EIGHT

Sometimes I think about all the terrible places you could have been when the power went out, like elevators and underground highway tunnels and window washing in downtown Manhattan. Being in a commercial airliner was surely one of the worst, since those huge, computerized jets had no chance to land safely once they lost power and communications. Even so, the people in the air met their end quickly. Think about astronauts in the space station. They could have had enough oxygen to last for days. They could be alive now for all I know, looking down on our huge, blue planet, waiting for the lonely moment when their oxygen finally runs out, all the while unable to know how things are going down here. Imagine having desperate, end-of-days sex in zero gravity. What a hoot.

I was in Dallas when all this happened, in the upstairs VIP area of a club called Cinnamon, recovering from a night of debauchery with a buddy and some dancer friends of his. The reason I came to Dallas in the first place was for a golf tournament, but after it was over I decided to hang around a few extra days. Ever since I lost my job I don’t keep what you would call a regular schedule. Still, waking up drunk in a strip club on an average Friday morning is pretty nuts …unless, that is, you’re on the town with Jimmy Jameson.

Jimmy runs what he calls a small-time sports gambling Web site, but the cash he pulls from this venture seems remarkable to me. On Thursday night, before the power went out, we were still on our first drink when a muscular friend of his walked in the door carrying one of those vinyl zipper bags people use for bank deposits. The contents of the bag comprised the previous week’s proceeds from the gambling enterprise. I didn’t want to pry into his business, so I didn’t ask how much money it was, but Jimmy’s the kind of guy who always knows what you really want.

“So this week’s total came to just over ninety thousand,” he said. “During football season it might be two or three times more. Then there are the weeks where I get fucked and have to cough up fifty or sixty thousand. You don’t want to be around me when that happens.”

Last year, when I was still employed, I made almost fifty thousand dollars and felt like I was doing all right …at least before I paid taxes and health insurance and tucked a few bucks into my hapless 401(k). That probably sounds like a lot of money to some people, but in the twelve hours we spent at Cinnamon between Thursday night and Friday morning, Jimmy shelled out nearly half of my gross annual salary. In cash. If you think there’s no chance to fuck a stripper in the club, twenty thousand dollars will do it for you. And then some.

By law the club shuts down at two in the morning, but Jimmy is what you call a special customer. He shelled out five grand for use of the VIP room, two-thousand-a-piece to four separate girls, three grand to the manager on duty, a grand to our server, and the rest went to booze. Around midnight the party began to slow down, and I was lying on a sofa next to this dancer named Keri, languidly making out with her. That’s when Jimmy produced two bubble packs of green pills that turned out to be X. Apparently he pays some pharmacist to cook them up. I’d never rolled before, so I didn’t know what to expect, but half an hour later Keri pushed me into one of the private dance rooms, yanked down my pants, and swallowed me like I’ve never been swallowed. Keri is one of the sexiest women I’ve ever laid eyes on, she has the best set of natural tits you can imagine, and that night every square inch of her skin had been rubbed smooth with lotion and sprinkled with body glitter. We are talking the wildest porn dream you can imagine turned into reality by a woman who normally wouldn’t have looked twice at me. But throw a couple grand in her purse and ply her with vodka and MDMA, and suddenly you’re a rock star and she is your groupie. Even if I wasn’t the one who paid for it.

The next thing I remember is waking up on the couch with a raging headache and a mouth so dry it felt like my throat was permanently sealed shut. At first I couldn’t figure out where I was. Then I remembered Keri and her amazing skin, the hair that smelled like coconut, and assumed she had vacated the premises now that her paid work was done. I was so hungover I could barely summon the strength to hold my head in my hands. Naturally, I started in on the typical morning routine of self-hatred, wondering how I could have blown half my severance pay on a singles cruise where I didn’t meet anyone, or how the $80,000 in my 401(k) had cashed out to $41,000 after taxes and penalties. I spent fifteen years saving that money one paycheck at a time and in six months had blazed through more than half of it. All while not finding the time for a single job interview.

So there I was, head in my hands, wallowing in hangover depression, when I heard someone approaching. I looked up and saw Keri standing there with a Bloody Mary in one hand and a joint in the other. She had changed into a pink spandex T-shirt and a black tennis skirt and did not look like a woman who had matched me drink for drink all night long.

“You look like you could use some breakfast,” she said. “I’ve got just the thing to fix you up.”

I couldn’t understand why she was still in the club or why she was bothering to dote on me. Most of the women I meet can’t get away fast enough. I wondered if she’d been slipped a morning bonus.

“Where’s Jimmy?” I croaked.

“He left around four. Krystal drove him home. I think he drank a whole bottle of Jameson.”

This information confused me, so instead of saying anything else I took the drink from her and knocked back a couple of swallows. It tasted strongly of lemon. I love the taste of lemon and in seconds the glue in my head began to loosen.

“Do you smoke?” she asked, pushing the joint toward me.

“Not very often.”

“The Bloody Mary will help, but weed is the real hangover cure. Smoke this and you’ll glide right out of here.”

For a moment I just stared at her. Finally, I said, “You’re a lifesaver, Keri.”

“You remember my name?”

“Sure. You spelled it for me, remember?”

“In here I normally go by Kat. I don’t like giving out my real name, for obvious reasons, but I know Jimmy is cool and you seemed like a nice guy.”

“You were pretty cool yourself,” I said. “I had a really great time last night.”

“So did I,” she said, smiling, her eyes shrinking to slits.

I wasn’t sure what to say next. The club was empty and dimly lit and we seemed to be the only two people there. I didn’t know what arrangement Jimmy had made with her or how long she was expected to keep me company.

“So if Jimmy is gone, I guess I should call a cab? I’m sure you want to get home.”

Her smile vanished.

“A cab?”

“I don’t want to be presumptuous and expect you to—”

“After going on half the night about wasting your savings, now you want to call a cab instead of asking me to drive you?”

I didn’t remember whining to her about money. I couldn’t believe I had whined to her about money.

“You’re right. Sorry. I would love for you to drive me.”

“Me, too,” she said. “But not to Jimmy’s. Not yet. Maybe you don’t remember, but you owe me one, mister.”

Again I had the feeling I was asleep, like this whole scene was some kind of high-concept wet dream. Exactly how much cash, I wondered, had Jimmy given her?

“By the way,” she said and winked at me. “I don’t even drive to work.”

“What? Then how will we—”

“Lyft,” she said. “It’s so much safer with a job like this.”

Imagine how futuristic that will sound to the people who survive all this: Arranging rideshare through an app on your smartphone!

Anyway, I smiled and was reaching for her hand when the lights went out. There were no windows in the building and we were thrown into the blackest possible darkness.

“Shit,” she said. “I don’t like this.”

By now you know the drill. I reached for my phone, to use it as a flashlight, and it wouldn’t turn on. Neither would Keri’s. Panic quickly ensued and I took her hand in mine.

“You brought me that joint, right? You must have a lighter.”

“I do!” she said.

After she found it in her purse, I took the lighter and produced a flame.

“I’ll hold this and you lead us out of here.”

A few minutes later we reached the rear exit and pushed the door open. By then our pupils must have been huge because we could barely open our eyes. Even so, I knew something was wrong. Really wrong. Cinnamon is just off the George Bush Turnpike, where the roar of traffic is constant, but instead of cars and trucks going by we didn’t hear anything except the distant sound of people shouting and dogs barking. The quiet was so formidable it was like someone had unplugged us from reality.

“What the fuck?” said Keri.

That was when I happened to look up and see the new star in the sky. I didn’t think much of it at first. About three seconds later, we heard the first of many massive explosions to the south. We didn’t know yet what had happened. To us it looked like the beginning of a war.

The way Keri screamed then was something I’ll never forget. I thought she would rip her vocal cords to shreds. I thought she might go into cardiac arrest. But she didn’t.

All the really bad stuff came later.

* * *

I was still holding Keri, staring at rising clouds of smoke, when the back door of the club opened and the night manager stumbled out. He saw us standing there and approached quickly.

“Hey, buddy,” he said. “I think you’ve—”

Then he stopped and looked around, as if he’d walked straight into a wall of silence.

“What the fuck?”

I don’t know if the guy was still drunk or high from the night before, but he kept turning around, clockwise, saying “What the fuck? What the fuck?” until he nearly fell over. This was so unexpected and ridiculous-looking that in spite of everything I started to laugh.

“Holy shit!” the guy said. “What happened? Do y’all know what happened?”

“It was already like this when we came outside,” Keri said.

The manager didn’t seem to hear. Instead he ran toward a lonesome red Buick in the adjacent parking lot and climbed into it.

Keri and I watched as he sat in his car, unmoving for a period of seconds, before he climbed out again.

“It won’t start!”

“Look around, man. There aren’t any cars running anywhere.”

“What are y’all going to do?” the manager asked.

It was a fair question. Whatever was happening was major and awful and I was a couple of hundred miles from home. I had no particular place to go, other than Jimmy’s, which was several miles north. And I didn’t remember how to get there.

“Do you live nearby?” I asked Keri.

“Not too far,” she said. “Down the turnpike that way.”

“I don’t want to be presumptuous, but—”

“You can come. Although it’ll take forever to walk there.”

“I guess I better head home myself,” said the manager. “My wife is with the kid and she’s probably worried sick.”

Neither of us knew what time it was, and Keri didn’t know in miles how far away she lived. I would say the walk took about three hours. It might have been faster if not for pedestrians everywhere, streaming out of their cars, out of stores and office buildings, out of their houses. You don’t know the look of real fear until you’ve seen it in the eyes of ten thousand people wondering if the country is being attacked, or if the world is about to end.

Eventually we got thirsty and stopped at a convenience store. The parking lot was crowded with people cursing and crying and looking up at the sky. A couple of unfriendly-looking dudes in Dallas Cowboys jerseys gawked at Keri as we walked by, and without my firearm I felt naked. Normally I conceal-carry, but I came to Dallas on a plane and I was too lazy to pack my piece the right way. Boy, did I regret that.

Before we went into the store, I told Keri to locate her bill of smallest denomination and hide the rest. She was carrying two grand of Jimmy’s money, in hundreds, but luckily found a couple of twenties in her roll. We were fortunate to have cash because the guy who ran the place was taking nothing else as payment. When she bent over the counter to pay for the water, I imagined what the two of us might do while we waited for the power to come back on.

Keri’s apartment was more like a loft, and from the outside it looked surprisingly upscale. Later I discovered she’d been making around three grand a week at Cinnamon. So you can understand my surprise when, as we walked in the front door, she stumbled over a stack of pizza boxes and nearly went sprawling across the floor. None of the window shades were open, and the only visible light was a bright rectangle thrown by the open door, but even so I could see dirty dishes and clutter everywhere.

“Did you throw a party?”

Keri thought I was joking and punched me on the arm.

“Oh, you,” she said, and kicked aside an empty PBR case that was blocking the way to the kitchen.

While she stumbled around, opening window blinds, throwing more light into a living room where war had seemingly been waged, the lust that been building inside me winked out like a match tossed into the toilet. If this was how Keri kept her house, what did that say about her personal hygiene?

Eventually she stumbled into her kitchen, which might have been home to entire bacterial civilizations, and found an enormous bottle of lemon-flavored vodka.

“I don’t want to think about what’s happening,” she said, her eyes wild and frightened. “Not yet, anyways. Let’s take a couple of shots and go upstairs.”

I know what you’re thinking: Why weren’t we trying to find out what had happened? How could we be so cavalier about a possible military attack or worse? Liberal elites might call our behavior a lack of intellectual curiosity, but the way I look at it, even though it was an awful situation, it was also out of our control. No one knew what was happening.

I swallowed a couple of ounces of vodka and followed her upstairs. As I watched her magical ass, eye level in front of me, I imagined a queen bed with a pink comforter, Keri bent over, tennis skirt yanked down past her thighs. Instead, at the top of the stairs, disorder was so profound I cried out in surprise.

“I know,” she said. “I need to straighten up. You don’t have to make a thing of it.”

Even now I’m not sure I can trust my memory of her bedroom. The only area of the floor not covered in clothes or junk was a path that connected the stairs to the bed and the bed to the bathroom. Every other square inch of carpet, every available surface in the room, in fact, was buried under an avalanche of discarded shirts and pants and jackets and bras that averaged something like twenty inches in depth. The only explanation for this mess was she never bothered to do laundry, that she wore each item one time and then cast it aside like trash.

When she led me to the bed, ready to turn my pornographic dreams into reality, I resisted.

“I still feel like shit,” I explained. “Maybe we should bring that vodka upstairs.”

“Good idea. Be right back.”

While she was gone I closed my eyes and pretended I was back at Cinnamon, which had looked pristine compared to this. Then Keri returned with the vodka and a handful of what looked like dead weeds.

“Let’s eat some of these, too,” she said. “I want to stop thinking about the world out there for a little while, don’t you?”

See what I mean? It’s not like we weren’t aware. We just didn’t care to worry.

“What are these? Mushrooms?”

“Yes, and they’re awesome. What do you say?”

“Sounds great,” I said, and washed down half a handful with more of the lemon vodka.

“You sound great,” Keri said and pulled me to the bed.

* * *

Later we drifted downstairs, our blood riding high on vodka and psilocybin, and I began to see the clutter of Keri’s loft as representative of a larger, more acute disorder of the world at large. We made our way outside and marveled at the new star, twinkling even in the light of the day. We lay in the front grass and watched the setting sun turn the sky violent with color. I was fairly sure I could hear smoke floating above us, billions of collisions between water and gas molecules producing a terrible, high-pitched screech that rattled my teeth.

“I’m not so sure this is a war,” Keri said.

“Me either. You think there would be troops or planes or something.”

“Maybe it’s aliens,” said Keri in an ominous and musical voice.

But I wasn’t sure about aliens, either. Instead, I was starting to wonder if it was God who had turned off the power and killed all the cars. Maybe He was trying to flush us down the toilet like He did in the days of Noah.

“I’m hungry,” Keri said. “Let’s go get something to eat.”

“What’s nearby?”

“Down the road there’s a KFC and a Whataburger and some restaurant. Saltgrass, I think?”

By now I know these restaurants are a quick walk of less than ten minutes from Keri’s loft, but that evening we seemed to wander toward them for hours. I kept expecting to see squares of light and color, KFC red, Whataburger orange, even though cognitively I knew the electricity was out. People were on the sidewalks and in the roads and a few of them spoke to us, but I don’t remember what they said. The smell of smoke was powerful. I felt like I was on the set of a post-apocalyptic movie filming the scene where survivors mill about with no clear understanding of what has happened or what’s coming next. Everyone seemed to be waiting to be told what to do.

Eventually we reached the intersection where the restaurants stood. The door to the Whataburger had been propped open and a line of people stretched around the building. There was no line at the adjacent KFC, so that’s the direction we headed. It never occurred to us to wonder why there was a giant line at one restaurant and not the other, at least not until someone waiting for a Whataburger called to us.

“Where the hell you going, man? Ain’t no chicken at KFC.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, stepping protectively in front of Keri.

“Look at the place, homey.”

I looked again and noticed the front door of KFC was not propped open. It was missing altogether.

“What happened?”

“The manager was a dick. He wouldn’t serve nobody and people didn’t like it. I heard someone shot him.”

“Shot him?” asked Keri. She threaded her arm through mine and pulled me close.

“That’s what I heard. Then some dudes stormed the place and took all the food. But turned out it was frozen.”

“They took a bunch of frozen chicken?” I said. This seemed unlikely, but then again the door to KFC was definitely not present. And no one was waiting in line.

“What about Whataburger?” I asked.

“They say he’s giving it away. The manager. Cooking all the frozen food on a propane grill. But as you can see the line ain’t moving so fast.”

I looked across the street at Saltgrass, where a shorter line snaked out the door and into the parking lot.

“Why aren’t you waiting over there?”

“Gotta have cash over there. I ain’t got no cash. Who carries cash anymore?”

I looked at Keri.

“Let’s try it,” she said.

As we walked away, the fellow in the Whataburger line called out.

“You got cash, man?”

“A little.”

“How about sharing a little green with the man that gave you the 4-1-1?”

“Sorry,” I said. “We don’t have much.”

“Oh yeah? Or maybe you’re full of shit.”

“Be cool, man,” I said. “Be cool.”

* * *

Keri and I waited for a while in the Saltgrass line, but eventually a broad-shouldered fellow marched outside and announced the food had run out. There were a lot of groans and a few lazy threats, but the crowd seemed to understand the supply wasn’t endless. Half the line shuffled over to Whataburger, and as I watched them, I noticed the 4-1-1 guy had barely moved. We decided to walk farther down the road to see what else we could find. By then my mind had returned to its normal, human size and I spotted two more restaurants ahead: Ruby Tuesday and Red Lobster. But when we reached them, we could see they were both dark and apparently deserted.

“I’m really hungry now,” Keri said.

“Me, too. You don’t have anything at home?”

“All I can remember is chicken nuggets and edamame in the freezer. But there’s an H-E-B a little farther up if we want to buy groceries.” “Maybe we should do that. I was just thinking that even if we find a restaurant with food, what will we do for breakfast in the morning?”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

It was another ten or so minutes to the H-E-B, where we found a sizeable group of people, mostly men, loitering in the parking lot.

“Don’t bother unless you got cash,” said a fellow as we approached the front door. He was short and slight, but the look on his face was angry and formidable, like a miniature dog posturing in front of a Doberman. He leered at Keri for a moment and then looked back at me. “You got cash?”

“We have a little cash.”

“Ain’t much food left, anyway,” said another nearby fellow. He ran fingers through yellow hair and looked up at the sky. By now it was almost dark, and the new star was near the horizon. It was brighter than anything I had ever seen in the night sky, even the moon.

“That’s why we should go in there and take what we want,” said the first guy. “We deserve to eat like anybody.”

“It ain’t time to start robbing stores,” said the fellow with the yellow hair. “It’s only been one day.”

“That’s right! It’s been a whole day and we ain’t heard shit from no cops or the government. Nothing. It’s like we ain’t even in America, man. Like we’re some kind of third world country.”

The guy was still muttering as we approached the store. The front windows were almost dark. What light there was seemed to be chemical in nature, and inside I could see they had set up propane lanterns and candles. A security guard greeted us immediately.

“This store only accepts cash,” he barked.

“We have cash,” I said.

“Let’s see it.”

“Pardon me?”

“Look, buddy,” he said. “We got people coming in here pretending to buy so they can walk out of here with shit in their pockets. Show me some cash or I’ll show you the way out.”

I nodded at Keri and she produced a twenty from the waistband of her leggings. There were a couple of hundreds in her shoe. We’d left the rest back at her apartment.

“Fine,” he said. “We don’t have much food left, anyway.”

He wasn’t kidding. I had never seen a grocery store with shelves so barren. If you didn’t know otherwise, you might have thought the building was being remodeled. The only ready-to-eat items we found were a loaf of blueberry breakfast bread and a package of Fritos shaped like corkscrews. Scattered around the store were other items less easy to prepare, like baking mixes, spices, and canned goods in the variety of beets and turnip greens. The only produce left were vegetables of little nutritional value: radishes, shallots, limes.

I had expected the store, like the restaurants, to be packed with desperate customers. But the only other shopper we saw was a hollow-eyed old woman who wouldn’t make eye contact and seemed to be whispering to herself.

“I feel like a ghost,” Keri said at one point. “Like I’ve come back from the dead to haunt this place. It’s fucking creepy.”

“I can’t believe all the food is gone.”

Laugh all you want at our ignorance. But we were accustomed to being assaulted by information, all day, every day. Remember how your phone would light up every five seconds when a news alert came through? You had Facebook reminding you of the past and Instagram barking about someone’s story and “Guess What Donald Trump Just Said? Tonight at 6!” It didn’t seem like a real disaster without the nonstop news coverage.

There was one checkout line open and it was manned by a sleepy-looking kid of about sixteen. He was tall and wiry and his earlobes were punctured with iron rivets.

“Where is everyone?” Keri asked him.

“We’re out of food,” said the kid. “After that woman leaves I think we’re going to close.”

“Was it a lot busier before?” I asked.

The kid looked at me like I hadn’t spoken English.

“Did you sleep all day? Don’t you know what’s happened?”

Keri and I looked at each other.

“We know something terrible is going on,” I said. “But still we didn’t expect the store to be so empty.”

The kid laughed.

“Dude,” he said. “It’s the end of the freaking world.”

“What?” said Keri.

“The supernova. It killed everything. How do you not know this?” “We’re not idiots,” I growled. “We can see things aren’t running. But surely the government will fix it soon.”

The kid looked at me with an expression of such pained tolerance that I was tempted to punch him in the face.

“Let me explain what an EMP is,” he said. “Then I’m going home to my mom.”

* * *

At the end of his speech, the checker informed us the store was out of bags and piled our meager groceries into a cardboard box that had previously contained jars of Miracle Whip. Then we headed for the door, tearing immediately into the bag of Frito twists.

The darkness outside was overpowering. Suffocating. By now the new star (the supernova?) had fallen below the horizon, and the other stars were so bright they didn’t seem real. But they didn’t cast much light on our path.

We should never have been caught so far away from Keri’s apartment after dark. Partly because the walk would take forever, but mostly because of all the people who were still outside, people we could barely see in the pitch-black darkness.

“Aiden,” Keri said. “Do you think that guy is right?”

“I don’t know. He sounded pretty smart.”

“I’m scared. This is way worse than a war.”

After we crossed the H-E-B parking lot, when we reached the sidewalk, a man stepped out of the bushes and blocked our path. His gaze focused somewhere between Keri and me, rather than directly at either of us, and his fists were balled at his sides. It was the yellow-haired guy we’d seen before.

“We need your food,” he said.

I stepped in front of Keri just as the guy lifted his shirt to reveal a handgun that was jammed into the front of his pants.

“We gave you a chance to loan us money and you didn’t. So hand over the food.”

Normally I’m not aware of my beating heart, but in that moment it seemed ready to burst out of my chest. Keri put her arms around me and pressed her face into my back. She whimpered and sniffled but, admirably, didn’t break down or scream.

As frightened as I was, the natural thing would have been to hand over the box and back away. But something had hardened in me after listening to the grocery clerk’s explanation of the EMP. If what he said was true, everyone in Dallas who hadn’t previously prepared an evacuation plan was probably going to die. At first this seemed impossible, but the more I thought about it, the more I could see how mass starvation might happen. The H-E-B had been emptied in less than twelve hours. If no supplies arrived in the next few days, let alone weeks, pandemonium would be the natural result.

At that moment, though, as we were being mugged for our wretched haul of groceries, potential mass starvation was no match for my clear and present hunger. The last meal I could remember was a slice of pepperoni pizza someone had delivered to Cinnamon around two in the morning. We had wasted the afternoon sleeping and failed to take proactive steps after the power had gone out. I was in no mood to give our food to some asshole with yellow hair, gun or no gun.

“I thought you were the nice one,” I said.

“Fuck you,” was his answer. His eyes peeked left, toward the bushes, and then he looked back at us. “Give me the food.”

“Where’d your buddy go?” I asked. “The one putting you up to this?”

Yellow Hair glanced left again and then put his free hand on the butt of the gun.

“You’re honestly going to commit a crime for some funny Fritos and weird bread?” I said.

Finally, the bushes rustled, and the short guy climbed out.

“You have cash and we don’t,” he said. “You can get food some-wheres else. All we have is you.”

“Look—”

Now he reached behind his back and retrieved his own large handgun. Pointed it at my forehead.

“I’m done talking to you. Give us the fucking food.”

I held out the box. My heart was beating in my brain. Yellow Hair stepped forward and took the groceries from me.

“That’s better,” said the short guy. “And now, honey, why don’t you step out from behind your little bitch bodyguard?”

“Dude,” I said.

He stepped forward and pressed the gun barrel into my forehead. It was hard and warm and suddenly my bladder seemed too full. My mouth was electric. I imagined an explosion in front of my face. Being split open by the bullet. The moment when sensory input would cease. When I would cease.

It was the most electrifying moment of my miserable life. I could die right then, and who the fuck cared? Like what was the big deal? Die and go to Heaven and everything comes up aces, right?

“Come here, honeypot.”

“Leave her alone,” I growled.

“Shut your fucking mouth,” said the short guy as he pressed the barrel harder against my head. “Or I’ll shut it for you.”

Keri was crying. She stepped out from behind me.

“Look at that,” the short guy said. He moved closer and touched her cheek with his other hand, the one that wasn’t holding a gun to my head. “We could have some fun, you and me.”

“Chuck,” said Yellow Hair. “Stealing food is one thing, but this … don’t do this.”

“Why the hell not? No one’s coming. No one can even see us. We can do whatever we want.”

“The power’s been out one day, man. It comes back tomorrow and you are in deep shit.”

“Thing is, I don’t think the power is coming back anytime soon. I think this is how it is for a while.”

Maybe it was Keri’s whimpering that did it, or maybe Yellow Hair’s sage advice, but eventually the short guy stepped away from Keri and me. Already I felt adrenaline draining away and mourned its passing.

“Fine,” the short guy said. “But maybe we’ll see you later. Maybe there’s another chapter to our story.”

And with that, he grabbed Yellow Hair, turned around, and disappeared.

* * *

I don’t know how long it took to find our way back to Keri’s apartment. The intense darkness had a way of distorting the passage of time. Keri saw potential assailants everywhere she looked, even when no one was there. The sidewalks and streets weren’t as crowded as before, but people were still out, and they emerged from the darkness like swimmers surfacing from ocean depths. Eventually we reached her loft and collapsed onto the sofa.

Keri nuzzled her head into my neck and cried violently. When I whispered that everything would be okay, her answer was to moan the words No no no, no it won’t. For a while this was all we did, and I was thankful for the darkness, which obscured the chaos of her living room.

I kept thinking about the warm steel of the gun barrel against my forehead. My first reaction had been fear, but then something else had risen inside me, a complicated feeling best summarized as a brazen sense of superiority. As if I had realized for the first time that death was an event like anything else. It was eventually going to happen no matter what, and when it finally did, I wouldn’t know until I was floating on a cloud somewhere, being fed grapes by naked angels.

To be clear, I’m not saying I wanted to die. I simply realized there was no reason to be afraid. To know this was to be different than everyone else. Better. Smarter. Awake.

As my mind adjusted to the new reality, I realized I was hungry again. Really hungry.

“Keri,” I said. “Let’s see what we can find in your kitchen.”

When there was no answer, I realized she had fallen asleep. I slid away carefully, assuming the motion would wake her, but she barely moved.

Now all I had to do was find my way to the kitchen.

Normally, when the lights are out, you expect to use faint shapes or shadows to guide you. But that night I could barely see my hand in front of my face. Navigating such black terrain in a stranger’s house meant inching forward with my hands splayed out in front of me while hunger pangs echoed off the walls. I felt observed, as if someone was watching me on an infrared camera, amused by my blindness.

Eventually I reached the kitchen, where I was nearly knocked over by the humid and rancid odor that poured out of the refrigerator. When I felt around, the shelves were almost empty, but I did find one Tupperware container that had been carelessly covered with aluminum foil. Whatever was inside this plastic bowl was the source of the rancid smell. There were condiments in the door and a jar of what my probing fingers decided were sliced jalapenos. I popped a couple of them into my mouth and was immediately sorry: They were so overwhelmingly hot I thought my face would melt.

After I wiped my watering eyes, I reached into the freezer and found the chicken nuggets and edamame, which were a few degrees cooler than room temperature. I unfolded the bag of edamame and sucked the seeds out of a couple of those, hoping to dampen the fire in my mouth, but this had little effect on the burning sensation or my hunger. Next, I nibbled on a chicken nugget, which was soggy and vaguely cool in a way that made me want to gag. I choked it down, anyway, along with a couple of others. This left about five more, and maybe I should have woken Keri to eat them, since they would spoil by morning. But I was enjoying this time to myself, so I let her sleep.

Next, I checked the pantry, where my searching hands discovered a half-eaten package of uncooked macaroni, some spaghetti, and a package of what felt like egg noodles. Everything else was spices and flour, except for a box near the back of the pantry that seemed to contain a dusting of graham cracker crumbs, the kind used for baking.

I decided to boil water and cook some of the egg noodles. But when I went to look for a pan, I pressed my hand on her stove for support, and felt electric burners instead of gas. Which meant I had no way to heat up the water.

This is when the new reality hit me so hard I nearly lost my balance. I sat down on the linoleum and put my head in my hands. My stomach was growling like a lion and I had nothing to put in it. I had no way to procure something to put in it. Sure, I could soak pasta in water and wait a couple of hours to choke that down. I could eat the ghastly chicken nuggets. But this food wouldn’t last long.

Even if I wasn’t afraid to die, starvation seemed like a pointless way to go about it.

I climbed to my feet and found my way upstairs, twice nearly tripping over junk on the floor. But eventually I located the bed, and the adjacent night stand, where the bottle of lemon vodka stood. I took a generous pull and sat down with my head in my hands.

When I finally looked up again, I noticed something strange—an orange glow that seemed to be hovering in front of my face. At first I thought it was a mirage, or maybe a dream, but when I turned around I could see the same orange through the window behind me. I’d been looking at a mirror.

From the vantage point of the second floor, it was clear the horizon was on fire. The idea that an American city in the 21st century might be devoured by an inferno opened a hole inside me that threated to swallow my physical hunger. The only way I could see to fill this emptiness was pour vodka into it, and with each swallow the world swam further away from me. It had been a mistake to visit the H-E-B. I should never have listened to that high school nerd explain why everything was broken, why the store shelves would never be restocked. What did he know? A country of 330 million people did not survive on a one-day food supply. There had to be more somewhere, if only—

And that’s when it occurred to me: the idea that reshaped the trajectory of my life (and this story) forever.

The next morning, Keri and I went looking for Jimmy Jameson.