His words were coming out slurred. There was a long shard of glass through his tongue.

The two of them pushed their way back outside, nearly falling over one another.

“This is all wrong,” said Diane. “This is not a safe place for Josh to be.”

“It’s not like we haven’t been in stores where clerks bleed a lot,” said Jackie, “but—” She trailed off, her gaze focused on no fixed point.

Most any bath gel or greeting card store in Night Vale has a full staff of bleeding salesclerks, struggling to maintain consciousness and constantly mopping the floors. But somehow in King City, it felt incorrect, like the people were not supposed to be bleeding constantly. Like they had once been normal, whatever that meant outside of the only context she had ever known.

In her mind, Diane saw a different man than the one covered in glass shards, or it was the same man, but he was running a store in which he did not bleed, in which nothing exploded, in which he sold supplies for fishing and at night went home to his family, watched old television shows, one episode right after the other, and then slept, one episode right after the other. She saw that man and this man at the same time. He was multiple, and becoming less with each iteration.

“We can’t hear the freeway,” said Jackie.

“What?”

Jackie pointed at the 101, so close they could see the writing on the big trucks carrying things from the north of California to the south.

“There’s no sound.”

She was right. It was completely silent. Even their footsteps seemed to be absorbed by the sidewalk. The loud hum from the sky was gone. They walked in silence past planters teeming with drought-resistant succulents blooming big purple flowers.

Diane felt herself carrying clothes from her dryer, organizing the warm cotton piles into manageable squares on her bed. She felt a King City street full of cars and shoppers, ordinary stores run ordinarily. She felt these things, and at the same time she felt Jackie against her, felt the empty horror of the silent city.

The next store had a sign saying GUITARS. An elderly woman sat in a folding chair at the back. The store was otherwise empty. No furniture, no merchandise, just walls that had been sloppily painted into streaks of different off-whites, and a hideous green carpet traversed by a pink, jagged line and speckled with yellow diamonds. The carpet was torn and fixed with silver duct tape here and there, the tape bright under bare fluorescents.

The woman looked up from what she was doing, which was staring at her hands. She now stared at Diane and Jackie.

“We’re looking for a boy about fifteen.”

The woman squinted.

“We’re looking for a boy who might have come here. He was—”