Movement. Sweet movement.

THIRTY-EIGHT

The Third and Final Hour

No movement.

Shitty, dead-fish-floating-in-the-water lack of movement.

Miriam was cooking with gas. Then she reached the causeway crossing the Barnegat Bay and traffic locked up tighter than a handful of tampons crammed up a nun's asshole.

Now it's car after car. Kayaks and boat trailers and pale yuppies and kids watching Spongebob Squarepants on DVD screens in the backs of the front seats. Even this late in the day, people are desperate for a taste of the beach, a whiff of sand and surf (the surf smelling like rotting mollusks and the sand home to old hypodermic needles and clumpy, filth-caked condoms). The sun has long faded, just a bleary smear against the dark clouds hovering above the island. It's like a line of tourists driving toward the Rapture.

Miriam lays on the horn.

The last cigarette from the pack is down to its nub. She grits her teeth and flicks it out the window, and it bounces off the hood of a silver mini-van next to her.

The mother in the passenger seat – a blimpy hippo already sunburned so badly it looks like she's been wandering the desert for forty days and forty nights – shoots her a sour stare.

Miriam thinks of shooting the woman back, with bullets.

Miriam elbows the horn again. She's feeling claustrophobic. This is coming down to the wire. She's been sitting in traffic for far too long now.

She needs a sign.

"I need a sign," she says, panicked.

"Here comes one," Louis says in the back seat. He peels up his electrical tape and reveals not a gaping socket as usual, but a ruined eye that looks more like a thumb-squished grape than anything else. For added effect, he winks.

Then he's gone.

Miriam desperately looks around to see what he's talking about.

Sour, sunburned lady? No.

Carload of dogs and screaming children in front of her? Probably not.

A small plane flies overhead. But since she doesn't have any kind of Batman grappling hook on her belt, she thinks that plan is pretty much fucked from the get-go.

Then she sees it.

A biker – no, a cyclist.

He's lean and ropy, dressed to the nines in red-and-blue spandex like he's the Superman of the bicycle crowd.

As he whizzes past on the side of the causeway, Miriam throws open the passenger side door.

His front tire meets unyielding resistance.

The cyclist flies over the open door. She hears, but does not see, his head hit the pavement. At least he's wearing a helmet.

Miriam's up and out of the car and on the bike before she even thinks about it. The front tire's bent a little from where it smacked into the Subaru's door, but even wobbly, it's locomotion.

She checks the cell phone.

She has less than an hour now.

"My bike!" the cyclist cries.

Miriam steers unsteadily past.

THIRTY-NINE

Frankie

The Barnegat Lighthouse – Old Barney – stands ahead.