The final pre-nuke posting was apparently one of the latter. It was text only, with no pictures or links. It read, “Jones party: your friendly guide Maeve here, up at the crack of dawn, chuffed for today’s adventure—looking forward to seeing y’allz at the sandbar at 6 am sharp—posting this from my phone since my wifi just went down! If you need to reach me, use my cell. And remember: SUNSCREEN AND HATS!!!”

The attached metadata indicated that the post had indeed been made from the mobile app using the SMS, or text messaging, system. The time stamp was 5:05 A.M. local, so about fifteen minutes before the nuke had detonated.

Chapter 10

Chapter 10

A few years earlier, Corvallis had been in a moderately serious car accident in stop-and-go traffic. He’d slowed down. The car behind him hadn’t—its driver was texting—and had rear-ended him hard enough to total Corvallis’s vehicle. Looking back on it later, the weird thing about it was how long it had taken for his brain to assemble anything like a correct picture of events. The first thing that had happened, as far as Corvallis’s mind-body system was concerned, was that his car’s headrest had struck him in the back of the skull hard enough that he could feel the little rivets in its frame. Then a bunch of other stuff had happened and he had been distracted for a while, but it wasn’t until maybe an hour later that he’d noticed his head hurting and reached up to find a bump on the back of his skull.

This was kind of like that. Reading the time stamp on Maeve’s message and her words my wifi just went down were the blow to the base of his skull, but it was a while before he really focused on it.

It was easy to find Maeve’s last name (Braden) and look up her address. She lived right in the middle of Moab, just a few blocks away from the offices of Canyonland Adventures. Whether she’d sent that text from her home or from the office, she’d probably been within a few hundred yards of ground zero.