There was no breeze, not even a whiff on the ridges. The Brobdingnagian windmills along Jegers Road were stuck in the sky. In farmers’ yards, the SUPPORT OUR TROOPS flags hung as limply in Fanta’s view as the facts and the reasonings behind them. Cattle stood in trout streams or shoved for real estate on tiny islands of tree shade under gypsy moth shrouds. Good word by FROM HELL HOLLOW, he mused, to describe the gray clots of fibrous webbing suddenly everywhere in the Bad Axe, inside of which the moth larvae stripped leaves from the doomed trees. Shrouds. He drove slowly through his changing world. The rusty green Tercel’s AC roared, its trail of drips mingling with transmission fluid, engine oil, and whatever else the ancient car leaked lately.

Fanta’s first choice was Darvin Montag, who had scored highest in his FROM HELL HOLLOW matrix. But he knew he had figured wrong the moment he saw that Montag’s mailbox had been lovingly crafted to look like a miniature Norwegian storehouse, fondly called a stabbur.

He paused the Tercel to knock back a bit of extra Walker from the bottle in his glove box and have a look. A man could only support one true hobby, he theorized. Especially a madman. Wisconsin’s own Ed Gein, for example, did not both construct lampshades from human skin and craft quaint nostalgic mailboxes.

But since he had come this distance, he drove down Montag’s driveway anyhow, meeting several large dogs keen to shuck him from the Tercel and rip his bowels out. A whistle slowed them, and out of copious yard junk appeared big old Darvin dressed in bathing trunks and a tie-dyed undershirt and sloppily brandishing an assault rifle.

Fanta called out over the dogs, “Hey, Darv. Hot enough for ya?”

“Shush up, knuckleheads. ’Lo, there, Grape. Yeah, sure enough, if she gets any hotter, I’m gonna have to take some stuff off that I’d better oughta leave on.”

Fanta said, “Well, lemme get off your property before that happens.”

He turned the Tercel around with both old men grinning.

Strike two became Kent Sutherland with his fresh DUI conviction and his brace of unvaccinated, homeschooled children. No one was at home at the end of a long dirt driveway in Town of Daisy. But Sutherland’s affairs looked generally tidy and spoke of adaptation, especially the robust-looking alpaca herd blinking from a shady hillside. When Wisconsin became Central America, Sutherland would be ready. Adding to this, the potted flowers and whimsical doodads meant, Here lives a happy woman. If a man’s woman was happy, to Fanta’s way of thinking as he popped his Walker, the apocalypse was not nigh.

As he drove on, Moody Blues in his cassette deck, “Story in Your Eyes” whirling from his old speakers, he asked himself: Why do people rant?