Again I turned and made a lap, more slowly this time, so as not to pattern my movements. But when I glided by, I didn’t see the truck at all. I checked the exit of the drive-thru to see if he might be coming out. A white SUV emerged. I stopped at the light. The truck wasn’t up ahead. Had he gone back to Ascension?

I was about to turn around when I sensed a purple emanation through the tinted glass and he rolled up to the light beside me. I lowered the brim of my hat and stole a glance. He’d unwrapped his Whopper on the steering wheel and was quickly pushing fries past his lips. His polarized sunglasses shaded from yellow to red.

The light turned green, and we had to drive side by side for a while before I could sneak into the lane behind him. He was heading into the mountains and the smoke was getting denser. Soon the road narrowed to just two lanes walled with stone. Evacuees jammed the lane in the other direction.

I hung way back, the truck a distant purple smear in the smoke. The sky was drawn—nothing cast a shadow—as he led me up into the afternoon dusk.

5.

We’d been ascending for half an hour when he finally turned off the road. I zoomed past, watching the truck disappear down an unmarked driveway. On the gravel shoulder, I found a place to park the Jeep and put on my respirator mask. The air stung my eyes when I got out of the car, but I could breathe.

I squatted in the brush, my piss hissing on the forest floor. It occurred to me that this would be a good time to call Gordon Stone. But when I flipped my phone open, I couldn’t get a signal on the mountain.

I walked along the slanted road. White fumes crawled over the asphalt and somersaulted when a car sped by—evacuees from the higher mountains, the trunks of their SUVs loaded, pets in passengers’ laps.

The driveway was a track of packed dirt through the forest, dark as a tunnel with the smoke. I followed the impressions of the tires. Away from the road, the silence was unsettling, lacking even birdcall. I knew that the man—the ghost, Rainer, whoever—could emerge at any moment. Unless I heard him coming, I wouldn’t have time to hide.

Just where the driveway curved ahead of me, I discerned a figure in the shifting dark, coming my way. I jumped behind a tree and pressed myself against it. A deer trotted out of the smoke and paused, put its nose in the air, almost two-dimensional in its stillness. Then it raked a hoof across the dirt and loped into the woods.