Donny continued toward the river, which was so well hidden in its engineered channel that you really could only see it clearly from a plane, unless you had the nerve to walk on one of those bridges that denied the possibility of pedestrians. But it was definitely there, flowing fast over the concrete boulders. The city’s founders had the nutty idea that Dallas would be a port city, moving goods up and down the river from where it emptied into the Gulf above Matagorda Bay, but it proved to be navigable only seasonally. Not anymore, now that the volatile weather had regularly filled it with enough water to keep the flow just below what used to be considered flood stage. With air travel and long-haul trucking restricted by the emergency emissions controls finally imposed too late to do any good, there was talk about reviving that idea. An idea so nuts you had to love it. Donny wondered if he was too old to become a ship’s captain, or a river pirate, now that he had proved to be such a failure as a plaintiff’s lawyer.

As he sat down there on a big chunk of rubble, watching the river run past a calm little pool that had formed, Donny remembered when he used to be able to catch some decent bass in that stretch. He tried to imagine what kind of mutants could survive in there now, but all he found from looking into those dark currents was the suffocating anxiety about his own immediate future.

He tried to let the water take it away, without the aid of Dallas acid, watching time flow, thinking about how ancient the river was and how it will still be flowing after he—and everyone else—was long gone.

Then he noticed movement on the opposite bank. He looked. There was a big green dumpster there, out in the middle of the wide floodplain but not far from the overpass. You could hear the sound of someone hitting the metal from the side. Then he saw who the someone was: three big raccoons, stepping out into the beginning of night. The dumpster was already open on one side, and all three of them peered down into it. Then one dove in while, to Donny’s astonishment, another one grabbed its back legs to let it dangle down there. And then pulled his mate out, holding a pizza box.

The amazing thing was, there was only one slice in there, and they shared it.