A breath of cool air made him shiver. The bay window was wide open. Had he done that? The curtains tossed fitfully and the sky was as blue as china glaze. It was a quiet morning; there was no sound louder than the honking of Canada geese in the shallow water under the docks.
He stood up, a slow operation, and looked at Evelyn. She was awkwardly asleep under a tangle of cotton sheets. One arm was flung out and Roadblock lay stretched at her feet.
Had he been drunk? Was that possible? He felt the way he remembered feeling after a drunk—the same sensation of bad news hovering just out of reach, the night’s ill omens about to unreel in his head.
And he turned to the window and thought: Ah, God, yes—the defense plant.
He remembered the beams of light stabbing the sky, the way the bedroom had begun to pinwheel around him.
Beyond the window, Lake Merced was calm. The docks shimmered under a gloss of hazy sunlight. The masts of pleasure boats bobbed randomly, listlessly. And due east—beyond the pines that crowded the far margin of the lake—a plume of smoke rose from the old Ojibway reservation.
He stared for a time, trying to sort out the implications. The memory of Chernobyl came again. Obviously, there had been an accident at the Two Rivers plant. He had no way of knowing what kind of accident. What he had seen had not looked like a nuclear explosion but might have been something just as catastrophic, a meltdown, say. He watched the smoke make a lazy spindle in the cool air. The breeze was brisk and from the west; if there was fallout it wouldn’t travel into town—at least not today.
But what happened last night had been more than an explosion. Something had rendered him unconscious for most of six or seven hours. And he wasn’t the only one. Look at Beacon Road, empty except for a scatter of starlings. The docks and boat ramps were naked in the sunlight. No boaters or dawn fishermen had taken to Lake Merced.
He turned to the bed, suddenly frightened. “Evelyn? Ev, are you awake?”
To his enormous relief, she stirred and sighed. Her eyes opened and she winced at the light.
“Dex,” she said. “Oh-um.” She yawned. “Pull the drapes.”
“Time to get up, Evie.”
“Um?” She raised herself on an elbow and squinted at the alarm clock. “Oh my God! Breakfast!” She stood up, a little unsteady on her feet, and pulled on a housecoat. “I know I set that alarm! People must be starving!”
The alarm was an ancient windup model. Maybe she had set it, Dex thought. Maybe it went off smack at seven, and maybe it rang until it ran down.
He thought: We might already be dying of radiation poisoning. How would we know? Do we start to vomit? But he felt all right. He felt like he’d slept on the floor, not like he’d been poisoned.
Evelyn hurried into the en suite bathroom and came back looking puzzled. “The light’s out in there.”
He tried the wall switch. The bedroom light didn’t work, either.
“House fuse,” she pondered, “or it might be a power failure… Dex, why do you look so funny?” Her frown deepened. “You were at the window last night, weren’t you? I remember now. You let Roadblock in…”
He nodded.
“And there was lightning. An electric storm? Maybe that’s why the power is out. Lightning could have hit the transformer over by City Hall. Last time that happened we were in the dark for six hours.”
By way of an answer he took her hand and led her to the window. She shaded her eyes and looked across the lake. “That smoke is the defense plant,” he said. “Something must have happened there last night. It wasn’t lightning, Ev. Some kind of explosion, I think.”
“Is that why there’s no electricity?” Now her voice took on a timorous note and he felt her grip tighten on his hand.
He said, “I don’t know. Maybe. The smoke is blowing away from us, anyway. I think that’s good.”
“I don’t hear any sirens. If there’s a fire, shouldn’t there be sirens?”
“Fire company may be there already.”
“I didn’t hear any sirens during the night. The fire hall’s just down on Armory. It always wakes me up when they run the sirens at night. Did you hear anything?”
He admitted he hadn’t.
“Dex, it’s way too quiet. It’s a little scary.”
He said, “Let’s do something about breakfast. Maybe we can run that little battery radio in the kitchen, find out what’s going on.” It seemed as if she weighed the suggestion and found it weak but adequate. “Everybody needs to eat, I guess. All right. Let me finish dressing.”
It was the off-season, of course, and with Mrs. Friedel gone, Howard Poole was the sole remaining guest—and Howard hadn’t come down to breakfast.
The stove was electric. Evelyn rummaged in the warming refrigerator. “I think we’re reduced to cereal,” she said. “Until the milk spoils, anyway.”
Dex opened the utility cupboard and found Evelyn’s Panasonic radio. The batteries weren’t fresh, but they might still hold a charge. He put the radio on the kitchen table, pulled its antenna to full length, and switched it on.
There was a crackle of static where WQBX used to be. So the batteries were good, Dex thought, but there was no broadcast coming out of Coby, some fifty miles west, where the relay tower was. The nearest actual radio station was in Port Auburn, and neither Dex nor Evelyn cared for its round-the-clock country-and-western music. But it would do, he thought, and he turned the dial clockwise.
Nothing.
Evelyn said, “There must be something wrong with it.”
Maybe. It seemed unlikely to Dex, but what other explanation made sense? Ten years ago he might have guessed there’d been some kind of nuclear war, the doomsday scenario everybody used to dread, that it had wiped out everything beyond the horizon. But that possibility was slim. Even if some Russian had pushed some antiquated red button, it wouldn’t have destroyed the entire civilized world. Surely it wouldn’t have wiped out Port Auburn or even closed down the radio station there.
An explosion at the Two Rivers plant and a radio with a dead transistor. He wanted to make a logical connection between the two, but could not.
He was still turning the dial when Howard Poole came into the kitchen. Howard was wearing a white T-shirt, Saturday jeans with a rip starting at the left knee, and an expression of sleepy bewilderment. “Must have missed breakfast,” he said.
“Nope. Cold cereal,” Evelyn said briskly, “and we haven’t really started yet. The power’s off, you may have noticed.”
“Trouble at the defense plant,” Dex put in.
Howard’s attention perked up instantly. “What kind of trouble?”
“Some kind of explosion during the night, from what I could see upstairs. There’s smoke coming off it now. The town’s pretty much still asleep. And I can’t find anything on the radio.”
Howard sat down at the table. He seemed to have trouble absorbing the information. “Jesus,” he said. “Fire at the research facility?”
“I believe so.”
“Jesus.”
Now Dex caught something on the radio. It was a voice, a masculine rumble distorted by static, too faint to decipher. He turned up the volume but the intelligibility didn’t improve.
“Put the radio on top of the refrigerator,” Evelyn said. “It always works better up there.”
He did so. The reception was marginally better, but the station faded in and out. Nevertheless, the three of them strained to hear what they could.
And for a time, the broadcast was quite clear.
Moments later it faded altogether. Dex took the radio down and switched it off.
Evelyn said, “Did anyone understand any of that?”