“I promise.” His hands were trembling. He set the mug next to hers on the table, stood up, and walked to her chair, where he started to bend over but wound up on his knees, his arms around her, his face pressed against her T-shirt. She held him. “I promise,” he said again. He kissed her once, and left.

The Beachcomber Souvenir Shop, where he worked as a manager, appeared to be undamaged by the storm. Roy circled the freestanding row of stores that housed the Beachcomber, and as far as he could tell the only damage to the entire building was to the dry cleaner’s sign at the south end of the complex. A series of metal bolts edged in broken plastic stuck out from the building’s gray façade, and the sign was nowhere in sight.

From there he followed a network of side roads that led to the back entrance of his neighborhood.

The ranch houses were made of cinder block; the roofs were gravel set into tar. The colors varied, but there were only five different models, repeating like the background of a children’s cartoon. Once again he pictured himself as Charlton Heston in The Omega Man. When he spotted movement behind the living room window of a house half a block away from his own, he imagined slamming on the brakes, leaning out the window of the station wagon, and opening fire with an automatic weapon, his eyes trained behind dark sunglasses on a member of that deadly group of mutants known only, in the film, as the family.

He parked behind Teresa’s Datsun, got out, and walked the perimeter of the house. There was evidence of fresh chaos here: Joe’s bicycle, left out, had been carried halfway across the backyard and lay on its side in the grass. The metal bucket he used to wash the cars had been tossed due west and sat against the next-door neighbor’s house, as if the ground had tilted in that direction. The taped sliding glass door that opened onto the backyard from the dining room bore the scar of something that had hit it hard enough to dislodge a thumb-size chunk of glass. But that seemed to be the extent of the damage. He made his way around to the front door and unlocked it. There was no indication of flooding; the carpet, at least what he could see of it, looked dry. He reached one shoe forward and tapped a rubber-soled toe against the fiber. Then he closed the door and locked it.