“Erik!”

Josh’s scream jerked him around in a circle and yanked him into motion up the beach without volition or thought.

“Erik! Help!”

Erik had never heard Josh’s voice sound like that, a high, thin edge of fear that knifed right through him.

“No, don’t—Erik, help, Erik, no don’t please don’t Erik help!”

There was the sound of a thunk, exactly like a cleaver coming down on a roast when they butchered out their yearly moose, and Josh was cut off in mid scream.

“I’m coming, Josh! I’m coming!” He tried to run faster but the sand gave way beneath his feet and it was like post-holing through deep snow. He rounded the outcropping of black rock, gasping, his chest heaving, his heart pounding so loudly in his ears he couldn’t hear anything else but it. “Josh! Josh! Josh—”

There was movement to his left from behind the outcropping and as he started to turn his head to see what it was there was another thud and a kind of explosion of white light followed by a feeling of falling down a deep, dark hole, down, down, down…

And then nothing.

Two

Monday, September 2, Labor Day

LIAM HAD NEVER SEEN SO MANY DO-gooders and no-goodniks in one place at one time. There were only thirty-five hundred people in the city proper and most of them appeared to be either parading or driving down Sourdough Street that afternoon. The marching half held signs and the driving half were harassing them by shifting and clutching at just the right moment during their pickup drive-bys to blanket the marchers with black clouds of exhaust.

Five women who had dyed their hair a matching bubble-gum pink, one hoped temporarily, crossed at the blinking red light where he was stopped. Behind them an older gentleman punched along on his walker like an AT-AT on Hoth, eyes with sclera aged to the yellow of egg yolks glaring at their backs. His white hair, what was left of it, was sprayed down in a combover whose fixity of purpose was being tested by the breeze caused by the passing traffic. He had a prominent, veined nose jutting from the middle of his face, completing his likeness to an old, bald eagle with acid reflux. At first glance Liam took him for a chronic drunk. Later, upon further acquaintance, he discovered that it was simple choler. Blue Jay Jefferson’s factory setting was pissed off.

The blue Forester on his right pulled out and the left-turning Ford F-150 across the intersection slammed on its brakes. No one knew how to cross at a blinking red light anymore. He was glad he was driving his own vehicle and wearing civilian clothes, otherwise he might have had to Do Something. He signaled, counted to three one one-thousand at a time, turned left in the best Gramps Champ fashion, and proceeded sedately down the hill. An actual stop light here, where he turned left again to cross the causeway that divided the man-made lake from the salt-water marsh, accelerated—barely—up another hill and turned left a third time to follow the road to an abrupt corner. There he turned into a parking lot before the road became a four-mile drive out along a spit of glacial silt that thrust out into Chungasqak Bay.