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the
garage for her dad’s car before leaving the house. That would tell
her whether he went to work or for an early morning walk. She won’t
even entertain the notion of her father being afflicted like
Susanna, or Tony. She has to believe that he’s alive.
    She pushes off the curb, making her way
across the desolate, smoke-dimmed street. In the middle of the
chaos surrounding her, she spins around in disbelief. In the
distance, in every direction, there’s some kind of new horror:
wrecked cars, smoking ruins, and yes, another body, a woman
face-down in a gutter a hundred yards to the east. She takes that
in only briefly, not letting her attention lock on it. The sky is
thick with smoke, and it’s still pouring out of Old Town. And over
everything is this crimson tint, this awful, buzzing thing, glowing
from bedrooms and doorways everywhere.
    It occurs to Rachel that there are no sirens
wailing now. Even the city’s emergency alarm sounded only briefly
and has been silent ever since. The absence of these sounds is even
more horrifying. The city is spilling over with disasters of all
kinds, and yet it seems that no one in authority is attending to
them. There’s a disturbing hollowness to the world, an emptiness in
which everything is bleak and gone.
    Why?! she shrieks inwardly.
    Her eyes catch on another figure, stumbling
perhaps a quarter mile south, and she shouts in the person’s
direction —“Hey! Hey! Over here!” —but the person half-falls,
not hearing her, and disappears around a corner.
    Rachel makes her way quickly up her front
path, onto her porch, and into the house. Her eyes land again on
the lonely apple core on the small table in the center of the front
room, and then she’s walking through the kitchen. She flings open
the door leading to the garage, and in the dimness she can see
immediately that her dad’s car is gone. Which means he’s at work.
Right? That’s what it has to mean.
    “He’s at work, and he’s typing away at his
computer, and he’s fine, and I just need to find him, and
everything will go back to normal!” she whispers hotly, although
she knows he’d have to be working in some basement office deep
underground to avoid the chaos of the explosions and the city alarm
earlier.
    There’s no basement at her dad’s place of
business. Not that she knows of.
    Susanna’s car, an older black Honda Civic, is
there. Rachel herself has no car, even though she got her driver’s
license three years ago. Susanna never liked when Rachel asked to
use her car—always gave her the stink-eye—and even though Rachel
knows that Susanna is sprawled impossibly, abruptly dead beyond the
next wall, it takes her a moment to make the decision to take her
stepmother’s car. Susanna always kept her keys deep in her purse.
Rachel doesn’t relish the thought of going back into her
stepmother’s bedroom, but she knows that’s where Susanna keeps the
purse.
    “Damn it!” she yells into the garage,
listening to her words reverberate against the unfinished
walls.
    Gritting her teeth, she runs to the bedroom.
At the threshold, she pauses to shut her eyes and take in an uneasy
breath before she enters the room. Susanna is still lying across
the bed in the same deflated position, the bedsheets tangled and
hanging half off the bed. Rachel casts her gaze around the room
looking for Susanna’s purse. She doesn’t see it. She steps around
the perimeter of the room, checking the dresser and the rocking
chair, and she pokes her head in the closet. No.
    Reluctantly, she approaches Susanna’s body to
check underneath the bed, careful to stay as far away from her
stepmother’s naked corpse as possible. She kneels down silently,
her breath coming quick and shallow, and lifts the bedspread from
the floor.
    The purse.
    She drags it out, giving only a second’s
worth of thought to the fact that her stepmother chose to hide her
purse under her bed. For once, a revelation of this kind doesn’t
cause her to roll