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of his tent to urinate and a near paralyzing fear of the darkness struck him at once. He couldn’t see shit, not even stars. There was no ambient artificial light from a city in any direction. The nearest house was more than fifty miles away, and he was pretty sure the nearest town was in Canada. He turned on his flashlight, but it only cast a dirty yellow splotch on the underbrush. The rest of the world remained shrouded in pitch.
    He might have felt okay had the forest been silent. At least he’d know a bear wasn’t stomping around somewhere nearby. But the forest was not silent. Water dripped from the trees in every direction. His ears seemed to work overtime since he couldn’t see. The part of his brainpower that normally processed sight was freed up to listen for sound. The dripping water sounded like an afternoon rainstorm. If a hungry 350-pound omnivore stepped on a branch somewhere nearby, maybe he’d hear it. But if a 350-pound omnivore sat on the path right in front him just waiting for Parker to get a little bit closer, he’d be torn to pieces by claws and by teeth the instant he bumbled into it.
    He hurriedly pissed in the bushes and scrambled back to his tent.
    The dark of the Olympic National Forest put a fright into him that was primal in its intensity. He didn’t think it was possible to be any more afraid of the dark than he was on that night in the forest, but he was wrong. He was so very wrong.
    How many bears live in that forest? A couple of hundred at most? In the now-darkened cities of the Pacific Northwest, thousands of those things were loose on the streets.
    Possibly hundreds of thousands.
    And the nearest artificial light was on the international space station.
    Parker was not going to leave the confines of his fortress unless he fucking well had to.
    Hughes had figured out how to board it up without generating as much noise as a construction site. He blew up the used-car lot down the street. Hughes and Frank first doused the building with gasoline, but they dumped the lion’s share on the hoods of all the vehicles lined up out front. And they dropped a match.
    The noise was unfuckingbelievable once the cars started exploding. It attracted hundreds of those things. They threw themselves into the flames like moths into a campfire. Most burned to death. Others were blown to pieces when the gas tanks ignited. None heard or otherwise noticed Parker and Kyle as they drove sixpenny nails into plywood and transformed their grocery store into a castle.
    Parker was impressed with Hughes for coming up with that plan. It was a good idea, a big idea, and if Carol hadn’t been so freaked out by the explosions, it would have been fun.
    He heard something outside, tiny and faint through the boarded-up windows, most likely Hughes’ truck. All sounds were magnified now. The silence of the earth itself seemed to make noise. Parker thought the “sound” of silence might be the onset of tinnitus in his ears, an incessant ringing that he never noticed before beneath the hum of civilization.
    Or maybe what sounded like faint tinnitus was really just the sound of the earth, of insects crawling on pavement and grass, of drifting and subducting tectonic plates, of oozing magma miles below, and the hum of the planet’s magnetic field. Maybe he was just imagining things. Maybe silence itself had a sound that he never noticed before because silence had never existed.
    Even the quietest night in his Seattle neighborhood had plenty of sounds: cars on the interstate, even though it was miles away; planes coming into the Sea-Tac airport from the East Coast and from Asia; trains on their way up to Vancouver in Canada; ships coming into Puget Sound from the ocean. All those things made noise. Even the wires in his house buzzed with electricity. Now there was nothing.
    It was worse at night when absolute silence met absolute darkness in a world full of absolute danger. Those things were somewhere out in that void. Hundreds