleasant voices. Despite a dutiful stint in the church choir some years running, Natalie had never been told there was anything exceptional about her voice, and yet this professor had named her.

Fuckin bullshit, some guy up front mutters, to a general murmured chorus of agreement and head nods. On Natalie, this blunt statement merely had the effect of bringing her back to the present. She stares down at some notes she and Marty and a couple others had jotted down, continues.

But the government didn’t really enforce this with, like...military, she says, you could still get drinks at the bar, and, like, beer at the store or whatever, until they ran out.

She was never a drinker, Natalie. Ever. Thus the terminology eludes her, she doesn’t feel entirely comfortable addressing the subject. She had never been a particularly good public speaker, either, which made the stigma of that commercial all the more ironic and unforeseen. Well, it would later turn out - she’s fairly positive of this - that her professor was somewhat of a pervert and had dreams of bedding Natalie, hence his reasons for promoting her, to win her favor. But she can’t figure out why Marty tapped her of all people to follow him to this podium, except that she was currently an employee of his.

Just then, the girl in the summer dress, who’d been outside smoking this entire time, tiptoes into the room. Eyes wide and brows raised, grimacing a mock apologetic horror, she mouths the words sorry and grabs the first available seat.

April 3, Natalie says, consulting her notes, our government then issues the statement that they’ve decided they will allow alcohol sales after all, but only at these eight Regional Distribution Centers sprinkled throughout the country.

To say she merely thinks that professor had an interest in her is the kind of filter Natalie puts over her own mind, to keep herself from thinking about things she’d rather not. But in the rare moments her thoughts dart in that direction - for seconds at a time only, as if trying to escape - she remembers the way she’d been sitting at the computer, alone after class. The way she heard his patent leather shoes smacking quietly across the floor behind her, ever closer, how his hands had slid in from behind her and cupped her breasts, his breath hot on her neck as he attempted to kiss her.

Well, Natalie had bolted up out of her chair and, blushing, apologetic, stammered something as she fled the room. It only occurred to her later that she’d forgotten to save her project, and for all she knew would have to retype everything the next day. Except there hadn’t been a next day - she blew off every class until the middle of the following week, when the fear of what she’d have to tell her parents after her ruse of being sick expired led her back into the classroom. With a sickening smile, in an encounter that still turns her stomach to think about almost as much as the prior one had, her professor sweetly explains he had saved everything for her, she needn’t worry.

People started, um, disappearing, she says, and at this, the inevitable tears she knew would arrive make their first appearance, welling up in the corner of her eyes, but nobody really knew what was happening at first. Not for a long time, actually.

Truth is, Natalie had always attracted the psychos, for whatever reason. Self aware and proud of her purity, she thinks maybe the opportunist sees in her a blank slate to write himself upon, as she’s likely to not put forth too much resistance. She just doesn’t have whatever chromosome it is that propels a person deep enough into another person’s circle to violate, offend, take advantage. But in actuality, the professor was not alone. With the exception of Derek, she had successfully rebutted everyone. Derek had seemed so much different to her - different from everyone else, different from whom he in fact turned out to be. He had seemed different, but in the end all that was different about him was that he managed to break her defenses down, he found a way to twist himself inside.

August 9, Natalie forges onward, snuffling only slightly, the cigarette program begins. And at this, incredibly, an overweight man with reddish blonde hair, sitting about halfway back, raises his hand. She wasn’t sure how to field this, whether allowing someone else to speak would open the floor up to absolute chaos. But he did have one of the most winning smiles she’d ever seen - Natalie was a sucker for this much, at least, she had to admit - and anyway, weren’t they all on the same team, those of them that had made it. She nods in his direction, says, yes?

And I just wanted to announce that the cigarette program continues out in my ride, where I’ve stockpiled as many cartons as my trunk and backseat will allow. Big ass boat right outside the door, ‘72 Bonneville, maroon..., he trails off, and like a pressure valve letting off steam, the entire room allows itself to slide into this easy spate of laughter. Even Natalie finds herself chuckling, through the tears.

She wasn’t a smoker, either. She never did anything. True friends, exclusively female, she would have counted on one hand even during the best of times, which these certainly were not. She wonders if any of those girls were still alive, even, as attempts to contact them had proven fruitless. She isn’t kidding herself that their lives were as blemish free as hers, but still, Natalie liked to think that there was some reward, somewhere, for basically decent people. She still held out hope that her parents were alive, for instance. And her having made it this far she supposes counts for something. Until that one-two punch of the day in the ice cream shop and the disastrous end of her relationship with Derek, she’d allowed herself to believe that the pure were invulnerable to attack, even. This fallacy, however, had clearly been one that an overwhelming majority of her fellow man had placed their faith in, as well, with equally terminal results.

Again there are eight Regional Distribution Centers, although in different locations. And even though...even though reports are starting to surface, or should I say it’s pretty obvious a whole lot of people...never came back from the first wave, this one is even...and it seems like now that the media clearly played a huge role in deliberately, um, spreading the confusion and, like, covering up things...this time even more people made the trip to these centers.

Her lone improper run-in with the professor aside, the sophomore year ended on a high note. She even got the impression that he was padding her grades in a continued effort to butter her up. But she said nothing, allowing herself for once this possibly unethical indulgence, telling herself that she deserved this as compensation for what he had done. The rare occasions she would allow herself to think about the encounter at all, that is. She had completed that radio spot late one April afternoon, been paid a small sum, and forgotten all about it. But then finals week, as if the timing could have been any more unfortunate, it hit the airwaves, and in that instant it was everywhere.

The content itself no one remembers. Ninety nine out of a hundred people, then or now, would be hard pressed to even name the company whose product she was pitching. But twenty, thirty years on people remember certain catch phrases that are completely divorced from their original meaning, in which the message is now merely a punchline, like the one about falling and being unable to get up, or experiencing something and buying a tee shirt. She was feeling pretty good about the work she had done, until that day in the ice cream shop.

Natalie has always been a full figured blonde, no doubt about it, always will be. She’ll not be gracing the swimsuit issue of a magazine anytime soon. A few stray pounds around the middle of her short, stocky frame might as well be a sack of cement strapped to her waist, for they are never going anywhere. But owing to an attractive, well proportioned face and an open smile that she was often told effortlessly conveyed friendliness - never mind her general reticence when it came to actually getting to know anyone else - and plenty of guys who plainly didn’t care about some extra pounds so long as it came attached to such a face and some curves in the chest and backside, she’d always felt relatively good about her appearance. From the age of thirteen onward, she’s been a devout walker, too, whether outdoors or on a treadmill. But this she does almost entirely because she genuinely likes it, loves the way it feels, rather than any grand notions about becoming buff. That, and it’s her tradeoff, mentally, with this love of the ice cream cone. Her zealous exercise schedule affords her this precious bounty.

Sweets otherwise could not have interested her in the least. But she could no more drive past Middlefork’s lone ice cream shop on a hot summer day - or for that matter, a mild spring one, and half of the dreary winter ones - without stopping, than she could bring herself to knock off a bank. And in the summer following that sophomore year, she was interning at the same production company where she’d caught her quote unquote big break, the route home from which led her right past it. For the first couple weeks, her coworkers had teased her about the commercial, but by this point she and everyone else was plenty sick of it.

Seated at one of the nearly deserted room’s tables, picking leisurely with a plastic spoon at her blueberry sundae, Natalie never expected her entire world to come crashing down. She knows that these backwards hat wearing teens across the room have no clue who she is, it’s merely a coincidence. But thanks to the ubiquity of that damn radio spot, a scene like this was probably inevitable somewhere along the line.

Are YOU making THIRTEEN PERCENT more than you did LAST YEAR?!? one of the kids shrieks, to a round of guffaws from his comrades.

No dude, it’s not shrill enough, one helpfully advises.

Like that bitch is anyway, another says.

No doubt.

Check this out.

"Yeah, let’s see what you got.

Are YOU making THIRTEEN PERCENT MORE than you did LAST YEAR?!? WELL!?! ARE YOU!?! the second comedian blurts, in his best imitation of a nasal, premenstrual young woman. His friends, apparently accepting this as the penultimate, hoot and give high fives.

Even at the height of her paranoia, immediately following the groping incident, she knows it’s nothing personal. Her voice is recognizable countrywide, but nobody knows who she is. Still, in this instant, she knows her days pursuing her chosen major are through. She finishes out her stint at the community college pursuing some vague business degree, and winds up here, in the office at Marty’s Carpets.

November 14..., Natalie continues, as she attempts to read her notes through the slight cataract of shimmering tears. Her voice becomes high pitched and choked off, capable of doubling at this point as a dog whistle, this was the...beginning of....Reunion Week...

And Marty now has the sense to slide into the spot she’d heretofore occupied at the podium. With a pat on the back and some muttered reassurance, he suggests she take a seat.

His abundant brown hair left to roam unfettered up top, Marty counterbalances by slicking down the sides with gel and letting the back end curl up at the collar. His goofy charm is the only reason he‘s able to pull this off. People instinctively sense that he is kind and harmless, and this makes up for a lot in the business world when an individual is lacking, as he feels he is, a great deal of the cunning normally associated with making a buck. But he trots a good service out there at a reasonable price, and he’s become enough of a fixture in these parts - even just barely over forty, and not yet fifteen years in the business - to cover three counties in six vans and face no real competition. People know who he is. As he has joked on more than one occasion, he had to have his personalized license plates changed becomes the cops were recognizing his car anyway, he’d been issued his fair share of speeding tickets, local pseudo-celebrity or not. And of course, though he tried his best not to dwell on the obvious immediate impact the tragedy of his wife and three children had on business - he agonized over their deaths plenty as its own separate issue - there was no denying this accident played a huge role in his becoming a household name.

Oookay, Marty begins, rubbing his hands together, eyeing the notes, all done in the brisk, jaunty manner he effortlessly brings to the table seemingly regardless of circumstance, yes, Reunion Week. Now...that’s obviously a tough phrase to swallow for all of us, and there’s no real need to elaborate on this one, but...

The accident, back when it happened, had made Marty alone in his grief, a place he always expected to occupy. Now that he has a meeting room full of folks who share the same, however, this experience, coupled with the meetings he has held every weekday from 9 to 9:30am - pep rallies to get the troops out there cleaning - has made him singularly prepared to lead these people. Or something like that. Problem is he’s never been much of an ideas guy. He’s plenty sensible, but not particularly imaginative. Even this cleaning business, he’d started out as an employee and gradually wound up taking over, buying the original owner out.

...just so we’re all on the same page, this is when all the major, uh, media outlets announced that our families - all of our families, the people that had gone missing - would be reunited with us. All we had to do was show up at one of the eight, uh, I guess now they were called, the eight, Reunion Checkpoints.

Everything had been going so well for Marty and his family clear up to the birth of his third daughter. His wife, Janice, was a blue eyed blonde and a fitness nut in a way he could never even dream about being, and there was something oft-commented upon about the way she positively glowed during each of her pregnancies. They had no fixed number, but with Susannah they had been approaching their 40s, and Marty not being one of those guys who just felt he just had to have a boy - on the contrary, he often felt their large four bedroom house in the country seemed all the more sweeter for its overwhelming female presence - that it might be their last. He had passed out pink candy cigars that day here at the office. Little did he know six months later he’d be passing out prayer pamphlets with the dates of their births and death.

Now. There has been much speculation - at least there was up until, what was it, first of the year...

Yeah, first of the year, his top salesman, Mike Wood, echoes from the front row.

...okay, so first of the year, that’s when the media starts shutting down before disappearing altogether. But up until that point, Marty pauses, as he often does, not for effect or even to collect his thoughts, but rather through some kind of internal anti-rhythm, a tic that has him look at the dry erase board over on one wall, festooned with everyone’s names, up until that point, though, there was a bunch of speculation about - is the church involved, how heavily is our government involved, uh, are there other countries involved.

He had been taking karate lessons for all of a month at the time Janice’s minivan went skidding off that country road. He had been taking karate lessons at her insistence - not the karate part, only that he needed to find some kind of hobby, an outlet. Every waking moment of the previous twelve years had been spent thinking about or else engaged in either business or family, and he was fine with that. Marty was also not a guy who tended to stress much. He felt reasonably comfortable around other males, but never had any great need to assemble a crew of buddies - or even just one - to run around with, either. But in his younger days, high school in fact, Marty had formed half an interest in karate, and it is with this long dormant idle fantasy, one parts, mixed with five parts a desire to keep Janice happy, that he had enrolled.

I don’t need to elaborate how that, uh, how that all turned out, Marty says.

He was acutely aware of how goofy he looked out there on the mat. Skinny enough, sure, and in decent shape for his age, but never particular muscular, and the flag football of his junior high days a distant memory. But all the guys took an instant liking to him, cheesy jokes and all, and this was something he was used to, winning people over without ever trying. Even after his first session, already the invites to come over for a barbecue or go out for a beer were pouring in. He wasn’t sure why he always declined, only that he unfailingly had. Never a drinker and, despite these podium forays every morning, despite being authoritative enough not to get trampled on by his help, he was not much of a social person, either.

The authorities were never quite certain what had caused Janice to run the minivan off the road. A clear summer day, no vehicle malfunction, no other cars anywhere nearby. She had simply driven clean off the road, and down the side of a steep incline. Maybe she’d been fidgeting with Katrina’s seatbelt or shouting at Elisabeth or reaching around with one hand to give Susannah something, it really didn’t matter much now. The minivan had gone over that embankment, tumbled end over end six times. They were gone before another soul arrived at the scene.

Marty threw himself into the only thing else he had, work, and never openly wept whether alone or in public. He kept it all inside. At the funeral he assumed the mask of his normal jovial self, and then he retreated. Of course, there was soon this whole other mess to contend with, that which now occupies his and these other thirty or so survivors, who knows how many else.

The only question is, he says, what do we do now.

Grandma drives the van with surprising gusto given her age. Seventy-two and still as fired up as ever, Grandma is living proof – as far as she’s concerned, she may be the final living proof – that in all but the most extreme cases, a woman past a certain age will always be considered sweet. For the first thirty five years, roughly, of her marriage to the late Harry Delaney, she was fired up to keep their marriage together through his frequent spells of alcoholic overindulgence; when that crisis eventually passed, it’s as though they both woke up and were fired up to get their retirement finances in order; now, all that merely a seven decade footnote, it seems, to these past fifteen months, she’s fired up for resolution, some answers while time remains to find them.

She’s been a maid for most of her adult life, so in some respects the shift, shortly after she reached that magic threshold of sixty-five, over to Marty’s cleaning business made sense. Harry was by then retired from the factory himself, although all this meant was forty hours a week instead at the much more sedate Ultratek repair center in a strip mall there in Middlefork. As Marty used and sold exclusively Ultratek products, he had a working relationship with the folks there. One thing led to another and Harry suggested she go to work at Marty’s Carpets, that the pay was better and the work surely not as bad, and Marty had a great reputation around these parts. Eyeing their financial outlook, she couldn’t disagree.

The dust kicked up by these damn vacuums – and they were some fine, powerful units, no doubt about that – was hell on the lungs, and though she was able to deduct the mileage, there was no pay for travel time, only for the job done. Thus it made absolute sense not only for Marty to generally have the employees with the most tenure do the driving, but it made sense from the perspective of your own paycheck to learn every street name and every short cut in every podunk town around here, and how to drive like literally hell on wheels.

Her memory is still as strong as the patented Ultratek Double Pump vacuum. But the new hires came and went with such frequency that there was no point in obsessing over names until the individual had proven he or she would last. She recognizes that the one tall, lanky, somewhat nerdy kid with glasses showed up as one of the survivors this morning, and she recalls conversations had with him, entire days even, from the short period he worked with her, but cannot remember his name.

He had been with her the day she drove the company van to Warburton to track down a trio of Mexicans – two males and a, what was it they called her, a senorita – who knew one another, gave the same address, and had all worked somewhere shy of a week. Unfortunately, each still had the brand new Ultratek that Marty loaned to every employee. Unfortunately, the address they had given did not exist.

Grandma was too set in her ways to own a cell phone and this kid apparently too antisocial to bother. So they had driven to the nearest fast food restaurant, as it was lunchtime anyway, and she had called Marty from an increasingly rare pay phone.

That’s grand theft, Marty told her with a resigned sigh, and she could picture him in his office, rolling his neck as he massaged it with his one free hand, which he always seemed to be doing,. I don’t wanna go there, but yeah, I think the dollar amounts we’re talking I have no choice

Okay. Just thought I’d let you know.

They are currently driving down I-75 en masse, Grandma helming one of Marty’s six vans. When it came time to roll out, these vans were a natural choice, and as it turns out they pretty much needed exactly this number of vehicles to transport a headcount that was finally tallied at 38. The lone exception being the fat redheaded guy who insisted on driving his aircraft carrier of a relic, this maroon monstrosity that could seat only one other passenger thanks to the heaping mound of cigarettes he’d had piled in his back seat and presumably trunk.

People describe Grandma as sweet, and she supposes she is - sweet enough that no one addresses her, ever, as Doris now that Harry is gone. Sweet enough that she usually sprung for lunch when saddled with a new recruit on her carpet cleaning assignments. As she had in fact that day at the fast food joint in Warburton, after the fruitless search for the Mexicans, and the tall lanky kid with glasses had been the one and only exception who refused to eat anything. This despite his surely being broke - she could sniff these things out - and having a ravenous mien about him pretty much all the time.

But she’s not so sweet, apparently, that anyone would want to ride shotgun with her. Saddled as she is with five bored, shiftless youths who all prefer sitting in the back. Four of them are chatting incessantly, albeit in mostly subdued tones, thank god for that, but the tall tanned blonde with a dreadful shade of purple lipstick, her hair done up in - what do they call those, corn rows? - she has been muttering nonstop into a cell phone since they left Marty’s Carpets even though as far as Grandma knew those stopped working completely months ago. That and, which she would have been reluctant to admit to anyone except maybe Marty and one or two of the other veterans, Grandma looks in the rearview mirror often, gleaning what she can about her fellow occupants, and with each glance, Grandma sees the blonde cupping a breast in her free hand and inspecting it, then the other. Every time, and all the way still mumbling into the phone. Such blatant sexually - vulgar, vulgar, vulgar. Girls never behaved this way in her youth.

Able to tune out the circumstances for a moment, her mind drifts back to that lustrous youth. Harry had been such a gentleman then, and so handsome, a tall, dark haired, Irish Catholic boy. And oh how long and sweet their courtship had been, culminating in the expected marriage straight out of high school. But four years in the service followed - during which time she cranked out the first of their eventual three children, having discovered she was with child just before he left - and to say he came back a different man, fouler mouthed and more prone to drink and violent mood swings, would be an understatement. But these were the things one did for one’s country then. An able bodied male and the country at war, he marched in and signed up and was shipped away.

Like any marriage, theirs was a bumpy ride. Back then, however, the couple simply rode through these bad times, the husband and wife - more often than not the latter - took it as a matter of great pride and stubbornness that nobody was going to ruin this family, particularly not the husband. And so the two a.m. cruises around town when Harry was on a good bender, bouncing from bar to bar to try and track him down - it got to where the patrons all knew Doris’s name, even though she never stayed, and certainly never drank.

They made it through these rocky episodes, and somewhere around or just after his fiftieth birthday, Harry finally settled down. Even so, though the factory paid decent and gave good benefits, they’d never done much more than struggle by through food costs and house payments and all the other expenses of maintaining a household. With the aggravation of dealing with his wild side gone, she was able to take up housekeeping at a local motel, and they slowly accumulated the proverbial nest egg. All of which was exposed now as having been completely meaningless.

The general consensus was for them to drive near the closest regional checkpoint center, which from the northwest corner of Ohio meant a trip to Huntsville, West Virginia. No one had the first clue what they’d do once they got there, nor that this was necessarily the wisest action plan, but at this point they were grasping for any foothold whatsoever. The chances of rustling up 38 people in the name of any cause at this point was becoming highly unlikely, and everyone felt, though no one would say, that this was their best shot to accomplish something, anything, to get some answers. At this point, you’d be lucky to get 38 people to attend a Super Bowl, assuming there were enough football players around to even flesh out two teams.

They do encounter the odd vehicle, however. Most are moving in the other direction, but some also head south, albeit at a much slower clip, as if driving well below the speed limit would somehow stave off apocalyptic doom. The landscape is completely different from every end-of-the-world miniseries Grandma ever caught on television. There aren’t a bunch of abandoned vehicles clogging the interstates, nothing’s on fire that she can see. The sky is still the same color as it had always been. When you pull over for gas or groceries, you’re able to get everything just as you had before - the only difference being, no one is collecting any money. Deliveries are still apparently made, but no one is minding the store. Things still look the same, there’s just no one around. Anywhere.

It’s as they come within a half mile of their first east-west interstate, I-70, that they realize something is horribly wrong. First they notice the giant metallic Xs, painted orange and barbed, at least twenty feet high, blocking further progress along this route. Then they notice that the remaining quarter mile between this and that intersection has been completely gouged out, into a deep ravine. Lastly, it is at this juncture that they notice the men in the three piece suits, sporting walkie talkies, flanking them on both sides of the highway.

Mike Wood had never been a particularly gifted decision maker. As they stand around the vans, wondering what to do next, Mike surely would have fumbled if asked his opinion on the subject. His life has been a whole series of near misses, the way he sees it, caused primarily by this waffling. He knows it, and at times it’s bothered him, but people essentially fall into the same rhythms they’ve maintained their whole lives.

Take his status, basically, as a career long bachelor. People hear him talk about himself this way, and they picture him as a ladies man, but it had never been like this. On the contrary, from the age of about eighteen onward, he’s maintained with clocklike persistence a near perfect schedule of being single for long stretches of time, ranging from roughly nine to eighteen months, followed immediately by a serious relationship that lasts about that long as well. His record is four years. But that was an aberration on the long side, and on the other end, none of them had been any shorter than that three quarters of a year mark.

He’s quiet and thinks a lot, but knows this doesn’t make a person deep, and that he isn’t. But he supposes there must be something missing in him the way he’s latched onto these women, clinging to them instantly. Meanwhile, the image he presents apparently confuses them: they see his handlebar moustache and the leather jacket he wears around in the cold months, the basic attire of a mechanic year round, and something about him screams bad boy. It takes at most eighteen months then for them to slowly come to grips with his being, on the contrary, about the most boring guy in the world.

The thing is, he knows he’s cheese knife dull, and has occasionally taken great pains to inject a little excitement into his life. But none of these passions ever take, primarily because he’s never doing it for himself. He’s just not a passionate guy. When single he drifts around from activity to activity, he has a few casual acquaintances, the tv is on but he’s never really paying attention to it. Dinner, usually a premade frozen concoction he nukes or sticks in the oven, is prepared and dispatched without a whole lot fanfare. Still, he knows he isn’t a bad guy, and believes that this should count for something.

Maybe his still being present and accounted for is that great reward for being the one dude he’s ever really known without any major skeletons in his closet. Prospective mates could spend years digging up dirt on him and find nothing, because there is nothing. A few beers with the guys every once in a tremendously long while - back when these had been plentiful, that is - but you could count those occasions on one hand in a year’s time. No arrests, ever, no scandals, he’s no more or no less thrifty with his money than anyone else. Before money became a moot point, anyway.

So all around just your average, insipid guy, and yet he wonders about that part in the Bible, that part concerning the meek and their inheritance of this planet. Naturally it went without saying that he’d never been a particularly religious man, either, that he’d attended church sparingly over the years - primarily during his brief stint in a Christian singles group - and that he was probably missing the larger point. But the way he sees it, if this is how they’re hooked up for being essentially good people who stayed home and interfered with no one, that’s great and all, except he’s not convinced the tradeoff was worth it. He feels he missed out on a chance at a normal life back when life had a chance to be normal. That is gone, now. At least as far as any of them know, it is, and so what he’s left with is the thought that he’s pushing forty, he threw his lot in and attempted to start a family with at least ten women in the past two decades, and they had all eventually found him lacking for one reason or another.

Mike’s leaning against the van, staring down at the highway’s shoulder and occasionally up at the plateau above them, where the men in the business suits and shades continue to pace around, speaking into their walkie talkies. Marty and some of the other important people are discussing what to do next, and this is fine with Mike. But he glances up at the men high above them again, and for a second there he believes his eyes deceive him - except that as he continues to stare, the same thing happens again.

Hey Marty....

No question about it, Mike was Marty’s number one salesman this side of Grandma, and while he’d never stopped to examine why, he’d once heard someone chalk it up to his knuckleheaded grace. Whether this was an actual compliment he couldn’t say, but hey, he’d paid his bills for two and a half years, he’d done quite well working at Marty’s Carpets. He was not a born leader, and he said little, and what he did say typically was corny as hell and had no depth but when he spoke, it all worked out somehow.

At the mere mention of his name Marty’s eyebrows shoot up above the rim of his glasses. He breaks away from the powwow and joins Mike beside the van, as his top associate crooks a finger skyward.

Watch those guys...I’m not sure they’re guys at all, I think they’re...

Huh? What do you mean?

They keep...blinking....in and out or whatever you wanna, uh, wanna call it, you...

Blinking?

Yeah, just watch, it’s like they’re holo - holo - what do you call it, mirages or something.

So Mike had been a year removed from his last breakup at the time the call to head west came through. Some people went online to view porn, some went for the various dating sites, but he’d honestly never tried any of this. In his boredom, he’d merely been trawling through one of the popular national classifieds sites - job postings, things for sale, et cetera - and that’s when he’d stumbled across the odd request, one that rekindled a long dormant passion in him, at a time he had none, and desperately needed one.

Such a kind, trusting old lady, this Mrs. Keehner, whose husband had recently passed and left behind an office and a garage and a storage shed jammed to the ceiling with the physical specimens of his lone true passion in life, stamp collecting. In his wake he leaves behind no notes and no discernible method of organization, just heap upon heap, and binder after baggie after envelope of these stamps. Thing is, Mrs. Keehner doesn’t have the first clue about these stamps herself. But, as she admits to Mike and surely each of the other applicants over the phone, she’d take her chances on the honesty of someone who called her up based on the thin prospects of the ad more than she would, say, taking this collection to an appraiser.

This was just the sort of diversion he needed to get his mind off of LeeAnn, his last great love. Awakening as it did memories of a pursuit he’d both picked up and set aside during a six month stretch of his ninth year on this planet. Stamp collecting! This old lady willing to pay him and by the sounds of it two or three others to come to her house and sort through this mess. If he could fly out there, she’d compensate handsomely enough for what she estimated would take at least two months. Besides, he had combed through virtually every even remotely interesting ad on the free internet classified site for weeks, with nothing to show for it but a whole lot of wasted time.

On many level Mike was the least likely guy imaginable to pack up and take to the skies. He’d only been west of the Mississippi once, to a funeral in St. Louis. He’d never been terribly interested in traveling, period, or rather he might have been except it took all he could just to pay the bills on time - there wasn’t a whole lot left over, ever, and certainly nothing ever saved. He was a mechanic, most of all, an occupation which didn’t exactly bring to mind images of musty living rooms and apple pie, sifting through piles of stamps.

But he’d never had much in common with his brethren, really. Even guys he’d worked with for years. Mike often stood around with them outside the bay doors during a lull or a break, as they smoked their cigarettes, and managed a modicum of conversation. But most of his answers were flat stock ones, and he was always content to let them do ninety percent of the talking. Despite the height and build - despite the moustache - he never felt as macho as these guys, never felt the need to prove himself such. They would always get on these conversational rolls with one another about girls or liquor or cars, even, and Mike would grin and nod and occasionally throw in a witticism, but he couldn’t connect on any significant level. The passion just wasn’t there.

He has some inkling of how constricted his life has been as he boards the plane at Toledo International and waits for the inevitable liftoff. Such an unexpected relief to have walked away from the shop he’d toiled within for the past six years, terminated the month-to-month lease at the apartment he’d rented for eight. This check in his pocket, and the money he’s saving by having no rent to pay at present, and the cashed in unused two weeks of vacation, these equate to a fresh start.

Landing in Seattle at 11:15 Pacific, Mike takes his first ever rental car the three hours west to this sleepy bedroom community, Randall, somewhere n the middle of Washington. He arrives at the address Mrs. Keehner had given him, expecting to crash on the couch maybe and go apartment hunting in the morning. But at her surprisingly palatial estate, he pulls into the driveway and is surprised to find what must be every light in the house blazing bright. With no regard for the hour, his benefactor - she introduces herself for the first time as Alice - answers the door, leads him into a living room that is piled above its occupants’ head with stamps: a slight, pale retiree named Dan, and this bubbly brunette in her twenties named Amy. Mike shakes their hands and settles immediately in to work, jet lag be damned.

Mike’s right, Marty concludes, as eight or ten of the more devoted participants in this odyssey gather around and gape at the men above them.

Though they see no weapons, everyone is eventually too spooked by these apparitions winking in and out, that they climb back in the vans, cross the grassy median, and head back the other way. This was their only real option to begin with - they figure why wait to see if these figures open fire, or military vehicles appear on the horizon to hem them in.

Marty looks beyond their immediate circle to those loitering against the last van, some fifty yards away. Natalie catches just a flash of disappointment in his features, which is rare - she’s never seen him lose his cool, and expressions such as these, the flinch of distaste, she has witnessed just a handful of occasions. Then it is gone, and he is the composed leader again. And maybe it’s just her wish that the others back there were more involved, instead of standing around, smoking cigarettes and mumbling, clearly disinterested, but she’s fairly certain that this is what Marty’s thinking, too. They seem completely detached, however, as though having no stakes in the outcome at all.

With Mary as their leader, this inner core agrees to retreat. They have seen no other cars for an hour, since passing the last exit. Presumably all the other motorists were locals who knew these final couple miles to be a dead end. Backtracking to and then off at that exit, they find a quiet village where, descending upon a shocked and visibly shaken convenience store owner for some much needed cold drinks, they are eventually able to calm him down enough to extract a map to a route he’s heard about some thirty miles to the east that cuts underneath the interstate.

Natalie’s at the wheel of the third van as they wind along these country roads. Even considering the dire circumstances, there had been somewhat of a playful air to their driving south along I-75 - sometimes it just felt good to get behind the wheel and mash the pedal. But along these curvy single lane routes, there is none of that, merely the steady forward progress of their vehicles, as dull and businesslike as a military procession. Even the conversation seems stifled.

That long haired brunette in the tan summer dress with orange flowers on it is riding shotgun with Natalie. She is always too shy to ask another person’s name, and this girl never volunteers it. She mostly sits smoking cigarettes - this does bother Natalie somewhat, but again she’s too shy to say anything, though at least this girl has her window cracked - and asks Natalie an occasional question. That’s it.

Natalie feels that she has been a very humble person her entire life, and never asked for anything. But it seems to her that what she and the other survivors have lost, apart from the apparent, though unresolved, tragedies of their friends and families, is the reasonable expectation of a normal life. There was a steady progression of events you could bank on before - education, career, spouse, home, children, retirement. Maybe everyone would achieve these things, maybe not, but at least there was a pattern that made sense, a framework and the time and opportunity to pursue. But this bizarre series of events, thrust into their routines like a wedge, has disrupted all that. Which is why she doesn’t get the disinterest of girls like this one sitting beside her, examining her fingernails idly as she puffs away.

All this thinking about family and career inevitably leads Natalie to Derek. Maybe she is still obsessed, hurt though she is, by that magical month and a half they spent together. Mostly magical, until its terrible end. But why shouldn’t she mull continually over it? He had been her first, and to date her only. Hard to believe, with all the promiscuity these days, but true: twenty years old and she’d still been a virgin.

She had been on a couple double dates in high school, when one of her girl friends asked, but that was it. Nothing ever progressed any further. Natalie was attracted enough to boys - she certainly had her share of movie and television stars she swooned over - but it was very important to her to get her education and her career off the ground first. Up until that twentieth summer, that is, when things sort of changed.

Possibly it had something to do with that incident with the professor. Her summers had always been spent more or less in the same fashion, idling at the ice cream stand with her girl friends, sleepovers, driving around town with them and the radio on, hanging out by the pool. But that particular summer for whatever reason involved more of the former and not as much of those others. Initially she paid little attention to the hunky lifeguard who kept coming over to speak to her and her friends. He is a couple years older than them, and Natalie doesn’t remember him from school at all. And even when it became obvious that he was singling Natalie out more than the others for his attention - when her friends began teasing her about this - she initially refused to believe it. But as she stood in line for the concession stand one scorching afternoon in late June, the lifeguard, so charismatic, so handsome, now familiar to her as Derek, approaches and invites her to ride with him to a party later that night.

Natalie’s nerves lead her to instantly accept, then she hurries home and spends the remainder of the afternoon and then the early evening fretting over every detail, including the acceptance itself. What if there was drinking at this party - would there be drinking at this party? Maybe not, but probably. She isn’t sure if Derek drinks or not, although he does seem very muscular and athletic and it is likely he takes too much care with his body to poison himself like that.

When he pulls into her parents’ driveway at nine in his giant jet black truck, so high off the ground she’s afraid with one look at it that she won’t be able to climb inside, she has decided on a skirt of almost the same color as his ride, a white tank top and a baby blue cotton blouse, unbuttoned, atop it. Makeup applied in a sparkling manner that her mother has always said makes her look very attractive. Derek doesn’t come to the door, he merely honks the horn once and sits in his truck with the engine running. This she attributes to shyness more than anything else, though, and the same with how he barely says a word to her the entire ride across town, he merely chews his gum and adjusts the volume on his stereo.

The party is a disaster. Whoever’s house this is, his or her parents are out of town and the place is overrun with the kind of hoodlums she’d never dream of associating with in her normal routines. The air is thick with cigarette smoke, but she doesn’t initially have enough courage to find her way out onto the back patio for some fresh air, until Derek leads the way. She then spends nearly the remainder of the night out there, too shy to even head indoors to pee. She nurses one can of cola, then another, and the guys are uniformly too cool to say anything to her - even Derek’s friends huddle just out of earshot, and often look over, and she can see that they are making wisecracks about something but she isn’t sure what. Some of the girls she recognizes from school, a couple of them she even knows and likes somewhat, and is thankful for their presence because they talk to her more than Derek does.

Unfortunately, those times he does come around, her heart just melts. This would explain some of the more disgraceful circumstances of the month or so to follow. She’s aware that she becomes even less popular and the target for even more jokes when she makes a big deal about not riding home with Derek, but he had been drinking! He had consumed, as far as she could tell, four beers from the keg they have on ice! He looks confused as they argue mildly in the backyard, and burps a lot, his eyes rolling to some degree in his head. He appears to be swaying. And this is how, teary eyed, she walks home at a forced clip, tears streaming down her face, ruining her sparkling makeup. When cars approach, she obscures her face as much as possible, and if there’s any shrubbery, she ducks inside it.

She avoids the pool, and for that matter goes nowhere else for the next few days. She does a great job of keeping up a cheery facade, though, because she knows her parents will press her for details, and she doesn’t feel like getting into it. Yet when Derek shows up on her front porch three days later, in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, and apologizes profusely, makes some wisecracks about what an idiot he is, and how stupid a lot of the other people there were as well, she’s charmed all over again. She blushes and laughs. And so it is she spends a few hours on a couple different occasions over at his parents’ house, watching him play video games. When the game is paused to load the next level, or it’s one of his friends’ turn, he talks to her extensively, and mumbles humorous asides even when he is playing that make her chuckle