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shaking as she fired it up.
    So were mine.

C HAPTER F IVE
    Russ grabbed a flashlight from his apartment, and Christy and I both had ours as well. We walked down the stairs and out into the dark street, and things seemed even weirder than before. It was midmorning, and the sun certainly should have been up. Instead, the sky seemed darker than ever. It made me wonder whether this was how those people in Alaska felt. You know, the ones who live where it’s nighttime for a month out of the year? If it was anything like this, then it must have sucked balls.
    Cranston shuffled out of his apartment, blinking like a sleepy lizard, and joined us. It turned out that he’d heard the siren, too. The noise had woken him. Cranston was our downstairs neighbor. He was in his early sixties—an ex-hippie and lifelong champion of liberal ideals. He played guitar and practiced transcendental meditation. He was a decent neighbor. Didn’t bother us. Was always friendly. His guitar strumming got to be a little too much sometimes, but Christy and I didn’t mind. When it annoyed us, we just turned the stereo or the television up a little louder and drowned out the noise.
    Russ, Christy, and I nodded at Cranston as he shut his apartment door behind him. He didn’t say much.Just asked us if we knew what was going on. We said that we didn’t. His curly gray hair was sticking up in every direction, and his Grateful Dead shirt looked like he’d slept in it. I guessed that was probably what he’d done.
    When we got outside, he seemed momentarily stunned by the situation. He stared up at the darkness, muttering to himself. Then he turned to the three of us.
    “That’s some strange shit, man.”
    “Yeah,” I agreed. “It’s pretty fucked up.”
    Cranston shrugged. Then he offered us a joint, and we all declined, if somewhat regretfully. Emergency or not, it seemed risky to smoke weed in the middle of the street. Plus we already had a good buzz going from the tequila and the bong. We watched Cranston puff the joint down to the roach. The tip glowed orange in the gloom. Christy licked her lips, gazing at the joint like a man in the desert dying of thirst who suddenly spots a watering hole. She’s always been like that. Smokes some weed and then wants more ten minutes later. Me, I’m good for hours. I thought she was going to tell Cranston that she’d changed her mind and ask for a toke, but she didn’t. She just shifted her weight from foot to foot and tugged at her ear. She was obviously nervous and tense.
    We all were.
    When the joint was spent, Cranston tossed the roach onto the sidewalk and crushed it beneath his heel. He ground his foot back and forth. I felt a pang when that tiny spark of light was extinguished.
    “Think the firemen have figured out what’s going on?” Cranston asked.
    “Let’s hope so,” I replied.
    Russ suggested that we drive to the meeting, but I talked him out of it. We could see more if we walked, and I was curious to find out everything I could about our current situation. Apparently, a lot of other folks felt the same way. There weren’t many cars or trucks on the streets, but there were lots of pedestrians. A crowd of people headed toward the firehouse, and the four of us fell in with the procession. All the people around us were strangely silent. Despite our numbers, nobody spoke much, and when they did, it was in hushed whispers. I glanced around for familiar faces but didn’t see anybody I actually knew—just a few people I recognized from earlier that morning. Tom Salvo was among them, but he was too far away to really talk to. I nodded at him, and he nodded back. There was no sign of Dez the homeless guy, but I hadn’t really expected there to be. He definitely seemed to march to the beat of his own drum, and somehow I doubted an emergency community powwow was his sort of scene.
    Unfortunately, we didn’t see much along the way that shed any light on our predicament.
    Damn, I guess that was a