Families used to stay here: mothers who packed picnic baskets lined with cloth, fathers who taught their boys to throw footballs in perfect spirals, children who ran around with a thick paste of zinc on their noses, grandfathers who showed kids how to catch crabs in the inlet. But the motels’ doo-wop cheer has long faded—the aqua and coral awnings blanched by the sun or torn away by storms, so that their metal skeletons are exposed. Their stucco façades are spotted with gray mold. In the 1990s, they were used to house people on welfare, until county officials raised concerns. Now there are oil stains in the parking lots, syringes in the gutters, condom wrappers and chewed gum and mashed cigarette filters collected in the empty planters. It’s a place for hard drugs only, where dealers sell heroin, coke, crack, speed. Guests wake up with welts from the bugs and rashes from sheets—but if they’re here in the first place, they’re usually too far gone to care. Fifteen bucks a night for a place to sleep, you take what you can get. It’s better than the street. Sometimes if a girl makes enough money here, she’ll buy herself breakfast at the Quality Inn across the road—seven bucks, all you can eat.

The motel manager will grumble to anyone who will listen that he has to replace light bulbs all the time—crack addicts make off with them, scrounging for anything they can sell. Sometimes you get a room with no lights at all and no one will come fix them, no matter how many times you call. Men beat women out in the parking lot, and everyone pretends it’s not their business, even as the screams get louder and louder and they can hear the fleshy crack-crack-crack of the blows—who can risk the cops showing up, shining flashlights into cars and knocking on doors?

The women see, too late, the symbolism behind the name, why he drove them here on that last night: He told them that the sun had set on Atlantic City. There is something bad in the air and in the water now, something rotten and wrong. A moral disease. The city needs a warning, a biblical punishment. It needs to change, to repent, before the sun can rise again. He wants to bring them all to their knees. God has clearly brought a few misfortunes to the town: The storm that tore away a stretch of boardwalk and filled the streets with water. The way so many of the casinos have shut down. But bad luck and floods are not enough. That’s where he comes in.