Black Moon

14

THE CAR PASSED THROUGH DARK WASHLAND, skirting the occasional dead warehouse complex and looted strip mall. The front of the car was dented in, the hood slightly crumpled, from when she had crashed through the gate.

Felicia glanced at the clock, her face blue-lit by the dash. It was getting late.

The moon was full, so she could see the dim outline of the mountains towering over the flatness of the wide valley. My mountains, she thought. The familiar ridges served as a measuring stick. If she imagined a line extending down from one distinct notch, she knew it would bisect her childhood home. Humans are messed up inside and out, but the landscape is still true.

When she was a little girl, she believed the peak with the flat top was a dormant volcano. When would it wake up, she had often wondered, and send a thick soup of lava into this maze of tract homes?

Dogs trotted across the road ahead and she sighted them, using a speck on the windshield as crosshairs, like playing one of Chase’s video games. When she drove over snakes, they felt like thick ropes of wet clay under the tires. The dull sensation made her cringe.

Again she checked the clock. I’m running out of time.

If it was accurate, then she had only about ten minutes before her sleep shift started. We’ll see if the implant’s even going to work out here, she thought. I don’t know why it wouldn’t. It’s not a transmitter. The stimulator controls the schedule.

She took a hand off the wheel and felt for the pulse generator near her armpit—a hard, raised disk under the skin. She was convinced she could feel the wire running under her skin, up her neck and into her skull, where it connected to the electrode embedded in her brain. Not just the wire, but also the signal as it traveled through it—a warm buzz telling her brain to switch modes.

At the center, Lee had said, “That sensation is just our imagination, like a phantom limb.” He said he sometimes thought he felt it too, but he didn’t let himself believe it.

“I can’t control what I believe,” Felicia said. She often found herself uttering this little mantra these days.

Another glance at the clock. A decision. She was definitely not going to make it home tonight, not taking these dark surface streets. Time to pull over.

She turned down a dirt fire road, a rocky passage through the chaparral. But she was going too fast and the car began bouncing around, the wheel pulling as the rocks and rutted lanes bullied her course. To compensate, she jerked hard to the right. The car dropped into a hidden ravine, slamming hard. She yelped as the air bag exploded before her. The engine stalled with a whine and the cape of dust moved past her, drifting like a ghost into the beams of her headlights and onward.

A stillness rose around her, though her heart was thrashing as if it wanted to be let out. The car was severely listing to the right. She was hanging in her seat, unhurt, her necklace reaching for the passenger door.

Then she felt a purr along her neck and slumped against her seatbelt, asleep.

Her shift had started.

SHE woke up at seven A.M., the world at a tilt. Her driver’s-side window faced up at the pale sky, cut into strips by power lines. It was a dreamless sleep that Lee had given them, but it succeeded in resting the body and allowing for the nightly restoration of the mind, the conversion of experience into memory.

Gravity had pulled at her all night so that she was hanging over the passenger seat but held in place by the seatbelt. The air-bag was semideflated before her.

She was slipping out from under the strap when the light changed. Something moved above her, blocking the sun. She turned and was jolted by what she saw. Out the window, looking down at her.

Eyes.

She released a short scream before clamping her hand over her mouth.

A set of massive cartoon eyes in the window. A kind of monster. A giant owl head on a human body.

“Jesus!”

Just a stupid costume, she could now see. One of those school mascots, or something escaped from an amusement park. Who is this creep?

The person inside was small. Dirty shirt and ripped jeans. Skinny, scabby arms pulling at the door.

It opened like a hatch and the owl person reached in, held out a hand. A small voice muffled inside the mask asked, “Can you get out?”

Felicia could tell that it was a girl in there.

She climbed out, avoiding the filthy hand, then reached back into the car for her backpack. It held a change of clothes, power bars, some ramen. It was all that she had brought, thinking she would be out in the field for no more than two days.

The owl stood back and stared as Felicia surveyed the damage. The car was almost on its side in the ditch that ran along the dirt road—a deep, flood-cut trench, toothy with boulders. She looked at the mountains—crisply visible, since the epidemic had done wonders for air quality—and concluded that she was probably ten miles from her parents’ house. Fifteen at the most.

She was surrounded by sage, all of it going brittle and brown as the California fall advanced. The shadows were long, bugs only starting to buzz. The sad call of meadowlarks fluted from the brush.

In the near distance, she saw a row of houses, a cul-de-sac reaching out into the scrubland. A massive loop of concrete overpass loomed above the neighborhood. Its distended shadow looked like an overlay of dark river.

This girl with the owl head scratched at her elbow and continued to stare—at least that was what the frozen-open eyes communicated.

“I like your hair,” she said.

Felicia’s hand went to her head. Short as a skinhead, she thought. It was just starting to grow back after it was shaved—when the implant was inserted. Porter had said he could just shave the site of the incision, but she insisted that he cut all of it so it would come back the same. The doctors both appreciated the gesture. A vote of confidence in their ability to get it right.

“I like your mask,” she told the girl. The anger at being startled was now faded, replaced by curiosity. The eyes were weirding her out, though. She leaned in, trying to see through the mesh, but it was dark in there.

“Did you crash?” the girl asked.

“Yep.”

“So did I,” she said. “Up there.” She pointed to the overpass in the distance.

“There’s like fifty cars up there, filled with dead people,” she told Felicia. “It’s super gross but that’s a good place to find dogs.”

Felicia looked at the overpass wondering about the dogs comment when she was struck with a realization. This kid was talking just fine, not staggering around. None of that sleepless shambling that they do.

The girl must have been thinking the same thing because she said, “You can sleep. I can totally tell. People around here will want to kill you.”

NOW they kicked through the furrows of dust, the owl-headed girl leading the way. The dead vines were like little rotting alien arms, curled and blackened as if by flames.

The vineyards had died long before the crisis, and developers had folded the groves up along the dotted lines and laid out neighborhoods of origami houses. It had been the fastest-growing community in the world during the eighties.

Felicia liked this skinny miracle girl who was now her guide.

Her name was Lila.

“Lila, hold up,” she said.

When she gave her a power bar, the girl tore at the wrapper, her hands shaking. She lifted her mask high enough to get her hand under it. The bar was gone in seconds.

Felicia gave her another one.

“I should save this,” the girl said.

“Go ahead and eat it,” Felicia told her, patting the backpack. “We have more.” She wanted the girl to stick with her. Maybe this will keep her close, she thought. “What’s in your pack?” she asked the girl. “Any food?”

“No, just noisy things.”

Felicia didn’t know what to make of this, but the girl had moved on down the trail that cut through dried mustard stalk.

“I need a car,” she called after her. “Know where I can get one?

“Probably,” Lila said with a shrug. “When we get to those houses.”

There was a wall of homes ahead of them. The first of what seemed like thousands of rows covering the valley floor and spreading up into the foothills. Just houses and supermarket strip malls, schools, and churches. She recalled a term that was sometimes used to describe such places. Bedroom community.

“Let’s see what’s in the garage,” Lila said, heading toward the closest house.

There was a naked man standing in the front yard, kicking a mound of trash on the lawn. Felicia held back. The girl sensed her fear, turned and beckoned.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “They’re not dangerous unless they catch you sleeping.”

She was right. The man glanced in their direction but turned away muttering to himself. Felicia could see that the front yard was filled with junk. Everything from inside the house had migrated to the dead lawn. Furniture, bunches of DVDs and video games scattered everywhere, plates and pans, hangers, tangles of clothes.

Felicia followed Lila around the side of the house and saw that every house was the same, the front yards cluttered with middle-class detritus.

“What a mess, right?” Lila said.

“Why?” Felicia asked, bending down to pick up a framed picture of a family. Smiling like they’re safe forever.

“Okay,” Lila said, “what happens is this. I’ve seen it so I know. Sleepless people get lost and they just walk into any house thinking it’s their house. Then they start looking for stuff that they remember having and they end up tearing the whole house up looking for it, throwing all the things they don’t recognize out the windows and doors. Then they look through that stuff again when they come outside and it gets even more messed up. They’re so clueless it’s unbelievable.”

“Wow, you’ve been paying attention,” Felicia said, thinking, Lee has to meet this kid. “How long have you been out here?”

“I don’t know. Feels like forever, but probably, what, a month?”

“You must be a pretty tough kid to live out here that long.”

The girl shrugged.

Felicia asked if she would take off the mask.

The kid seemed to freeze, looking back at her with those massive fake eyes.

“You can’t tell,” she said, “but I’m shaking my head.”

THERE was a car in the garage—an SUV. Felicia thought it would be perfect, if there was a key. They waded through the clutter of trashed belongings that surrounded the vehicle and Felicia got behind the wheel. She was hoping a solution would present itself.

“Hot-wire it,” Lila said.

“I don’t know how to do that, do you?”

“No. I know HTML though. And a little CSS.”

They checked under the seats and behind the sun visors. Felicia emptied the glove compartment as Lila looked on, snatching up a flashlight and stuffing it in her pack.

“Yay,” she said. “Light.”

“Good idea.”

“I used to sleep in the car,” Lila said. “When it first started happening to my parents. I’d lock myself in there and it was safe. For a while.”

“Where are your parents?”

“Out in the desert.”

Felicia waited for more, but the mask was silent and she was reluctant to prod. That could wait for the right moment.

They entered the house in search of the car keys. Light flooded in the window, revealing the cluttered floors. Couch ripped open, TV facedown in the debris. Glass crunched under every step. Holes had been kicked in the walls.

This could be my house, she thought. She had been carrying around the image of home as she had left it. Meticulous, the way her mother liked it, needed it to be. Both parents sitting on the couch in front of the TV, or out on the patio, tending to something on the grill. Even the bizarre picture Chase had painted—the walls of the house filled with bees that produce a sleep-inducing drone—was better than what she was seeing now. And that was just a hallucination, she reminded herself.

“If we had the Internet,” Lila said, “we could look up how to hot-wire a car. We could look up anything.”

“Not anything,” Felicia said.

There’s so much they couldn’t tell us, she thought. Still can’t tell us. The answers aren’t out there. At the center, all Kitov and his team of geniuses could do is come up with a sad workaround. Hot-wiring our heads, since they can’t find the keys.

THE smell came in stinging little hints at first, then got overwhelming as they approached the interstate on foot. Felicia pulled her shirt up over her mouth.

“Where is it coming from?”

“It’s a dead thing,” Lila said.

They started across an overpass where the sunken freeway cut through the developments, embedded four stories down. Halfway across, Felicia looked east and west. Not a car was moving on the eight lanes of grooved concrete.

The smell rising up around her was like a physical presence. She retched and ran to the railing, intending to vomit over the side. That was when she saw them. Piled across the lanes below, a barricade of bodies. A broken tangle of limbs and torsos, heads at the heart of dried eruptions. She staggered to the other side: more.

Suicides. Even at the center they had seen it begin. Annika throwing herself off the bluff onto the rocks below. That was a sure thing. This didn’t seem high enough and spoke to the desperation of the dead below.

Blocks up she saw another overpass and the dark low pile beneath it. Barricades of bodies all the way into the city.

Lila was running to the far end, crossing over, her pack jangling loudly. Felicia watched as she tore off the owl mask and vomited onto the sidewalk. She saw the side of the girl’s face, her long hair, before she herself was doubled over, the contents of her stomach splashing over her dusty shoes.

By the time she reached Lila, the girl was wearing the mask again.

AS evening approached, Felicia started to regret wasting so much time looking for car keys in abandoned homes. She recognized that they still had a few miles to go, that they wouldn’t make it before downtime hit unless they ran.

“Where’s a safe place to spend the night?” she asked Lila.

“In a house,” the owl-head said, “since there’s two of us. Someone can keep watch.”

They had seen about a dozen living people all day, most of them just shambling along. Some had called out to them, or headed their way, but most just looked past them. Eyes blinking, mumbling. Seeing visions only the sleepless see.

“People actually seem pretty harmless out here,” Felicia said.

“They wouldn’t be if they caught us sleeping. They would seriously try to kill us.” Lila said she had seen it happen to a girl who was found sleeping in a tree house, killed by a bunch of kids looking for firewood.

“They hit her with hammers and axes,” she said, “and rocks. Even when she fell out of the tree and was dead on the ground I bet they kept doing it. I don’t know really because I ran away but I bet. They go bonkers when they see sleepers.”

She was quiet a long time. Felicia wanted to see her face, to know what was going on in that dark globe. She watched her—small shoulders and skinny arms, pants sagging in the seat—as they crossed the vast parking lot of a supermarket.

They peered in through the glassless windows. It was now just a dark cave, picked clean by looters. Rows of empty shelves disappearing in the black space. Someone was sniffling somewhere in the darkness and they moved away from it. They went into an abandoned ice cream store.

“I’ll take a triple,” Felicia said to the invisible worker. This was where she and Chase had spent a lot of her waitress money. Memories of those early days flashed through her. The two of them on her scooter, his arms around her.

“I’ll take a banana split!” Lila yelled.

They sat at the table and ate power bars instead. Lila got up and went around the counter. She turned on the faucet and water rushed into the stainless steel sink. “See?” she said. “There’s still water here. We ran out at home so we had to scoop it from the aqueduct. It was so completely vile.”

They drank out of a plastic pitcher and sat looking out the window in silence.

“I think this was hers,” Lila said.

“This what?”

“This,” she said, pointing to the mask. She explained how she hid out in a girl’s room, wore some of her clothes. Found the mask in her closet. She was a cheerleader, Lila said. “I could tell we wouldn’t have been friends. But we could both sleep so maybe we would have found each other, like you found me.”

Felicia was confused. “Wait. Who are we talking about again?”

“The girl,” Lila said. “The one they killed.”

THEY decided to find a house and try to lock themselves in it.

In a quiet cul-de-sac, they picked one that had a For Sale sign, the thin post hammered into the lawn. The uncut grass reached up for the sign, promising to eventually conceal it. Most of the windows along the front of the house were still intact. As with many of the other houses, dying orange trees stood in the front yard, which was littered with clothes, papers, and a weave of scattered belongings. There were For Sale signs all up and down the street.

Inside, they checked everywhere for sleepless people hiding in closets and showers. The task made them jittery. Lila took Felicia’s hand and squeezed it as they slowly pressed forward. They jumped at everything, especially upon glimpsing a long coat hanging from a hook on a door. They screamed, then laughed nervously.

Then Lila tore it off the hook and threw it to the ground. She kicked it around the room, saying, “Wake up! Come on, up and at ’em! Rise and shine!”

Now they really laughed, collapsing to the carpeted floor.

LILA took a string of empty cans from her backpack and pulled it tight at the top of the stairs. She strung up an elaborate web of trip wires all the way down the stairs, hanging the bells, cans, and jangly ornaments she had collected for her pack of noisy things, as she called it. She did this with professional efficiency, admiring her work before retreating to the room, where she hung a wind chime on the doorknob as a final precaution.

“That’s what I do now,” she said.

As the darkness set in outside, they were camped out in the master bedroom behind the locked door. They lounged on mattresses that they had to drag up from the bottom of the stairs, where someone had tossed them. A Santa Ana was brewing outside and occasional gusts caused the house to shudder.

Felicia told Lila to sleep while she kept watch.

“Why don’t we both sleep?” she asked. “I think we’re safe in here.”

Felicia said, “I can only sleep at certain times. From exactly ten to seven, actually.”

“What?” Lila asked, like it was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard. “Why?”

“Well, I have an implant that makes me get to sleep.”

“An implant?”

She explained how it worked.

“There’s no way to wake me up, once I’m under. It’s not like normal sleep.”

“Whoa,” Lila said. “Do a lot of people have those?”

“Just about twenty of us. We’re all people who worked at a sleep research center at the university. We fixed ourselves. Lee did, anyway, with Porter. I was the first to volunteer.”

No reason to tell her about the disaster with Kitov, she figured.

“Everyone should get one,” the girl said.

Felicia agreed. “That’s why I came out here,” she explained. “To take my family to the center, if they’re still here.”

The mask stared at her for a long silence.

“Will you take me?” Lila finally asked.

“Of course.”

“Is there food?”

“Hope you like pasta,” Felicia said, smiling at the thought of all the pasta she had eaten at the center. The security team had found what appeared to a hundred years’ worth of the stuff in the university’s emergency stores.

“Cool,” Lila said. “Pasta’s awesome.”

“Then you’ll like the center,” Felicia said. “It’s down in San Diego, overlooking the ocean. It’s practically a resort.”

She winced. That was laying it on pretty thick.

The girl was quiet for a long time and Felicia thought maybe she had fallen asleep, until she asked, “So do you have a boyfriend?”

Felicia lay back and stared up at the ceiling. “I did,” she said.

“What was his name?”

“Chase.”

“I like that name. What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. We broke up just before all this started.”

“Why did you break up?”

“We had issues.”

“What kind of issues?”

Felicia paused, not sure she wanted to get into all this, especially with a kid. “It just wasn’t working out,” she finally said.

“Were you sad?”

“Yes. It was awful. We knew each other since we were kids. Even younger than you are right now.”

“Where is he now? Chase.”

“I don’t know,” Felicia said. “The last I heard from him was a voice mail, saying he and our friend Jordan were going away on a road trip, and that he would be back in time for my birthday. That was before we knew what was happening,” she added, going silent as her thoughts raced on.

Lila was silent too. Felicia sat up and studied her. The girl was sitting on the mattress, leaning against the wall. Her mask pushed forward, and those big eyes staring at her feet. “Are you asleep?” she said quietly.

“No,” a small voice said from inside the mask.

“Go ahead. It’s safe.”

“I believe you,” the girl said.

She decided to leave the girl alone, give her some space. Maybe she’s thinking too much. Maybe she thinks I’m going to attack her.

“I’ll be quiet,” she said.

For a while, she watched the girl’s foot move. It was wagging slowly. From behind the mask, she said, “I will never go home. I don’t want to see it.”

“See what?”

“Them,” the girl said.

“Your parents?”

“Yeah, but dead.”

“How do you know that?”

“They told me in a letter,” Lila said flatly. “They said they were going to do it.”

“I’m so sorry,” Felicia said.

The girl said nothing, but her silence seemed to send a message. Her silence and the big still eyes of the mask. Yours will be dead too, they seemed to say.

IN THE morning, at exactly seven o’clock, Felicia awoke to find herself alone in the room. She blinked and rubbed her eyes. All the furniture they had used to barricade the door had been pushed aside. Felicia went to the door and saw that it was still locked, the wind chime still in place.

She must have gone out, locking the door behind her, Felicia thought. But why would she do that?

The girl’s backpack, she noticed, was gone.

She opened the door and called out for her. The house was quiet.

Felicia dressed and went downstairs, walking right into the trip wires Lila had set up the night before. The cans clanked and rattled like dull bells. She picked her way through them and entered the garage, squeezing between the cars parked there.

Oh no no no, she said, looking up and down the street. Why would she leave?

Then she was running down the street, calling out. The houses stared out at her, blank, empty. No sign of the girl.

Felicia returned to the garage of the house and waited, peering out at the street. Maybe she’ll come back, she thought. Maybe she went to find us something other than power bars to eat for breakfast. But the fact that she took her backpack said otherwise.

She stared out at the street, or watched flies zigzagging in the air, passing through dust-filled shafts of light. The sun moved over the houses, pushing shadows across the cluttered yards.

A few men passed by, stumbling along and talking to themselves. She ducked low, watching them for any hints. It was clear they were lost, disoriented by their sleepless state. She could smell them though they were thirty feet away.

I can’t wait all day, she thought, but I will wait as long as I can.

Later, a woman came down the street and looked directly at the house.

Felicia put her age somewhere in the midthirties. She had a dirty face under a ratty tangle of hair and a slipper on one foot. Her simple flower-print dress was torn. She was wearing it backward.

The woman lingered in front of the house for a minute or so, staring up at it as if trying to remember something. Her mouth was moving. She was either chewing something or silently reciting some endless conversation.

Felicia let her wander off. But when the woman came by again, only minutes later, she decided to try to talk to her. She was kicking at a crack in the sidewalk when Felicia stepped out of the shadowy garage. When the woman saw her, she froze and stared with exhausted eyes.

As Felicia approached, the woman appeared to recognize her, but was then immediately devastated to realize that she didn’t. She wavered on her feet and Felicia went to her side and held her up, gagging at the sharp tang of urine.

“Have you seen a girl?” Felicia asked. “About this high? Wearing an owl mask?”

The woman just stared, her eyes moving over Felicia’s face. She was searching for something, her mouth frozen open. She said, “Dreams got so upsetting to him because he had to watch every one of them and they were so ugly and evil that no more sleeping and dreaming was allowed to happen in our heads.”

This was a new one to Felicia. Lee would be interested in hearing it, but what about Lila? It was clear this woman was too far gone to help. Felicia lowered her to the curb as the woman’s face continued to flash between joy and despair. There was something electric about it, as if the different motor cells of her brain were being shocked with a probe, causing her face to open and close like a fist. Felicia could see the muscles working spastically under the skin as she backed away.

Two hours later, she decided she had to move on.

FELICIA turned the corner and looked down the street of her childhood. She was having doubts about actually entering her house. It was easy to imagine how she would find them, after what she had seen yesterday.

Did she really need specifics to haunt her? Dreamless sleep was a blessing, she had already learned. No dreams, no nightmares.

She stopped and sat under a parkway tree, setting the backpack on the curb. The neighborhood was silent. No barking dogs, she observed. No hammering from construction sites, or airplanes flying over. No rumble of school buses. This kind of sunny September day would still bring the splash of neighbors doing cannonballs into their pool, the referee’s whistle from the soccer field. The pulse of bass from a car going by, the whine of the gardener’s blower.

What had happened was this, she realized: the world had been turned inside out. That was the only way to describe it. That was the result of a world without sleep. All outside things were now inside. Everything else that we kept in our heads, in our hearts, has flooded out into the open air.

But what about Lila? If she was still sleeping, there must be others. Maybe, and maybe was enough.

My mother, father. Maybe my sister. Maybe my brother. Maybe the walls filled with honey.

She said it out loud, “Maybe is enough.”

THE house sat low in the shade of elms, the debris of their lives on display before it. Family pictures were strewn about the wild lawn, a garden of memories to pass through.

Felicia stood at the base of the driveway looking up at the shattered windows. The front door was partly open. She felt it like a wound. The darkness it revealed seemed impenetrable. Her body was trembling, teeth chattering. She decided she couldn’t do it, couldn’t take that first step up the driveway, and turned back. But the maybe was there to move her forward, until she was standing at the darkened doorway.

She stood there for a long time. The door and the space beyond were familiar, but filtered through all that had happened since she last stood there. At that remove, they felt like props for a dream she had once had—a dream of an entire lifetime now mostly forgotten. Familiar things, like the doorknob that they all touched but didn’t see or feel, now had an otherworldly aura. Their unique truth had resurfaced, wiping out for a moment the generic memories. She felt as though she was visiting this place for the first time, though she was also aware that she was intimately familiar with it.

Still, she couldn’t reach out to it now. She couldn’t even nudge the door wider with her foot because of the terror that now had her by the throat. She closed her eyes and listened at the opening. Then she called out hoarsely, “Hello? Mom? Dad? You there?”

Nothing came back.

“Hello? It’s me!”

Nothing.

That’s all I can do, she thought. She remained in the doorway for several minutes, just to be sure. Nothing changed.

She was backing away when she heard the voice. A low murmur. Coming from inside. Someone talking.

“Hello? Who’s there?”

The murmuring continued.

She was pulled forward by the possibility. She passed quickly through the living room, then the kitchen, stepping over the shards of dishes, the racks from the oven like the walls of a cage. In the dining room the table was on its side. A chain led out the shattered back door and she could see that it was locked around one of the patio pillars. The chain they once used to keep their dog, Zeto, tethered to the tree and out of the pool. She pulled on it and there was resistance, a tug like a fish on a line. She dropped it as if shocked, but followed the chain down the hall.

It led into the first bedroom, where she found that it was bolted around Chase’s ankle.

CHASE was delusional, talking to the wall. When he saw Felicia, he redirected the stream of garbled words in her direction. At first she thought he was speaking another language. He seemed to recognize her behind his exhausted eyes, but his reaction was subdued, as though she had just stepped out of the room for a moment and returned.

He was lying on a mattress, shirtless, his torso badly scratched and scarred as if he had crawled through a thicket of thorns. Some of the scratches were scabbed over, but others were fresh. Felicia could see that he had lost a great deal of weight, ribs and abs showing like furrows, face hollowed and gaunt. His filthy boxer shorts hung loosely at his hips. He’s starving, she thought.

She threw herself at him, said his name. She kissed his neck, his face, as he looked beyond her, mumbling. She couldn’t make out what he was saying. Something about it growing in not out. Something about a head stuffed with hair.

Is he talking about my haircut, she wondered?

“Sit up, come on,” she told him. She pulled his arms and he rose, still talking over her shoulder. “I knocked up night,” he seemed to say past her ear.

He looked at her, unsmiling. “Say that again,” she asked, but he didn’t respond.

The emaciated state of his face, his body, scared her. She grabbed the backpack and pulled out a fistful of power bars. “Chase,” she said. “Come on, eat these.”

She tore one open and held it out. His body did the rest, sending out his hand for it, cramming it into his mouth. He was chewing, but already tearing open another. He must need water, she thought.

In the kitchen she tested the tap. Water streamed out. She filled a pot with it and brought it to Chase. He drank, but not with the same fervor that he ate. The chain, Felicia noted, was long enough for him reach the sinks, the toilet too. How did he get chained up, she wondered. Did her family do it? She looked at how it had been secured to his ankle. There was a screw pushed through the loop of links and bolted tight. She tried to undo it with her fingers but it didn’t budge. She needed tools.

“Did you do this?” she asked him. “How did you do it, Chase? Listen, how?”

THE old Acura was in the garage. No sign of her father’s car. They drove away in it, she told herself. She had already searched the entire house. There was no sign of them. Off to somewhere safe, she insisted. Maybe to find me, as they had once discussed during one of their final phone calls. She speculated that they must have left before Chase arrived. He tried to make sure he wouldn’t wander off as his condition worsened, and made use of Zeto’s chain.

She thought, They are together, at some kind of sanctuary. The whole thing hasn’t touched them. They left this car for me.

She had carried a key for it since she was sixteen. She had learned to drive behind the wheel of this car, her father coaching her through three-point turns and parallel parking. He had always kept a small tool kit rolled up in a towel and stashed in the trunk, and she used it—the pliers and wrench—to get the chain off Chase’s leg. She led him to the passenger seat and strapped him in.

The car had a full tank of gas, but she noted that the clock was broken. Stuck at 8:33. Right twice a day.

She pulled out of the garage slowly and parked on the incline of the driveway. It was stupid, she knew, but she got out and pulled the garage door shut. Her mom had always hated leaving the garage door wide open like that. Anyone could walk in, she used to say.

Then they were driving through her old neighborhood and Chase said something like, “Cards were switched is what he said at the top of the world but who did that to what cards on the top side of clouds?”

“Chase? What cards?” she asked. “Did you say cards?”

He turned to her and mumbled, “It’s dreams all the time now so nothing is nothing anymore.”

She told him they were on their way to get help. At the center, they would take care of him and he would be good as new. She explained everything about the implant in her head, even showed him the generator bulge under her skin. “There’s a wire,” she said, “going from the generator to the implant in my brain. I know it sounds weird, Chase, but it works. They’ll give you your own implant.”

They had talked about implants before. He had pretended to joke, and when she laughed, he was hurt that she seemed to think it was such a stupid idea. He thought it could save them. She remembered his anger, saying he would be able to fuck her whenever she wanted to be fucked. That’s what she wanted, right? Seething, punching walls and doors. Not angry at her. At his own body.

“You don’t need an implant or pills or any of that, Chase,” she had told him then. “You just need to be honest with yourself.”

“Then why am I always dreaming it? Why am I fucking you every night in my dreams if it’s not you that I want?”

“Stop saying ‘fucking,’ ” was all she could say.

Later that week, he had attacked her. She had felt him behind her, dreaming one of those dreams. She took him inside, thinking it could work like the mechanics of a key. Hoping, by fitting together in that most simple way, he could unlock her and let out the possibilities she had already stored away.

She was able to kick him away when he became violent. His head hit the wall and he realized what he was doing. He quickly gathered up his clothes and fled. They didn’t see each other much after that, until she met with him to tell him it was over, even though it crushed him.

Both of us, she thought.

FELICIA knew she couldn’t take the freeway. Bodies of jumpers were there, piled in the shadows of the overpasses.

They passed through the cluttered surface streets, sometimes swerving onto sidewalks, over lawns, as they moved through the mess. She decided she wanted to look for Lila one last time.

She pulled up to the house where they had stayed the night. The gate groaned as she passed through and entered the house for a quick search. Still no sign of the kid. She called for her up and down the street and, back behind the wheel, she dared to honk the horn. This excited Chase, who shouted, “The sheep will not come back!”

When a couple of men appeared at the end of the street, staggering toward them, Felicia drove slowly in their direction. The sun was going down and she reluctantly turned on her headlights, begrudgingly acknowledging that time was running out. Only a couple more hours until the implant put her under. The men watched her glide past and she scanned them in return, searching for any sign of Lila. They were pretty far gone, twitching faces, murmuring mouths. They peered in, maybe astonished to see the lucid look in her eyes, the steadiness of her hands. Frowning now, so Felicia kept going, thinking there was nothing more to do. She told Chase this with a sudden sob. It hit like a sneeze. She wiped back the tears and drove on.

She told Chase about Lila as she worked her way slowly out of the labyrinth of obstructed roads and tangled housing developments. Progress was slow. She wished the clock in the car worked, but guessed that she had only another hour before downtime hit. She eventually found her way to a highway through the chaparral. Here Felicia could actually pick up some speed, rushing along under the low ceiling of stars.

Then, in the headlights, she saw what appeared to be a building in the road. As she closed on it, she saw that it was a bus, spilled on its side, blocking both lanes.

She tried to ease around it, but there was not enough shoulder. They’d have to turn around, backtrack to an intersection several miles back. She knew now that she needed to pull over. It was because I waited so long for Lila, she knew.

THE car sat at the end of a street for a neighborhood that was never built. There were only the roads and wooden stakes in the dirt, marking off imaginary homes.

She had decided that she would stay in the car with Chase. In the backseat, rather than out in the weeds. She recalled the soft thump of snakes on the road from the night before, the roaming packs of dogs.

Chase didn’t resist the chain.

Felicia looped it around his hands and then around his body and the car seat. She kept pulling it tight, taking up the slack, as he talked into her hair, breathing indecipherable words onto her neck. It was a long chain. She wrapped it around his waist and the car seat a few times. She looped it around his thighs, and as she did this she noticed that he had become aroused.

Felicia looked up at him and saw that he was there, present, his eyes sad and heavy, his face contorted, pained, and she held him, kissing his forehead. “We just need to get through tonight,” she told him. “Tomorrow I’ll take you to people who can help.”

He tried to raise his arms—to hold her, she thought—but they were chained down. He thrashed.

“Chase! Don’t. Just sit still.”

His face started flashing through emotions, like the woman she saw earlier on the street, as he strained against the chains.

She couldn’t watch it. It was like his face was flashing every moment of his life.

Felicia fled to the backseat, her hands shaking. It must be close to ten, she thought. She sat directly behind him, talking to him. Trying to soothe him.

The car shuddered as he rocked side to side. He shouted nonsense and groaned. It was like a child’s tantrum, or seizure.

The chain bit into the back of the seat.

Felicia covered her ears, clamped her eyes. His rage seemed to peak. She glanced up and noticed that in her struggle to secure him, she must have knocked the rearview mirror askew. Should she straighten it? She couldn’t have him seeing her sleep. He would kill himself trying to get to her.

But she could hit downtime any minute now. Any second, even.

So she sat wondering, eyes darting to the mirror, to the broken clock.

Damn it.

She jumped up and squeezed between the front seats, reaching for the mirror.

Then nothing.