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Chapter Text

 August 5^th, 1992

FROM A DISTANCE, Ogunquit looked perfectly the same. Flags waved merrily at doors, cars gleamed sedately in driveways, and if the grass on the usually-manicured lawns is a little long, well, it's the 3^rd of July in the middle of what's shaping up to be a rip-roaring, sweat-popping Maine summer, full of bright humid days and biting flies, and who could blame the town's residents if they put off giving their grass a haircut for a little while, just until the heat broke?

When they topped the last hill on Highway 1, and came across the rusting hulks of one of the blockades Ogunquit had voted themselves at the height of the plague, Stu climbed up on top of one of the old town trucks to get a better look.

Frannie fretted at him from the ground the entire time, swearing that "God help you, Stuart Redman, if you fall and break your neck and leave me alone with this child - "

Stu grinned down at her, and then immediately rendered his reassurance moot by nearly putting a foot through a rusty patch on the roof of the truck he was standing on. Good luck getting a tetanus shot if you'd stepped there, he thought to himself with a shudder.

There were deer in a few of the backyards, but overall Ogunquit was just as quiet and dead as the last ten towns they'd come through. So he climbed down, scooping little Peter up into his arms once he was on solid ground again. He gave the baby that little toss that always made him giggle, set him on his shoulders, and said, "Well, we'd best be about it then. Might as well leave the bikes here, we'll be half the afternoon getting them around this stuff otherwise."

Fran looked at them both with an expression of such perfect happiness and love that he felt a sudden sharp ache in his chest, making his eyelids prickle even as he smiled back at her.

The closer they got to the center of town, though, the more Fran's face seemed to fall in on itself. Up close, it was easy to see the changes. The flags waving merrily at the doors were in shreds and tatters, ripped apart by the indifferent weather with no one to care for them or take them in. The cars sat on flat tires as often as not, rusting quietly to themselves in the Maine sun, and some of them were crazily parked, akimbo to the sidewalk or just stopped in the middle of the road. And the lawns were, if as green as she ever remembered them, no longer the cheery trimmed green of neat little New England yards, but rather the dank, wet-smelling green of overgrown thickets, waist-high and grasping, promising nettles more often than berries. The out-of-control lawns seemed to reach green claws up toward the porches and down into the street, hungry for more territory. Here and there a clutch of weeds growing through the asphalt at the edge of the road proclaimed the state of the war: encountering only token resistance, the grass pushed ever further over the road's borders, consolidating its hold on the land it had already taken as it went.

Peter took it all in with wide blue eyes, one hand clutching Stu's hair for balance (Stu occasionally took one steadying hand off Peter's leg to loosen that grip), the other corking his thumb firmly into his mouth. He knew from his parents' behavior that something was different about this place, for all that it seemed much the same as all the others they'd passed through on their meandering way from Boulder, but he didn't know why his mother had seemed so happy to be here, or why she now seemed so sad.

As they turned down Elm Street towards the Goldsmiths' house, Fran shivered. Stu reached out, tugging her closer to him by her shirtsleeve, and put his arm around her.

She smiled at him – a smile that quickly turned to a grimace as Peter took advantage of his mother's newfound proximity to bend down and seize a handful of her hair. Disentangling the chubby baby fist, she wormed one of her fingers into the middle of his, keeping hold of him so he couldn't do it again, and transferred her smile to Peter.

"Almost home, love," she said softly. To Stu, she said, gesturing at a green Cadillac parked along the sidewalk – parked halfway on the sidewalk, to be completely honest – "That Cadillac over there belonged to Mr. Brannigan, from down the street. Harold -" Her face twisted as she remembered Harold's fate. And his crimes. Swallowing, she continued, "- Harold took to driving it around town for a while, after everyone was - " dead "- gone. Just driving up and down the streets, around and around. I don't think he even had a learner's permit. He went a little crazy when his family died."

"Why, I guess we all went a little crazy for a bit," Stu said.

"The whole world went crazy," Fran said bleakly. Then her expression lightened, and she stuck out her tongue at Peter, who chortled happily. "But everything's better now, isn't it, Peter-bear?"

#

When they arrived at the Goldsmiths' house, despite her bladder demanding immediate relief, Fran went straight to her father's grave. It was easy to find – the rosebush she'd planted on top of it had taken hold real well, just as she'd thought it would. Fat red roses spotted its glossy dark leaves in lively splashes of color. Fran walked up to the bush and just stood there for a minute, her hands moving restlessly over each other.

"Hi Daddy," she said. "Frannie's home."

For a second she thought she might burst into tears, but then it passed. Stu came up behind her, still carrying Peter on his shoulders, and slipped one arm around her waist. Peter chuckled to himself, waving both arms and legs.

Fran put one hand over Stu's, clasped around her midsection, and one on Peter's gently kicking leg. "We named him after you, Daddy," she said to the rosebush, which rustled a bit in a passing breeze, as if listening. "I wish you could have been here to meet him." She paused for a long moment, and then said simply, "I love you." Turning beneath Stu's arm, she raised her face to his for a kiss, and said, "Let's go inside."

"'Ome!" Peter said, kicking excitedly.

"That's right, baby," Fran said. "We're home."

***

It wasn't home, though, not the way she wanted it to be. The first thing they were greeted with, entering the house, was a dreadful, sodden stench, so bad it made Peter burst into tears, crying "Tink! Tink!" over and over. Fran wondered wildly, for a second, if she'd dreamed her fathers nightmareish funeral. He's been here rotting the whole time, she thought, one hand clapped to her mouth – whether to keep from puking or screaming she wasn't sure. Maybe both.

Stu took one look at her face and hustled her and Peter back outside. Once Fran had calmed down a bit, he left her playing with Peter on the porch, tied a shirt over his nose and mouth to filter out the worst of the stench, and went back in.

He found the source of the smell easily enough – it, or rather they, came from the kitchen. Sometime after Frannie had left Ogunquit, a window had broken, and two years worth of rain and snow had caused a grey-green coating of sweetish-smelling mold to overgrow everything. Worse, at some point during the proceedings, a raccoon had gotten into the pantry. What he found there must not have agreed with him, because Mr. Raccoon was deader than a doornail, and adding his stench to the mold and rotting food. It all added up to a cacophonous symphony of smells, none of them pleasant.

Stu, no stranger to dead things or decay after the last few years, rolled up his sleeves and went to work. A box of garbage bags he found under the sink were no use; they disintegrated into plastic flakes as soon as he tried to open them. A quick search of the pantry yielded a brown paper grocery bag filled with rags, on a high shelf that had spared it from rot and the depredations of critters, and the half-full bottle of bleach next to the garbage bags still smelled as sharp and chloriney as ever.

He tossed filthy rags out the back door as he worked, and after an hour he judged it safe to call Frannie and Peter back in.

Fran exclaimed over the damage to the kitchen, and was effusive in her thanks, but her face remained pale and drawn. After dinner (a candlelit affair of canned goods warmed over their little camp stove; they'd have to go looking for a generator in the days to come), she suggested that they go up to bed. A little color had come back into her face, but not much.

Stu agreed readily. They'd been sleeping rough the last couple of days, and a real bed sounded just fine to him. There was one more roadblock, though.

At first, they'd intended to use Peter and Carla's bedroom – the only one with a bed big enough for two – but Fran stopped dead in the doorway, eyes wide and one hand over her mouth.

"I can't," she said. "I'm sorry, Stu, I just can't. My father -" She could see his pajamas lying on the floor where she'd dropped them while dressing his body for burial, and tears sprung into her eyes.

Stu was carrying Peter, who'd fallen asleep almost as soon as he'd finished eating, and now lolled bonelessly in Stu's arms as only a sleeping baby can do. Lacking a free arm to hold her, he settled for bumping her shoulder gently with his own. "That's all right, Frannie," he said. "We can sleep wherever you want."

So they bedded down in Fran's old room. Her twin bed wasn't nearly big enough for all three of them, so Fran took the bed, with Peter sleeping peacefully in the circle of her arms, and Stu took the floor.

Stu briefly mourned the loss of the real bed he'd been looking forward to, but as settled into his blankets on the floor he was looking up at Fran. She'd fallen fast asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow, all the lines smoothed out of her face and a lock of hair falling over her eyes. I'd rather sleep on the cold ground next to her than the softest bed in the world somewhere she isn't, Stu thought.

He'd thought he was going to lose her twice since they'd left Boulder – first when their baby, the one they'd made together, had been stillborn, before they'd even managed to make it to Maine, and then, in the weeks after the miscarriage, when she'd slipped into a deep well of depression and grief. For weeks, she was all but catatonic, only rousing out of it a little now and again when Stu brought Peter to her to nurse or cuddle. They'd still had several hundred miles to go to the Maine border, but Fran's frail condition following the miscarriage and her apathetic lack of energy slowed their progress to a crawl, and many days they didn't manage to make any progress at all.

He'd felt more helpless then than he ever had in his life then, even more so than when he'd lain in that gully with a broken leg, sick with pneumonia and waiting to see if he'd live or die – waiting to see if the world would live or die, if Larry, Glen and Ralph could execute the charge Mother Abigail had laid upon them.

He'd grieved for the baby, too (it had been a girl, and his secret thought was that if she'd lived, they'd have called her Norma, after his first wife), but Fran took it harder, maybe with a bit of postpartum depression mixed in, he didn't know. He only knew that watching her, as she sunk deeper and deeper into a hole he didn't know how to pull her out of, made him feel like he was going to explode into smithereens and maybe burst into tears at the same time. When she slept, he'd take a pillow and slip off to the edge of the light of their fire, and just punch it, over and over, until his arm was sore from the effort and tears were running down his face.

And then one day he woke up to find Peter curled up next to him in his sleeping bag, and Fran was sitting next to the fire, watching them both and smiling. She'd built up the fire, and there was water boiling in a pot for coffee.

"Good morning, sleepyhead," she'd said, and Stu had grinned at her from his sleeping bag and said, "Hey, beautiful," and after that things had started to get better. Fran still had bad turns, where she'd start crying and be unable to stop, or days when she'd wake up just as tired as when she went to sleep and be unable to help break down the camp or do much of anything, but that day she turned a corner, and she never slipped down as far as she had before.

Peter snuffled in his sleep, breaking Stu's train of thought. And it's a good thing she got better, too, he thought to himself. What would I do with this great galumph of a toddler without her? Smiling to himself, he pulled the blankets up to his chin, and was asleep almost immediately.

***

In the wee hours of the morning, the silence of the house was rent by a terrified scream. Stu sat bolt upright, heart racing, hand reaching automatically for a gun that wasn't there, to find Fran trying to comfort a sobbing Peter.

"I think he had a bad dream," she said over Peter's head to Stu, seeing that he was awake.

Stu nodded. "Give him here," he said, sitting up. Fran handed Peter over, and Stu cuddled the still-sobbing toddler closer, tousling his dark hair and making soothing noises. Fran watched them both, and marveled, not for the first time, at Stu's easy way with the baby. I never would have thought he'd be such a natural father.

"What was it, buddy?" Stu asked Peter, whose sobs had settled into a hitching sniffle, and who was rubbing his eyes with chubby fists – a sure sign that the storm was passing. "Was it a scary dream?"

Peter nodded and looked up at Stu with wide blue eyes. "Man, daddy," he said. "Brrack man. Chasin' me."

Fran's mouth dropped open. Stu's eyebrows shot up, and they stared over Peter's head at each other in horror and disbelief.

***

"It was just a bad dream," Stu said for the third or fourth time. "It don't mean anything. It can't mean anything – Fran, you know that. We beat him."

They were downstairs, in the kitchen sitting next to each other at the worn Formica table her mother had used as an auxiliary countertop when cooking. Fran had made them each a cup of tea on the Coleman stove, which they'd set up on the Goldsmith's GE range. Peter was upstairs, having fallen back to sleep almost as soon as he'd stopped crying.

"We beat him," Stu repeated. "You can't think -"

"I don't know what to think," Fran said. "I know what you saw out there, but - "

"It was a nuke, Fran. Nothing could have survived that. Nothing and no one. Not even him." Stu turned his head to spit, then thought the better of it.

"It's just," Fran started, and then stopped. "It's just, we all had those dreams, those terrible dreams, and it turned out they were real. What if Peter's dream is real, too?" She shivered, and Stu put his arm around her.

"It was just a dream," he said again. Then he laughed, but it had a hollow sound. "Hell, we don't even know it was – him – Peter was dreaming about. It's not like he said anything except 'black man'. He's two, for crying out loud." Peter had refused to say anything more about his nightmare. When they pressed him, he burrowed his face into Stu's shoulder, falling asleep there as soon as they stopped asking questions.

"But what if it was him, Stu? How could Peter be dreaming about him?"

Stu took a long drink of his tea, which had gone lukewarm, and didn't answer for a bit. "Well, I don't know," he said. "But listen – you had plenty of those dreams while you were pregnant with him, didn't you?"

Fran nodded slowly. "Even when the rest of you started dosing up to sleep," she said. "I didn't want to risk it hurting him."

"Well – and I know this sounds crazy, but it's no crazier than anything else that's happened – what if the dreams got through to Peter back then? Crossed the, what d'you call it, the placenta, somehow. Maybe he's just remembering them.

Fran frowned. "I don't know," she said slowly. "Placental dream transfer? It sounds like something out of a science fiction novel."

"Like killing the Devil in Las Vegas with a nuclear bomb?" Stu asked mildly.

Fran laughed at that. "You've got a point," she admitted. "It just frightened me so badly, to hear him say that."

"It gave me a turn, too," Stu said. "But it can't be more than just a dream, Frannie. Flagg's gone."

"I guess you're right," Fran said, not totally convinced.

"You bet I am, I'm always right," Stu said, and ducked when she made as if to throw her mug at him. He stood up, holding out a hand to help her to her feet. "Now, what do you say we go back up stairs, kiddo, and try to catch a couple more hours before that whirling dervish in the bed wakes up?"

"Sounds like a deal," Fran said.

But when they got back upstairs, she lay awake for a long, long time.

Chapter Text

 Seagulls wheeled in great clouds over the water, which glinted diamond-blue in the bright August sun. There were more gulls than Fran had ever seen in her life – the lack of fishermen's nets to cadge from didn't seem to have harmed the gull population one whit.

Fran was sitting on the end of the long stone pier, kicking her legs over the water below. She was listening to the waves crash into the pier, and to the gulls screaming and squabbling above her, and she was thinking.

She'd woken up before Stu that morning, and, wonder of wonders, before Peter as well. She'd slipped out of bed as quietly as she could and tiptoed downstairs. She'd meant to make breakfast for the three of them, but as soon as she walked into the kitchen her eyes had fallen on the little door to her father's workshop. Still thinking about coffee and quick-oats, she'd drifted over toward the door. Her hand was on the knob and turning before she quite knew she meant to open it. Once it was open, she'd stared through the open doorway into the cool dimness of the workshop for almost a minute, considering. Then she shrugged, ducked her head, and went inside.

It was hard to see much – she hadn't thought the bring a candle, and the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling was as dead as every other bulb in the house – but everything smelled the same. Wood and oil and – she thought – just the tiniest whiff of her father's pipe tobacco.

She walked up to the workbench, put her hands on it, and closed her eyes. Like this, breathing in the smells and feeling the cool, dry air of the workshop, she could almost feel transported three years into the past. Outside, the sun was rising, the birds were chirping morning, and her husband and sun were sleeping upstairs, but in here, she was barely tall enough to see over the workbench, and her father was right next to her, and in a minute he'd say "hand me that wrench, Frannie," and ask her about her day.

Taking a deep breath, she opened her eyes again, and the fantasy disappeared. "I miss you, Daddy," she whispered. "Every day."

A rustling sound behind her startled her into whirling around. "Stu?" she called, and then, "Peter-bear? You shouldn't be in here, sweetie."

There was no answer, and she couldn't see Stu or Peter in the doorway, but the rustling sound came again, low to the ground and to her left. Fran dropped her eyes to the source of the sound and froze. She could see a pair of red eyes, a few inches off the ground, watching her.

Some kind of animal, then. She took a step to the side, groping along the workbench for something she could use to scare it off, but her father must have put his tools away in a fit of uncharacteristic tidiness before he got sick.

Another step brought her closer to the wall, where she knew a set of wrenches and other small tools hung. She kept her gaze on the eyes. Were they closer than they had been? They seemed to be.

A creepy sort of feeling crawled up her spine. It's just some wild animal, she told herself. Probably crawled in here to hide. It's more afraid of you than you are of it. "Hey!" she said loudly, taking another step toward the wall. "Hi! Get out of here!"

The eyes were definitely coming closer. Fran began to be able to make out the outline of the animal they belonged to in the light cast by the open doorway. It was low-slung, weasel-like, but something was wrong about the sleek head, and she was mortally certain that it was not a weasel. The eyes were too intelligent – too malevolent.

One more step backward and she nearly screamed as her back hit the wall. Reaching blindly upward, she found the pegboard on which her father had hung his tools and felt along it until she found the cold metal handle of a wrench.

The weasel-thing came forward again, slinking low to the ground. She could see its mouth hanging open in a parody of a comic grin, exposing row upon row of needle-sharp teeth.

The wrench wouldn't come off the nail it was hung on. Fran jiggled and yanked it to no avail. She could hear herself panting in great, harsh heaves, out of all proportion to the effort she was putting forth.

The weasel-thing continued to advance, and it seemed that it got larger as it did. It was knee-high already, and growing with each step. Fran lifted her eyes from it briefly and cried out in fear as she saw, behind it, two more pairs of red eyes, staring out at her from the dark corners of the workshop.

"Yaaah!" she screamed, yanking mightily at the wrench. With a groan of rusty metal, the nail popped right out of the wood. The wrench fell into her hand, and she nearly dropped it in surprise, but turned its fall into a swing instead, striking out at the weasel-thing's head, which was now just a few feet away and nearly as high as her waist.

The toothy mouth opened wider in surprise, and the weasel-thing took a step back. Fran wasted no time pressing her advantage, and swinging the wrench before her, she dashed around it and for the door, nearly hitting her head (a thing she hadn't done since she was ten) in her rush to get out.

Stu, who was up by then, and making coffee, stared at her like a crazy person as she dashed through the door carrying the wrench.

"Frannie?" he said worriedly as she slammed the workshop door behind her.

Fran shot the bolt on the door with vicious strength, a triumphant cry on her lips. Then she turned around, looked at Stu as if seeing him for the first time, and burst into tears.

And now here she was, an hour later, sitting on the Ogunquit pier and Contemplating Life. The phrase took on capitals in her head, all of its own accord. A breeze sprang up, ruffling her hair. The Revlon Girl Contemplates Life, she thought, and started giggling. Once she started, she couldn't stop. Nearby gulls eyed her warily, unused to the sound of humans after nearly three years without them, but she ignored them and kept laughing. It felt good to laugh, like clearing out the cobwebs and shadows left behind by her morning scare.

Stu had, against her wishes, armed up with a flashlight and a pistol and gone into the workshop as soon as she'd calmed down enough to tell him what had happened. Fran stood nervously at the door, fidgeting and calling out "Do you see anything?" every five seconds.

At last Stu had come back out, shaking his head. "I found an old rat's nest, but that's it," he said. "I didn't see anywhere where anything the size of what you said could get in. Are you sure it was that big?"

And then of course she'd gotten mad, and accused Stu of not believing her, and he said he believed her just fine, but he didn't see anything, and did Fran want to come in and have a look for herself?

Fran had nearly gone into hysterics again at the idea, and so she'd taken herself off to the pier to calm down. But here under the sun, with the blue water of the Atlantic beneath her and its fishy-salt smell in her nostrils, the terror of what she'd seen in the workshop had begun to recede, and Fran had begun to feel like herself again. Come on, old girl, she said to herself, pushing up to her feet and hearing her knees crackle. If you stay away too long, Peter'll be convinced you're never coming back.

With one lack look out over the ocean, she began the walk back to the house. The warm sun was shining down on her head and her legs felt loose and good from the walk. You're doing okay, Frannie, she thought.

A block or so away from the Goldsmith house, though, she felt everything closing in on her again. There was Mr. Brannigan's car, still sitting where Harold had haphazardly parked it, rust showing through its bottle-green paint. Two of its tires were flat, and it leaned drunkenly against the sidewalk it was half-parked on.

The unkempt lawns began to bother her, and the sagging, bedraggled flags as well. Every house she passed seemed to say, accusingly, This isn't your home anymore. What are you doing here?

"It can be home again," she muttered to herself. "It can."

The houses didn't reply. Instead, she heard her mother's voice in her mind, sharp and clipped, as it always was when Carla scolded her. Bad girls who betray their parents can't make a home, the voice said. Bad girls don't know how.

"Shut up," Fran said under her breath, and then snorted to hear herself arguing with her mother's ghost. You're cracking up, Frannie.

The Goldsmith house loomed up in front of her, as familiar as her face in the mirror, except for the shagginess of the hedges mapping out the property line. Fran supposed they were tall enough to suit even Carla now, though she would have raised holy hell – holy heck, Fran thought, a lady never swears – to see them so untrimmed.

There was no sign of Stu or Peter outside, but Peter's building blocks were scattered on the front porch. Fran smiled at them as she walked in. "Stu? Peter?" she called.

"Mama!" Fran's head snapped to the right at the sound of Peter's voice, a cold, slimy dread crawling up from her belly and into her throat. The door to the parlor – Carla's pristine, inviolate parlor – stood open, and Peter's voice came from inside.

Oh no, Fran thought in sudden panic. Children aren't allowed in the parlor, it's too dry for drool and sick-up and -

"Mama!" Peter called again, interrupting her train of thought.

"Peter-bear," she said, hurrying to the parlor door. "Now, you've got to come out of there, baby, you can't – oh, Peter -"

Peter was tottering toward her on naked legs, arms held wide for a hug and a huge smile on his face. Behind him, Fran could see his discarded diaper, the contents of which he'd been busy painting all over the furniture and carpet.

In a flash, Fran was at his side, grabbing his arm and dragging him out of the parlor. Peter's smile collapsed into chagrin.

"What did you think you were doing in there?" Fran demanded angrily. Her mind was racing. Got to clean it up somehow, got to fix it before she sees. The fact that Carla Goldsmith was three years dead and not seeing much of anything didn't occur to her. She picked Peter up roughly and carried him over to the sofa, unmindful of the crumpling expression on his face. She plunked him down next to it and grabbed him by the chin, turning his head to face the drying brown smears. Peter began to cry.

"Look what you did!" Fran raged at him. "Look at it! You ruined the sofa!" His sobs turned into wails. A voice in her head, the voice of a little girl who's just come in for a scolding, said oh no, not like this, you're being just like her. Fran ignored the voice, grabbing Peter by the shoulders and turning him around to face her. "Bad boy! Bad Peter!"

"Frannie?"

She let go of Peter and turned to see Stu standing in the doorway. "What's the matter?"

She was beginning to feel a flicker of regret for scolding Peter so harshly, but Stu presented a new target for her fear-fueled anger, and her fury rose again. "How could you have left him alone in here?" she demanded. "Look what he did to my mother's sofa!"

Stu held out his hands to her. "Why don't you come away, Fran. You're scaring him out of his skin. I only left him alone for a second-"

"Only a second!" Fran heard her voice turn vicious, cold. It sounded like Carla in one of her quiet rages, and even while part of her quailed to hear herself turn that tone on Stu, part of her was glad. It was important that he understand what he'd done wrong, that the parlor remain sacrosanct. "You left him long enough, I see! And what if he'd decided to play with the stove?" Stu looked stricken. Behind her, Peter's sobs had ceased. She felt a sudden urge to back down, apologize; she plowed ahead instead. "What if I'd come back and found him lying in here dead?" Dead like my Fred, her mother whispered in her mind. "What if he..."

Suddenly her anger drained out her like water going down a spout. It left behind a mossy rime of regret, confusion, and cold, tremendous guilt. Did I really just yell at Stu like that? she thought. Did I really just grab Peter and – and scold him like a bad dog? Like Carla would have scolded her. She looked back and forth between the two of them. In the doorway, Stu was staring at her, looking flummoxed. Peter was staring at her, too, but he was slack-mouthed and vacant-eyed, as if he were concentrating very hard on something.

Released from the frantic energy of her anger, Fran felt suddenly limp. She put her hands over her face and began to cry. "Oh Stu – I'm sorry -"

Instantly, Stu was at her side, gathering her and Peter both into his arms. "Ssh, Frannie. It's all right. No harm done."

"I'm sorry," she sobbed again, and then again, as if it were all she could say. "I'm sorry, Stu. I'm sorry, Peter."

"Apology accepted," Stu said. "Ain't that right, Peter?" Peter nodded against Fran's shoulder, which only made her cry harder.

When the worst of her crying was over, she took a deep breath and tested out the new realization that was slowly filling her head. It felt right, true, so she raised her head and looked at Stu. "Can I ask you something?"

"I reckon you can ask me anything you like."

"Would you hate me if I said I didn't want to stay here?" she asked. "I know it was my idea, and my plan, but - "

"Too many ghosts?" Stu asked.

She nodded. "I just keep hearing them, in my head. Or turning a corner and expecting to see them. And when I saw the parlor, the only thing I could think was clean it up quick, before she sees."

"Frannie," Stu said, "you ought to know by now that there's nothing that could make me hate you. If you want to go, why, we'll go. There's surely nothing to hold me to this place, after all."

She felt a great tension go out of her body. "Oh good," she said. "Because I don't think I can stay here another night."

Stu nodded understanding. "Well, listen," he said. "We've hardly unpacked anything, and it's early yet. Did you want to try some other place here in Ogunquit, or leave town entirely?"

"I thought we could go back to Deerport," she said.

They'd spent the winter and spring in the tiny town of Deerport, Maine, near the New Hampshire border. They'd found a big old empty rambler of a house and fixed it up a bit – patches of plywood over broken windows, a nursery for Peter on the second floor and a playroom on the first – and when they'd left for Ogunquit Fran had felt a bit of a pang at all the things they'd had to leave behind. The old wasteful habits, she'd thought. They'd been cosy there, just the three of them, and it had felt right. It had felt like home in a way she knew, now, Ogunquit never would again.

"Well," Stu said, "we ought to leave a sign or something in case Lucy or somebody else from Boulder comes out this way and goes looking for us."

"That's a good idea," Fran said.

He stood up, and so did Fran. She picked Peter up and rested him on her hip. "I tell you what," Fran said. "If you go see about scrounging for some paint for a sign, Peter and I will see about rustling up some lunch." She took a step toward the door, then paused. "I do love you so very much, Stu Redman. Thank you for being such a good man."

Stu grinned. "I do my best," he said. He kissed her on the cheek and left.

Chapter Text

 September 12, 1998

Peter stood at the edge of the wheatfield, Fixing. The sun was out, and while it had started to get chilly in the evenings and when it rained – winter came early to Maine in the best of years, and this was fixing up to be an earlier one than usual – it was warm enough out today that he was only wearing a t-shirt and shorts, the sweater that his mother had made him put on discarded carelessly at the edge of the field.

The wheatfield was a point of contention between his parents. It wasn't much of a field – only twenty feet or so square – but every year at planting and harvest time Fran and Stu had an argument about it. They'd had their annual harvest argument just the night before, though the harvest itself was a week or two off yet.

"It's a waste of time," Stu said for the tenth or twelfth time. "We got enough flour right here to last us years, Frannie, and there's enough down to Kennebunk to last us at least a decade, even with the new folks." Deerport had been empty when Peter and his parents moved in, but people liked to come together, and by now they had a half-a-dozen neighbors.

Fran sighed, and the dishes she was washing in the sink clanked together a little louder. "And what are we going to do when that runs out, Stu? Stop eating bread? Send down to Portland and ask them if they've got any left? Order it up from Sears Roebuck?"

Peter had looked up from where he was pushing the last of his pie around his plate when the argument started. He was watching to see if it got going well enough that he ought to intervene. Now he let his vision go unfocused, let himself see the rays of connection between his parents.

It seemed like other people couldn't see the rays, but everyone Peter had ever met was surrounded by a starburst of them. They sprung up between any two people who had a relationship with one another, even just a casual friendship like Stu had with Mr. Brannock who'd taken up in one of the houses on the other side of Deerport. Peter knew he had a ray that connected him to Mr. Brannock, too, although he had trouble seeing the rays that were connected to himself, especially when they were as thin as that.

Stu and Fran's rays that connected them to Peter were much easier for him to see, because they were wide and thick and solid, not spindly and little like his ray to Mr. Brannock. When one of his parents were thinking about him or talking to him, the rays got brighter and changed colors; right now they pulsed the quiet purple of absentminded love and concern.

Distance didn't seem to affect the rays, either – some of the ones Peter could see emanating off of Fran and Stu stretched far off into the distance, farther than he'd ever been able to see, and he knew that some of them went as far west as BOULDER, which was the city full of Good Guys. The story of how Stu and the Good Guys beat the Scary Man and saved the world was his favorite bedtime story.

Both Stu and Fran also had a number of broken rays, ragged and torn, and most of these were black at the ends. Those were deadrays; they used to connect up to people who were dead now. Lots of people had died before Stu beat the Scary Man, and some folks had died since then, too.

Just now, however, Peter was most interested in the ray connecting Fran and Stu to each other. This ray was larger than any of the others connected to his parents, except for the ones connecting them to him.

"I just don't like to see you breaking your back over that stupid wheat," Stu was saying, and while Peter watched, the ray began to flicker with angry red, mostly from Fran's side, but a little from Stu's too.

"Stupid?" His mother's voice held the tone Peter thought of as Watch Your Step. "I'm still waiting for you to have a better idea, Stuart Redman!"

Peter let his mouth drop open and he stuck out his tongue in concentration. He was sending his very best Fixing at his parents' ray, soothing down those angry red flickers and searching for any hint of blue calm or green humor to encourage.

A look of confusion crossed both Stu and Fran's faces, as often did when Peter began to Fix their ray, as if they'd momentarily forgotten why they were fighting in the first place.

"Hey, now, Fran, I didn't mean it like that," Stu said. He got up from the table and came up behind Fran at the sink, slipping his arms around her waist. "If you want to grow yourself some wheat, grow away. We got plenty of space for it."

Fran resisted for a second, but Peter sent a final, soothing stroke along the ray, extinguishing the last of the red flickers, and she relented, relaxing back against Stu. "That last loaf turned out pretty well, I thought."

"Sure, it turned out real good," Stu agreed. Peter returned his attention to the concrete world just in time to see the face Stu was making at him. He giggled. The last loaf of Home Wheat had been weird and crunchy, full of sharp bits of wheat chaff.

A drop of sweat rolled down Peter's forehead, jerking him back to the present-day, and the wheatfield. The sun was still beating down from the sky, but a few wisps of clouds had spun themselves out of nothing overhead, and they were herding themselves across the sky in a perfectly straight line.

"There," Norma said in his ear. "Do you see it?"

Peter jumped, but he didn't bother turning around. He knew he wouldn't see anything, anyway. "Jeez, make a little noise, wouldja?" he griped. "I almost jumped out of my skin."

"I can't," Norma said, reasonably enough. "I'm dead."

She had a point, Peter realized.

Grownups thought of Norma as his "invisible friend". Fran thought it was incredibly cute, Peter knew, that he called her his sister, and both his parents were slightly unnerved by the fact that the name he called her by was the same as the name they would have given his sister, if she had lived. But when he called her his sister, it was nothing but the truth. Norma had told him the whole story – how Fran had gotten pregnant just before his parents had struck out from BOULDER, how she'd lost the baby, all when Peter wasn't even a year old. So that made Norma a ghost, but not the scary kind.

"Do you see it?" Norma asked again.

"Yeah." Peter wrinkled his forehead, letting his eyes go unfocused, concentrating.

"But do you see it?" Norma pressed.

"Ssh. I'm trying."

And then, suddenly, it leapt out at him: a rainbow, a ribbon, a river of light. Peter sucked in a deep, surprised breath. It was no color and every conceivable color all at once, and he thought it was maybe even some colors no one had thought of yet.

It was easily ten – fifty – maybe a hundred times the size of any ray he'd ever seen. He said as much to Norma.

"That's cause it's not a ray," Norma said. "It's a Beam."

***

An hour later, lying on his back in the wheat, Peter was still entranced with the Beam. It flowed sluggishly across the sky like a wide, deep river, off to the East, and it lined the clouds up as it went. Peter knew that if he could fly over the land the Beam passed, the way people used to fly in the Old Days, he'd see that all the plants and rivers and even the houses lined up just a little bit under the Beam, too. Everything could feel its pull, its Flow, even people, even if they didn't know it.

Experimentally, he let his mind travel up and into the central current of the Beam, drifting down the rainbow current – only to be yanked back with a snap that stung his mind like someone snapping your hand with a rubber band.

"Ow!" he said.

"Don't do that," Norma said. "You'll get stuck, and I can't pull you out. You're not strong enough yet – if you ever will be."

"Where does it go?" Peter asked.

"Far away," Norma said. "But that's not why we're here. Do you see it?"

Peter felt his tongue creep out of his mouth as he concentrated. Almost – "Yes," he said.

Along the edges of the Beam, things weren't so smooth and rainbowlike. Sparks were shooting off the sides, and in some places the fabric of the Beam was ragged and torn, like a deadray.

"Not quite like," Norma said, reading his thoughts again. "It's not torn all the way through. Can you Fix it?"

"Let me try," Peter said. He pushed out with his mind again, but this time he didn't try to dive into the Beam. Instead, he focused on smoothing the torn edges, pushing the ragged bits together and pinching, trying to fuse them together again like a piece of torn dough.

"Don't pinch," Norma said. "It's more like -" she sent him a sense-image, fingers running over a feather, and Peter got the idea. He tried that instead – smoothing the edges of the Beam gently, urging them back into their original shape.

One of the ragged bits faded into sleek smoothness, and Peter wanted to cheer – but then he saw that while he'd been Fixing that one, three more had slipped down the Beam and out of his reach.

"I won't ever be able to Fix them all," he said. "How can I?"

"You can't," Norma said. "But you'll get better at it, with -" she vanished, midsentence, or at least Peter's sense of her did.

A cloud passed over the sun, and with it came the Looking, making Peter realize why Norma had vanished. The Looking meant that someone was snooping around, using something other than their eyes. Looking for people like him, Norma had told him. He didn't know who was Looking for him, although he had a sense that it was always the same person. It wasn't the Scary Man, although he'd known how to Look too.

Peter did what he always did when the Look showed up: pulled himself all the way into his mind, even the little tendrils he normally left out for Norma and to know when his mother was looking for him. He pictured a stone wall all around himself and concentrated on keeping it smooth and strong and featureless – nothing to see here, move along. Peter didn't think whoever was Looking for him had ever seen him yet, but he didn't know how to tell for sure.

The Look moved on without pausing. When it passed, Peter heard Fran calling his name, in a tone of annoyance that said she'd been calling for a while.

"Coming," he yelled back. Standing up, he dusted himself off and raced back to the house, pausing only to scoop up his discarded sweater.

"Hi mom," he said when he reached the porch steps.

"Peter, where have you been? I've been calling for ten minutes!" Fran held the screen door open for him.

"I was watching the clouds," he said. "I guess I fell asleep."

He concentrated briefly, looking for something he could use as an olive branch. "You should look behind the hamper," he said. "That's probably where your sewing kit is."

Fran looked at him with surprise. "Now, how did you know I was missing my sewing box?"

"Norma told me," he said. That wasn't true, but he'd found blaming things on his "invisible friend" to be a useful trick. "Can I have a cookie?"

"Just one, or you'll spoil your dinner," Fran said absently, already starting up the stairs to look for the missing box. She was frequently perturbed by her "spooky kid", as she sometimes called him, but she knew better than to look a gift horse – or a gift sewing box, in this case – in the mouth.

Later, during supper (canned ham casserole with green beans, and Peter made a face every time one of the beans squeaked against his teeth until Stu made him stop), it began to rain.

"Well, that's too bad," Stu said. "It'll spoil your drawings, Peter."

"What drawings?" Peter asked.

"Those ones you did down on the sidewalk, with your chalk," Stu said. "Say, Fran, did we ever teach this kid hopscotch?"

"I don't believe we have," Fran said, smiling. "What do you say, Peter-bear? Want to find out tomorrow if you can beat your old mom at Eleven Points?"

"Sure," Peter said, but his mind was elsewhere.

The rain didn't last long. After supper, he slipped out the front door and made his way down the long driveway to the sidewalk. There, in front of the house, he saw what Stu had been talking about. Most of the chalk had washed away in the rain, but he could still make out a few lines and whorls: blue circles, yellow arrows, some with odd hashmarks on them.

"This is bad," Norma said in his ear, but then she refused to say anything more.

That night, Peter dreamed he was being chased by men with the long, furry snouts of wolves. They all wore slick yellow raincoats and shiny black rainboots, which gave their footsteps a heavy, hollow tromping sound as they came after him. No matter where Peter ran or tried to hide, whenever he turned a corner or peeked out from behind a bush, there they were.

Panicked, he dove headfirst into a hole in the ground that turned out to lead to an underground tunnel. Peter felt himself shrinking as he crawled inside. His nose began to twitch and his hands shriveled up into furry paws that scrabbled at the dirt underneath him. I'm turning into a rabbit, he realized. Just outside the tunnel, he heard a long, high-pitched howl, followed by a scratching at the dirt above him. He turned around just in time to see a long-clawed, hairy hand reaching for him. He shrank back into the tunnel, but the dirt pressed all around him. He had nowhere left to run, and that hand was reaching closer, closer -

With a start, Peter woke up, relieved to find himself in his own bed. He took several quick, deep breaths, rubbing his arms and face with his hands to reassure himself that he was not a rabbit after all.

Then the high-pitched howl sounded again, just like in his dream, and Peter froze. It sounded like it came from the fields, somewhere close by.

Just a regular wolf, he told himself, but it was a long time before he could get back to sleep.

Chapter Text

 June 1990 to September 1996

When the lights went out and America took its final bow, Jess Rider was in Portland, Maine.

He hadn't intended on being there still - he'd only come down to spend the weekend with Fran in Ogunquit and meet her folks. Then he'd planned to get the bus down to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and from there the ferry over to Martha's Vineyard, where his own parents were summering - but then Fran had dropped her bombshell, and so even though she didn't want to see him, Jess had phoned his father and said that he thought he'd be getting in to Edgartown a week or two later than he'd planned.

His father had taken this reported delay with equanimity, and hadn't asked any questions, not that Jess had particularly expected him to. Nor had he asked about Fran, and Jess hadn't offered any news on that front. His parents didn't particularly approve of his dating Frannie Goldsmith, who might come from solid old New England stock, but was nonetheless distinctly Not Our Sort. They expressed their disapproval largely by ignoring Fran's existence. Which, since they largely ignored Jess' existence as well ("poet" not being among the set of Approved Careers for any son of the Riders) was a barely perceptible sort of disapproval, and one that Jess ordinarily had no trouble at all in dealing with.

The news of his impending fatherhood, however, had put an entirely new spin on things. Jess spent the first week after Fran broke the news to him in a sort of distracted tailspin. How they were going to get by with a baby (for he believed Fran would soon come around and accept his proposal of marriage, however clumsily he had made it). What this was going to mean for his prospects of graduate school. How he was going to tell his parents.

Normally, Jess spent the evening hours, from supper straight through to bedtime, writing poetry - or, more like, writing a line of two or poetry in the spiral notebook he used for his first drafts (finished poems he copied painstakingly into a leatherbound journal with a fountain pen), and then tearing out the page, crumpling it up, and tossing it in his overflowing wastebasket. But in the days after Fran had told him, over a pineapple sundae, that she had a bun in her oven, and that he, Jess Rider, had put it there, his wastebasket had remained obstinately empty. He couldn't write a line. He could only pace in his waterfront room at the Lighthouse Inn, staring out the window at the ocean, hands alternately clasped behind his back and running nervously through his hair, wondering just what the hell he was going to do now.

And that's how it came to be that by the time Jess took note of the goings-on of the outside world, the outside world had well and truly gone to hell.

Jess didn't watch television; he believed it was at best a distraction and at worst a sort of poison confection for the brain; it might taste good going down, but it killed your higher brain functions, slowly but surely. Nor did he listen to the radio, unless it was the classical music station, which he sometimes turned on in the background to provide the proper mood for his poetry. And he never made small talk with clerks or waitresses, which he thought of, with no sense of irony whatsoever, as "the help". Thus sheltered from the world as it bustled (and, increasingly, sickened) around him, he managed to sail right through the first spasms of the superflu epidemic without even noticing it.

On the morning of June 25th, he had sallied forth from his hotel in a dark mood. Housekeeping had not been by to change his sheets or turn down his bed for three days, and he had been forced to reuse a towel that morning in the shower. He'd stopped at the front desk, intending to complain, but no one was there.

A rumbling in his stomach convinced him that there was no sense in waiting for the clerk - undoubtedly sneaking a cigarette or pinching the maids' bottoms, and that was probably why they were too busy to change his sheets, too - to come back, so he'd filed the little speech he'd prepared away for later and went out to the street.

Portland's harborfront street was all but deserted - surprisingly so, for ten in the morning, given the sunny day. Jess only passed two people on his walk down to the coffeeship where he usually got his breakfast when in Portland. Both passers-by - a middle-aged woman in a blue velour tracksuit and a tall, black teenage boy in black jeans and a tank top - seemed to be suffering from pretty serious colds. Both of them watched him curiously when he passed them, but neither said hello or made any other gesture of greeting.

Jess walked up to the coffeeshop's glass door and reached out to push it open without breaking stride. He was brought up short - running into the door and nearly bouncing off it in comic fashion - when it failed to open.

He stepped back, blinking with surprise and embarrassment. He glanced around to see if anyone had seen his pratfall, but the street was still deserted.

A sign on the door, taped to the glass from the inside, read CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE DUE TO ILLNESS. The roar of a motor behind him made Jess turn around. A trio of camo-painted army trucks was coming up the street. He watched them pass by, realizing with unsettling surprise that they were the first cars he'd seen. The soldiers riding in the back of the trucks all wore gas masks, and carried large, automatic guns of some sort. They seemed both relaxed and tense at the same time, scanning the street incessantly.

*Just what the hell is going on?* Jess wondered, beginning to be worried for the first time. He watched the trucks until they turned a corner and were out of sight.

***

He figured out just what the hell was going on later that day. He broke his usual pattern of preoccupied standoffishness, prowling the streets of Portland until he found an old man sitting on a park bench who was willing to talk to him. Jess' eyes had grown wider and wider at the old man's recitations: the deaths, the quarantines, the ever-wilder rumors. Martial law and the Army patrolling the streets after dark. It was all too much to take in.

He'd gone back to the Lighthouse Inn - the clerk was still gone - and tried to call Fran, but he only got the tri-tone and recording of a broken circuit. He'd spent another afternoon and evening pacing, a whole new set of concerns plaguing his mind. By morning, his mind was made up.

Jess Rider made a run for it.

He'd always had a horror of illness. As a child of four, he'd contracted a particularly nasty case of pneumonia and nearly died. He spent weeks in the hospital, chiking on tubes, tied at four points to his bed to keep him from tearing out his IV, terrified and miserable. Ever since then he'd dreamed about those days, the feeling that he was drowning in his own snot, the burning ache of the fever. He'd wake up parched and coughing, convinced even ten and fifteen years later that the pneumonia had come back, that it was going to get him this time.

Faced with an epidemic of people seemingly dropping dead of his nightmare come to life, Jess ran. He ran in a fairly controlled fashion, all things considered - timing the army patrols the night before he left, poring over a map to find the least-traveled route out of town - but he ran all the same. He'd have liked to take some supplies with him, but (he reasoned) it was likely he'd escaped the plague thus far only by his reclusiveness, and so now he feared greatly to press his luck.

On June 27th, he packed a few things into his backpack (a razor, two bars of neatly wrapped hotel soap, a change of clothes and three of socks, both notebooks, and his Norton Anthology of Poetry, which was unforgivably heavy but which he found surprisingly soothing when he had trouble sleeping, which was often lately) and headed out. He stuck to the stuck to the back streets, riding his bicycle, until he reached the edge of Portland. Then he bade farewell to the bike and slipped through backyards and stands of trees that slowly gave way to second- or third- growth forest along Highway 1. He stayed well away from the highway proper and headed south.

He found an abandoned gas station along the way. Its shelves were mostly empty - a scattering of smashed glass and stepped-on potato chips spoke to more than a failure to restock. He gleaned a few cans of Vienna sausages, though - the kind with the pull tabs - to make a cold supper with. He also found a little handheld flashlight on the floor behind the cash register, and stuffed as many batteries for it as he thought he could carry into his backpack.

That night he slept rough, his head on his backback and shivering a little despite the fact that it was June. He thought he'd outwalked any Army blockades, but he still woke, heart pounding, and every creak of a branch or snap of a twig.

The next day, quite by accident, he came upon a ramshackle-looking cabin set back a mile or so from the highway. A dirt track leading in that direction had tall grass growing in the middle of it, suggesting that no one had been here for some time.

"Hello," Jess called out as he approached the cabin. "Anyone home?" There was no answer, so he walked up and looked in a window, wiping it with one hand to clean months of dirt before he could see in.

The cabin was small - only a single room, with a bed, a table, and a wood stove - and deserted, as far as he could see. After a few moments of guilty consideration, Jess went around to the door and began trying to break in. It was harder than he had thought it would be. His shoulder ached from throwing it at the door over and over, and he was afraid the whole time, despite the cabin's remoteness and evident abandonment, that someone would come along and demand to know what he was doing. At last, though, the door burst open, nearly dumping him on the floor in the doorway.

Once inside, Jess took stock. The cabin seemed well-made and weather-tight, despite its rundown appearance. The rough wood floors were covered in dust, as were all the surfaces, but they looked clean beneath the dust. A hatchet leaned against the wall next to the stove. The bed wasn't more than a cot, but he found sheets, a pillow, and a thick quilt that looked and felt handmade in a closet.

In the center of the wooden floor was a trapdoor. Jess pried it open with slight trepidation (he had not encountered many corpses on his flight from Portland, but he'd seen a few, and those few were enough to last him a lifetime, he felt) and shone the flashlight down into the hole the trapdoor revealed.

A few short steps led into a dirt-lined cellar, the ceiling so low Jess had to duck going in. Looking around when he reached the bottom, he gave a low whistle. The walls of the cellar were lined with canned goods. Beans, corn, ham – enough to last one person months. Whoever this cabin belonged to, they had stocked it well.

Jess remembered reading a story in the Atlantic a few months before, about "preppers", people who were stocking up and going off the grid to be ready for apocalypse, or nuclear war, or race riots – it seemed you could pick your fear and there was someone socking away food and bullets over it. He reflected, with bitter humor, that if the owner of the cabin had been one of that stripe, he hadn't prepped well enough. Lucky for me, though.

A sudden lassitude overtook him. He had been walking for the better part of two days, and not sleeping well, and while he was in good shape – he crewed the men's rowing team at the university – he wasn't used to that kind of sustained exertion. Stumbling back up the cellar stairs, he closed the trapdoor and crossed the cabin to the cot. He didn't bother to make up the bed with sheets – he just wrapped himself in the thick quilt and was asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

Outside the cabin, the world continued to fall apart.

***

The next few days fell into a good sort of rhythm for Jess. He would wake up in the morning, chop wood for the stove, and cook something from the cellar full of cans for breakfast, washed down with water from the nearby stream. It didn't occur to him that the stream might not be potable until the second day, at which point he decided that horse had left the stable and there was no sense shutting the door. Then he'd spend the rest of the morning reading from the Norton anthology. He was growing very fond of Eliot these days, but shied away from Yeats.

After lunch (more cans), he'd walk in the woods, trying to take mental note of every sense-image that came to him – the way that the trees dappled the sunlight, the sound of the birds on their branches – for later use. Then he'd come back to the cabin and write until it got too dark.

He thought for once he was getting some really good stuff down on the page; hardly any of it wound up on the floor in crumpled balls. He began to think of his flight from Portland as a matter of considered choice; moral choice, even. He felt like a modern-day Thoreau, having thrown off the shackles of society and gone off into the woods to let nature sing him its true poetry first hand. He began to read Thoreau in the afternoons, and Whitman too, over and over. He thought about all the multitudes he might find within himself, now that he had plenty of quiet and solitude to do it in.

On the third day, while he was washing his clothes in the stream as best he could with a sliver of the hotel soap, he suddenly thought of Fran and the baby, and on the heels of that realized that he hadn't thought of her once since he'd left Portland. Suddenly he felt monstrous in his carelessness; here he was, throwing off the shackles of the world, discovering his multitudes, writing some of the best poetry of his life, but for what? Meanwhile, the woman he loved – and his unborn child – were going through God knows what in the epidemic outside.

He jumped up, resolved in an instant to go to Fran immediately. Then he paused. Could it be that it was safe to go back, yet? He'd found a hand-cranked radio, tucked away in a cupboard in the cabin. It was the kind of thing they sold in survivalist magazines and hunting supply catalogs, which confirmed Jess' image of the cabin owner as an apocalypse prepper. Every night so far he'd cranked up for a bit after supper to listen to the news. Every station he could get had continued to mention the flu epidemic, although they all maintained that it was a minor outbreak and that a vaccine was on the way.

The thing of it was, though, that every night Jess had been able to catch fewer stations. Even the ones that just played canned music seemed to be dropping off the air. And every DJ and news anchor had sounded sick, hacking and sneezing their way through their time checks and station Ids.

He stood there, by the stream, caught in an agony of indecision. At last, with a sigh, he resolved to give it a few more days. It's not like I'd be much good to Frannie against the flu, he thought, which was both true and a bit of self-serving rationalization.

That night, and the night after, the number of stations his hand-cranked radio picked up continued to drop. The night after that, he could pick up none at all.

***

A week passed, then two. Jess had begun to make a noticeable dent in the cabin's provisions, but he was no closer to deciding to leave than he had been on the 30^th. He spent most of one afternoon taking painstaking inventory of the stacked cans on their shelves, noting their totals down in his spiral notebook.

It wasn't until he caught himself, staring into the fire in the stove after supper one night, wondering how much wood he'd need to chop to get through the winter that he realized he had begun to consider doing just that.

"That's crazy," he said out loud, startling himself with the sound of his own voice. But the idea persisted. He hadn't heard another human voice on the radio for over a week. He'd begun to half-believe he was the only person left alive in the world.

That can't be true, he told himself, but as he had for each day of the last fourteen, he pushed the decision of when to leave off to the next day.

It was well past dark; only the embers in the stove gave off a little light. Jess shut the stove door, closing off even that small glow, and went to bed.

He dreamed the same two dreams he'd been having for several nights now. In the first one, a dark man, whose face he couldn't see, quoted poetry at him in between extravagant promises. You could be great, the dark man whispered, and the sound of his voice turned Jess' spine to a bar of ice. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

The second dream was less frightening. An old, black woman, old beyond imagining, sat on a porch singing simple hymns and told him to come see her in Nebraska. You'd be welcomed with open arms, she said.

And then, as they always did, those dreams shifted to Fran. She was sleeping next to a campfire, banked down to coals, her head pillowed on a backpack. There was a faint worry line between her eyes, and one hand cradled protectively around her stomach, even in her sleep. Jess wished he could see her standing up to see if that stomach had begun to curve yet, to see her eyes open and see her smiling at him. As he watched, she began to stir slightly. Her head shook back and forth a little, and her lips moved.

Jess reached out a hand to comfort her, and then he woke up. He was in the cot in the cabin. The sky outside was just beginning to lighten, the birds chirping tentatively at one another. Jess sighed and passed a hand over his eyes. He had a feeling – a crazy feeling, but a strong one, a true feeling – that the dreams were real, somehow. Every day, when he woke up, their fading images had a stronger pull on him. Especially the first two. The dark man wanted Jess to come to him in the West, he knew. Jess thought he was somewhere in Nevada, or maybe California. I will set you high among my lieutenants, the dark man had promised, and Jess had believed him. Look upon my works.

But the old woman in Nebraska – she was real too. He was sure of it. And she didn't promise greatness or power or any of those things – but she radiated such pure, simple love and goodness that it made his chest ache, left him desperate for the words to describe the way it felt.

The dark man was Shelley, Eliot, Yeats; the old woman, Thoreau, Whitman, Donne. And Jess was perched between them like a man with one foot each on two floes of ice. Sooner or later the ice would melt, or the two floes would pull too far apart, and if he didn't pick one or the other, he'd be dumped. But how was he to decide which way to go? Torn in an agony of indecision, Jess did what he did best and put the decision off to another day.

In the end, it was the third dream that decided him. Jess chose Fran. It took further mental agonies (which cut deeply into his writing time and seemed to turn all the poetry in his head to dust, a fact he vaguely resented until he decided to consider it a sacrifice he was making for love), but at last he repacked his bag and left the cabin, venturing forth once more, only to find the world he was attempting to rejoin utterly gone.

He wasn't totally shocked by this (in fact he had largely expected it), but his first sight of a highway packed with dead cars (and dead bodies) left him even more deeply affected than he had prepared himself for. Fran's worried face floated in front of his eyes, though, and he pushed on.

He soon found a bike to replace the one he'd lost, discarded on the side of the highway. Its former owner lay beside it, black and swollen with decay until Jess was unable to tell if they had been male or female. The bike's tires were a little flat, but there was a hand-pump strapped to the frame. He filled them and took off, sticking to the shoulder except when it was so full of stalled cars that it forced him to get off and push it.

He rolled into Ogunquit on the fifth of August. He didn't know for sure what he was expecting – Fran, greeting him like a conquering hero? Fran, dead in her bed at the Goldsmith's house, and her unborn child with her? Or, given his dreams, no trace of her at all?

He was definitely not expecting a sign painted on a barn roof saying that Fran had left town a month before. With some guy named Harold, at that. Harold Lauder – he remembered, vaguely, that Fran's best friend from Ogunquit was called Amy Lauder. He and Fran had been planning to go to Amy's wedding that summer. Was this Harold a brother, or a father? He pushed down the hot coil of jealousy that rose up and threatened to choke him. They were probably only traveling together by coincidence – two survivors of the flu – or familiarity. Besides, whoever Harold was, he wasn't the father of Fran's baby. And Jess knew Fran loved him. She'd told him so often enough.

He noted the directions to Stovington down in his notebook. Then, grimly, he kicked up his kickstand and rode on.

But he had no better luck at Stovington. There was just another sign, this time pointing to Nebraska – and Jess began to feel that old, agonizing indecision creep up on him again. The dreams were getting worse. They went on all night now, back and forth between promises of greatness and promises of love. If Fran was going to Nebraska, that meant she'd picked one. He knew that, somehow, just as he knew the dream he'd had of her the night before, curled up sleeping next to a man Jess had never seen before, was a true dream also.

What if he went to Nebraska and Fran wouldn't have him? What if he didn't, and missed his chance? And even if Fran didn't want him anymore, there was the baby to consider. Didn't it have a right to know its father? Didn't he have a right to know his child?

It was August twentieth. Jess got a map and tried to measure up the distance from Stovington to Nebraska. It was a hell of a long way. If he did go, would Fran even still be there when he got there? What would he do if she wasn't?

While he was marking off the highways he'd need to take, he realized that the route was largely the same as he'd need to take to get to where the other dream – the dark dream – was urging him. A great wave of relief washed over him. He didn't have to decide yet after all.

That night, he slept like the dead, rolled into his blankets next to the fire. There were no dreams. He took it as a kind of reward.

In the middle of Iowa he came across a little town called Hampton's Ford. The lights were on, which unsettled him, although he couldn't put his finger on the reason for his discomfort until he was nearly to the middle of town – and there were people living there. Almost a hundred of them, in fact. People like Jess – folks who had had the dark dream, and the dream of Nebraska, and couldn't decide between them. People who could have gone either way, to the dark man or to Mother Abigail, found it impossible to split difference, and so refused to decide. Everyday folks, in other words, neither good nor bad but a mix of both.

It seemed like the most natural thing into the world to Jess to stay with them for a while. The lights and automatic heat for the increasingly-chilly evenings were almost intoxicating after having gone without them for so long, and Jess found he'd missed human company far more than he'd known.

A week after he arrived in Hampton's Ford, he woke up, bang, in the middle of the night. The bed beside him was cold, although Diane had been next to him when he fell asleep (he told himself that Fran couldn't object to him and Diane, since she was hardly celibate herself).

Jess knew as soon as he woke up that something was wrong, though he couldn't say what. Pulling on a pair of sweatpants, he walked out to the front of the house to look for Diane.

Movement outside the big picture window that faced the street caught his eye. The street was full of people. He slipped out the front door and saw Diane among them. No one was talking to each other; they all just milled about, looking poleaxed.

"What happened?" he asked Diane, coming up beside her.

She turned to him, eyes wide and a little wild. "Can't you tell?" she asked him. "Didn't you dream it?"

"Dream what?" Jess was still more than a little asleep, and in no mood for Twenty Questions.

"We all had the same dream. All of us."

"What is it?" he asked irritably. "Dammit, Diane - "

"It's over," she said. "Boulder and Vegas – there was a bomb, we think, a big one - "

Jess felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. "Boulder's gone, then?" Fran was in Boulder, he was pretty sure. He pictured her, walking down some nameless Boulder street, big with child, looking up into the sky to see a missile screaming hell down on her.

Diane blinked at him. "You really don't know, do you? It was the other way around. It was Vegas that blew up."

***

He didn't stay in Hampton's Ford for long after that. Somehow he couldn't bring himself to go to Boulder, either. He knew the old woman was dead, too, and he knew that a lot of folks like him, folks who couldn't decide between her and the dark man, were heading out that way now that it was all over. But even removing the pressure of the grand good-and-evil decision didn't help him to make that choice. So he drifted from town to town to town.

He never stayed too long in one place – the longest was six months, in an old mining town in the California mountains – but America was dotted with little towns these days. They were its main centers of population, circled round with rings of farms. In the early days, these towns were mostly full of the people who hadn't be able to choose between the dark dream and the light one, along with a few who were maybe ashamed of that choice, and so if someone did ask what Jess had been doing during "the Troubles" no one batted an eye when he shrugged his shoulders ruefully. And in the later days, hardly anyone asked anymore.

It took him six years to get around to heading up to Boulder, and by then Fran was long gone. They were good years, too, even after the dreams started up again a couple years in. Not about the old woman or the dark man, this time – she was dead and he was gone. No, Jess dreamed of a different man now – or at least, the figure he dreamed of looked like a man, although something – some sense – in Jess said that he wasn't not entirely human. Even less human, in fact, than Randall Flagg had been.

The man, or not-man, appeared in different places in Jess' dreams. Most frequently he could be found at the center of a featureless plain. Jess would approach him in these dreams from a great distance, traveling without any conscious thought or motion, moving faster and faster. He would race along the unchanging, flat plain until at last, on the horizon, he'd see a speck. The speck grew larger as he got closer, resolving into a great throne with a man sitting upon it. As he got even closer Jess would be able to see that the throne was made up of oddly curved lumps; still closer, and he'd see that the lumps were human skulls, picked clean and bleached white by some unseen sun.

The man usually wore a hooded robe the color of fresh blood, which covered him from head to toe, obscuring all but the lower half of his face and his scrawny hands. Sometimes those hands seemed to have too many knuckles for Jess' comfort.

From within the hood, the figure's glowing red eyes bruned out, always fixed inerrantly on Jess. From within the hood, he spoke, and his voice was simultaneously repellent and compelling. Jess could never remember what questions the red man asked, nor what orders he gave, but he always worke from these dreams feeling both exalted and dirty, as if he'd committed some great and heinous crime in his sleep. Look upon my works echoed in his head for hours after.

On other nights, Jess dreamed of Fran. Those dreams were better and yet also worse, because throughout them he could feel two burning red eyes boring into his back, making his flesh crawl. Whenever he turned around, though, no one was there, and so he'd turn back to Fran, who would smile lovingly at him, or laugh uproariously at a joke he made - and how could he have found her laugh grating before? - or tell him how much she'd missed him. And then Jess would feel that hot gaze crawling up between his shoulderblades again...

Good years, for all that. And yet he felt something was missing.

The first person he met in Boulder – on the outskirts of Boulder, really – was Lucy Swann. She was teaching her twins – son and daughter – to ride bicycles. They wobbled around in unsteady circles on their training wheels under her watchful eye.

Jess watched them from a distance for a while before approaching. Fran's baby – our baby – would be about that age, he thought.

Lucy looked up as he walked toward them, rolling his own bicycle along beside him.

"Hi," she called out. "Just in from the outer provinces?"

"Hi," Jess said, lifting a hand with a rueful grin. "Is it that obvious?"

Lucy laughed. "You've got that look," she admitted. Jess rolled the bike up to where she stood and stuck out his hand. The twins wobbled closer, interested in the stranger but shy.

"Jess Rider," he said.

She shook his outstretched hand. "Lucy Swann." Then she grinned. "And let me be the first to welcome you to the Reconstituted State of Colorado, Jess. I hope you'll like it here."

Chapter Text

 September 19, 1998

Fast forward eight years, Fran thought, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. She tucked the dishcloth into the pocket of her apron as she slipped out the door. Whoever thought you'd end up here, kid? Not Frannie Goldsmith, that's for sure. She'd never even been to Deerport before Captain Trips, for all that she'd grown up not fifty miles away – it was a flyspeck of a town, no reason why she ought to have visited.

And yet, here she was.

Stu was across the backyard, sitting on his rock. It was a boulder, the size of a kitchen table and about four feet high, that sat at the corner of the property like it had been sitting there since the end of the last ice age. Stu liked to sit out there and watch the sun go down. Sometimes he'd roll a cigarette and smoke it out there, although there was little enough tobacco being grown these days and less of it came through Deerport, so he couldn't take up his old habit in earnest.

Fran paused on the back step and just looked at her man for a minute. From here, he was the same Stu she'd met on the road to Vermont, all those years ago, with a bun in her oven and a traitor at her side. Up close, when she cared to let herself see them, she could see the new gray in his hair and the lines beginning to seam his face, almost as deep as her father's had been for all that Stu was twenty years younger. It was a hard new world, and it was making them all old before their time, she thought. But he was still her Stu.

He turned when he heard her approaching. "Come to share my rock?" he asked with a grin. He held out one arm.

She smiled and joined him, feeling the heat from the sun soak up into her from the stone and the warmth of his body soaking into her from his side. She laid her head on his shoulder.

"Caravan'll be here in an hour or so," she said, "I heard them checking in on the radio."

Everyone in Deerport – everyone everywhere, as far as Fran knew – kept a CB radio in their houses. It was their link to the outside world, in a world where nearly everything had become "outside". In some places there had been a real push to move back to a higher level of technology. Places like Boulder, in point of fact, and Fran had heard that there were great things happening in San Diego, too. Also Austin, Texas and Detroit. But even in those places, the folks there kept running into the same fundamental problem: things wore out, or broke, or ran out of something they needed, and there just weren't enough people left to make more of all the things needed to keep a technological society running. Not just enough trained people, either – enough people, period. Fran remembered Glen and Nick talking about how all the old toys were just lying around to be picked up – but without patient parents on hand to fix or replace them, how long would the toys last?

If they could have gathered everyone left in America up and set them down in one place, she thought, maybe they could have done it. Maybe if Mother Abigail hadn't died, if the dreams had kept pulling people into Boulder, holding them there. They could have gotten the factories and the big farms and the computer systems all running again – if they could've found one place where all that stuff was, that was.

But scattered as they were – and some, like Stu and Fran herself, preferred it that way – there was just no chance. So they had running water, yes, and electricity (for as long as a fuel lasted, but they could haul that a long distance, and there was talk of reopening some coal mines). Local telephone service, sure, in any place populated enough to make it worth setting back up. But no long-distance. Local TV stations, but no cable and no satellite, maybe ever again. And when the wires for the phones shorted out or the transmitters broke down, what then? Would they all go silent? Most of the major highways had been cleared of cars, but with no one left refining gasoline, much less drilling for oil, cars were getting scarcer. It was a long, slow slide down to a lower level of technology, plain and simple.

The Caravans were a new thing, the past couple of years. A fairly sophisticated trade had sprung up between neighboring towns, all across the country – of all the things mankind had left behind him with the flu, economics was surely not one of them – but the Caravans were longer-haul. Drawn by donkeys or sometimes even horses (for just as with the dogs, only most of the horses had died of Trips), the Caravans were the post-flu version of the postal service, a newswire, and a travel agency all rolled into one. Plus trading, of course. They carried letters and even parcels all the way across the country, albeit to an irregular and uncertain schedule; brought news from a hundred towns and happenings too small to get repeated through the CB grapevine, and offered safety in numbers to folks wanting to go from one place to another. Evil had no more left America's shores with the dark man than it had arrived with him, and the wild and empty spaces between settlements, no longer easily crossed at sixty-per with the windows rolled up, were now stalking-grounds for raiders and robbers and tinpot dictators running a hundred slave-handed fiefdoms and conscript harems out beyond the fringes of reconstituted society. But few of those wildlings and despots were willing to take on a whole Caravan, forty or fifty strong, with most of those armed and a watch posted. And those who did decide to try it quickly learned why the others stayed away.

When the sun had finished setting, Stu sighed and sat up straighter, leaning back until his spine crackled and popped. "Ready to go meet the caravan?" He slid off the rock and held up a hand to Frannie to help her down. They walked together, arm in arm, toward the house.

At the back door, Frannie turned and cupped her hands around her mouth. "Peter," she called.

A few seconds later, the wheat at the edge of the yard began to rustle. Stu chuckled. "That boy loves that wheatfield," he said as Peter broke through the front row of stalks, racing toward them.

"Is it the Caravan?" Peter panted when he reached them. "Norma said it'd be here today, but when they didn't get here by supper I didn't believe her."

Fran and Stu exchanged a long look. They'd had a number of worried conversations about Peter's imaginary friend. He was too old to still have one, Stu maintained. It was time he grew out of it and stopped pretending. Fran argued that his lack of playmates his own age made it a natural thing for him to do. At which point Stu would ask mildly if she wanted to go back to Boulder then, and if Peter wasn't around they'd usually have a nice little argument about it. Fran didn't mind a friendly argument every now and then, and neither did Stu – the making up after was always nice, after all. But if Peter was around, she found it hard to keep up her end of it, and she thought Stu did too. They never seemed to get around to talking about that, though. Just like they never talked about how strange it was that Peter's imaginary friend had the same name as the sister he'd never had – the baby Fran had lost on the long trip back to Maine from Boulder. Or the uncanny way Peter had of being right, even about things he couldn't possibly know, when he said Norma had told him something.

Fran broke the stare first, smiling down at Peter, who was bouncing around at her side with the agitated, nervous energy of an excited eight-year old. "It's the Caravan," she confirmed. "Now go wash up and change your shirt before we go, you're all over dirt."

Peter bounded up the stairs to the door, then turned back. "Norma says there are a bunch of people here to see us," he said, and then ducked inside. A moment later they could hear him thundering up the inside stairs, taking them two at a time as he always did.

Fran turned back to Stu to find his eyebrows reaching for his hairline, as she could feel her own were. "Bunch of people waiting for us, huh?" Stu said. "Now, what could make him think a thing like that?"

As soon as they got to the meeting place in the middle of town, though, Stu and Fran saw what Peter had meant. "Lucy!" Fran yelled, taking the last half-block at a run. Lucy turned, a broad grin on her face, and opened her arms for Fran to collide into them.

"God, it's so good to see you," Fran said. "Where are your kids? Have they gotten huge? They have, haven't they? Why didn't you write and say you were coming?"

Lucy laughed. "They're in one of the wagons, with Leo, getting cleaned up a bit. Look – here they come now." She pointed to a wagon twenty or so yards away, from which Leo Rockway was climbing down. He turned around as soon as he'd gotten down to help first a young girl, and then a little boy, down alongside him. He waved at Fran and Stu, and then, holding the children's hands, he started walking them over to join the group.

Fran gasped. "Leo's here too?"

"Leo's here too," Lucy confirmed. "And that's not all. I wanted it to be a surprise, which is why I didn't write." She turned and smiled as a man about Fran's age came up beside her and put his arm around her waist.

Fran felt her brow wrinkling as she looked at the man, who was dark-haired, with patrician-like features. He looked so familiar, but she just couldn't place him.

"Fran," Lucy said, "I want you to meet Jess Rider – my husband. Jess – this is Fran Goldsmith. She and I have a bit of history from the Troubles, I guess."

Fran felt the air go out of her lungs in a shocked gasp. She could see Jess' wide, shocked eyes, and he, too, doubled over a bit as if he felt the introduction like a punch.

"I...but I thought you were..." she whispered.

Lucy was looking from one of them to the other, confused. "Fran?" she said. "Is everything okay?"

"Hey Mom," Peter called out, running up to them. "They have chocolate with them. Real chocolate!"

"Come here, Peter," Fran said over Lucy's confusion and growing unease, motioning to Peter, who was standing half-behind Stu, holding his hand, looking at the visitors shyly. "I want you to meet Jess Rider. He and I used to know each other, back before the flu."

"Used to know each other?" Lucy said blankly. "But how -"

Peter took a shuffling step forward, staring at the ground. "Pleasedtomeetcha," he mumbled. Then he looked up at Lucy with a half-smile. "And you too, ma'am. And you," he added to Leo, his eyes dropping to the floor again.

Fran knelt down next to him. "Peter, Jess is your father. Your biological father, I mean."

Lucy gasped, "Father!" She rounded on Jess. "You never told me – Jess – you -" Jess just looked at her, blankly, saying nothing.

It was Stu who stepped forward then, taking Lucy's arm. "Now, I bet he's just as shocked as you are, Lucy. As we all are – I thought my jaw was going to fall off! How could he have expected Frannie to be alive? Much less to ever see her again."
Jess cleared his throat. "That's right," he said. To Fran: "I went down to Ogunquit when it had all died down, to see if you were -" he cleared his throat. "But there was no one there. I assumed -"

"Of course you did," Stu said. But Fran's brows were knitted into a frown.

"If you were coming south, you should have seen the sign," she said.

"Sign?" Jess kept his face carefully blank.

"The sign Harold and I left, that said where we were going. He painted it on the roof of a barn." She felt a quiet pang of sorrow and anger mixed, as she always did when thinking of Harold.

"I didn't see any sign," Jess said. "I was on my bike, though, and I was a little – well, you know. I might not have been looking around much."

A strangled sound made them all turn and look at Lucy. Her face was working painfully. "I'm sorry," she said at last. "This is all just – a bit of a shock, you understand. I – I think I'd better - "

Without finishing the sentence, she turned and stumbled away, half-running.

After a long, awkward pause, Jess said, "I think I'd better go after her. Excuse me."

Fran and Stu turned to Leo, as much to give the two of them some privacy as to catch up, but Peter watched Jess jog after Lucy.

He caught up with her just before the corner, grabbing her arm. She whirled to face him, and said something Peter couldn't hear. They began to argue.

Peter let his eyes unfocus, trying to see the ray between them. He felt as if their argument was his fault, even if it was only existing that caused it. What he saw made him pause, and a cold feeling of dread crept up from his stomach and into his chest. The ray that started somewhere deep inside Lucy was broad and thick, just like the one between his parents. It pulsed colors – mostly red just now, shot through with yellow fear – and stretched out between her and Jess, just like the one between Fran and Stu did.

But when it got to him, the ray just...stopped. Peter squinted, trying to see the end of it, and the rays vanished from his sight completely. He made himself relax, and they came back, but the one reaching out from Lucy to Jess was still wrong. It stopped just short of him. Or not even stopped, exactly – it wasn't like the other broken rays that Peter had seen, that sometimes meant that someone was dead and sometimes meant that the relationship was irreparably over. It just...ceased to exist in the vicinity of Jess. It was as if Lucy was putting out all the normal energy of a relationship between two people, and Jess was putting out nothing at all. Not the dimmer bands of neglect or even the dark shades of dislike. Just...nothing.

A hand fell on Peter's shoulder, making him jump and making the rays vanish.

"Hey," the man they'd called Leo said. "Peter, right? Long time no see."

"Huh?" Peter said.

Leo laughed. "I guess you wouldn't remember, would you? I used to watch you sometimes for your Mom and Dad, back in Boulder. Changed your diapers a couple times, even. 'Course, you were a lot smaller then." He motioned with his hands, indicating a baby, and they both laughed. Then Leo's face grew serious again. "You and I – we need to talk."

"Okay," Peter said, a little confused. "About what?"

Leo looked around. Fran and Stu had drawn off to one side. They were watching Lucy and Jess and talking in low voices.

"Are you dreaming about them yet?" Leo asked. "The low men?"

"Low men? I don't understand."

Leo said, "They look like men, sometimes, but other times they have the faces of animals."

Peter remembered his nightmares with a shudder. He looked at Leo, wide-eyed. "But – how do you -"

"I've been seeing the signs since we crossed into Ohio," Leo said. "Graffiti, mostly, but also these." He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a folded piece of paper, which he passed to Peter.

Peter unfolded it. He read it, slowly. He was proud of the fact that he didn't have to sound out the words anymore, but he wasn't very fast at reading yet. The paper said

LOST DOG

ANSWERS TO "BEAR"

If you have seen our dear YOUNG DOGGIE

Please let us know!

Our hearts are BREAKING without him!

NO QUESTIONS asked. The

main thing is that we get him

HOME safe!

"That's how they leave messages for each other," Leo said. "It doesn't work so well here, where there are so few people, but in the crowded worlds, no one thinks anything of a sign like this."

"Crowded worlds?" Peter asked.

Leo looked up. Lucy and Jess were coming back. They were smiling as if they'd made up, and Peter felt relieved that the argument had been resolved even without his help.

"Later," Leo said. "We can talk more later."

"Well, look who's making friends already!" Lucy called.

Leo grinned and yelled back, "Old friends, Lucy, remember? I changed his diapers!"

Everyone laughed except for Peter, who was more confused than ever.

Chapter Text

Night. Lucy and Jess lay together on a big, four-poster bed. Jess lay on his back, breathing slow and even; Lucy curled into a tight ball on her side, drawn away from him even in her sleep. They had had a real banger of a fight before bed, in the kitchen of this borrowed house they were staying in. The exchange of words they'd had out front, while everyone was still around, was just the appetizer. This had been the entree, the piece de resistance, the dessert.

The twins had stayed over at Fran and Stu's to play with Peter - even in Boulder, kids were still scarce, and they'd been on the road for a while - so there was no need to keep their voices down. Nonetheless, Lucy had started out hissing low, maybe out of habit.

"You never told me you knew Frannie, Jess! You never told me you were Peter's father!"

"Lucy, for God's sake," Jess said, holding both hands out flat toward her. "I thought she was dead, of course I did! How could I have known – how could I imagine – that this Fran you knew was the same Fran I knew all those years ago?"

But Lucy had refused to be placated. She'd lost too much, and she was desperately afraid of losing yet again. And she was already tired of the cagey way Jess got about him whenever she asked about the past, and so they were off to the races.

Now Jess' body filled, even in his sleep, with a trembling, high-wire tension, and his eyelids fluttered incessantly. He was back on the featureless plane, before that throne of skulls again, shuddering under those burning red eyes. They focused on him like twin laser beams. In that voice that haunted his dreams and nightmares alike, the Crimson King began to speak to him.

Down the road, in the Goldsmith-Redman residence, Peter tossed and turned. He was being chased again by the men in the yellow coats, only this time instead of wolves they had the faces of weasels and red, glowing eyes. He was racing through and old warehouse, trying to hide behind this crate or that box, but they found him every time. He broke out into the open at last, running for his life, with three of them on his tail. He pulled a tight turn down a new aisle, nearly twisting his ankle, and only then saw what they were herding him towards: a big, iron-barred cage, large enough to hold an eight-year old boy.

On two sides of the cage there were two sets of round holes: one at ground level and one shoulder-high. And through each of those holds was fed a stout chain, and on the end of each chain a pair of handcuffs...

Peter woke, sitting bolt upright in the darkness. He was soaked with sweat, trembling all over with fear, and suddenly he knew that he had to get out of the house. Moving clumsily, still half-asleep, he got out of bed and began to dress.

Down the hall from Peter's room, Fran and Stu slept soundly, wrapped in each other's arms. They'd made love with quiet, intense passion that night, each reassuring the other (and themselves) that the sudden reappearance of Jess Rider meant nothing. When they were finished, they'd fallen straightaway into dreamless sleep.

Downstairs, the Swann twins slumbered the slumber of the innocent in the playroom. And in the living room, Leo Rockway lay wide awake, trying to hold himself together, trying to calculate how long they might have before the low men showed up in force, trying to figure out what he was going to do when they did.

He could feel Joe battering at the walls of his mind, wanting to be let out. Wanting Leo to be shut away again.

It had been a long, long time since Leo had let Joe out. That was how he thought of it, letting him out, as if Joe was really a separate person from Leo Rockway. Leo Rockway was an everyday citizen of the Reconstituted State of Boulder. A little scarred, sure, mentally and physically. Prone to bouts of occasional grief, even now, when he remembered the victims of Captain Trips and Randall Flagg; especially when he remembered one Larry Underwood, permanent rockstar-in-waiting after his final, biggest engagement in the center of Las Vegas. Prone, even, to just stopping and staring off into space sometimes, as if he were receiving instructions from somewhere else, although that happened less and less as the years went by. But basically whole, for all that.

You couldn't call Joe whole. Joe was missing all sorts of things. Language, for one. Self-control. The ability to distinguish the real world from that other world, the one Leo saw in his dreams and – once or twice – when he was awake.

Leo snorted softly to himself. Real world! He knew better than anyone that the other world, the one Joe saw, was real, too. He knew it better than anyone except for maybe Joe himself, and Mother Abigail, of course.

Because finding Mother Abigail was the first time that Joe and Leo had worked together.

One of the things Leo always remembered the most clearly about being Joe was how full of horrors Joe's head was. Joe...remembered things. Mostly things Leo would rather not remember. The kinds of things that steal your language and leave you in a state of atavistic catatonia, helpless to explain what was wrong or even identify when people were trying to help you.

Leo barely remembered his mother, but the back of Joe's mind was always filled with a crystal-clear picture of her face. Her dead, bloated, blackened face, with her eyes starting from her head and her tongue protruding just a little from between her swollen, peeling lips. Always in the back of Joe's mind, too, were the probably-dreams in which she sat up, bloated and black and smelling, and began to talk to him in a deep, grating voice that was both unlike and horribly like her own.

Leo was pretty sure that was just a nightmare Joe'd had after his mother died. But Joe was utterly convinced that it was real, and in the tumultuous silent place in Leo's head where Joe hid, it played over and over and over like a three-dollar second-run movie. And that was just one of the horrors – real and imagined and hallucinated in the squirrel-bite fever that would have killed him if Nadine Cross hadn't come along – that lived in Joe's head, all the time.

But Joe knew things, too, thinks that Leo could sometimes feel the knowing of, just out of reach. And sometimes, if Leo stopped and stared off into space for a second or two, Joe would whisper a little of what he knew in Leo's ear. Where Larry or Lucy-mom were when he couldn't find them, or where he'd left his jacket. Little things, mostly.

On the day they'd brought Mother Abigail back to town, Joe'd been restless all day. In those days Leo's control over Joe was still tenuous; if he got too excited or scared or let down his guard, up Joe would come, pushing Leo out of the way and taking over.

That day it was harder than usual to hold Joe back. The wilderness, he kept muttering in Leo's head. The wilderness. And he kept pushing, like he was trying to push Leo all the way out of of his own head.

Leo was walking along, thinking about Larry, when it happened. He was thinking about how sad Larry had been when he had to admit to himself that Harold and Nadine-mom were no good. Leo himself had never liked Harold, and he'd known for a long time that Nadine-mom had made her choice and that it was the bad choice, but he hadn't been able to make Larry see about Harold and he didn't want to talk to anyone about what was happening to Nadine-mom. Even thinking about talking to someone about that made Joe come rushing up from the back of his mind, knife raised and ready to fight for his life.

He was thinking, also, about how worried Larry was. Larry knew that everyone in the Boulder Free Zone was looking to him and the rest of the Committee to come up with a plan to deal with the dark man. But he didn't know what to do any more than anyone else did, and he was terrified of letting them all down.

I bet if the Grammylady – if Mother Abigail were here she could tell him what he should do, Leo thought.

THE WILDERNESS, Joe said, and then he was rushing forward, like he always did when he wanted to push Leo out and get in the driver's seat for a while.

But this time something in Leo said No and refused to give way. He braced himself against Joe's onslaught. And to his own surprise as much as Joe's, he stood fast.

Joe howled inchoate rage. He threw image after image at Leo – their mother, dead; their father, likewise; their two younger brothers – but Leo continued to hold firm.

Together, he thought firmly. Together, or nothing.

Joe pulled back a little, considering. Leo felt his mental "stance" relaxing as he agreed. Then Joe started to give him directions.

They'd found the box canyon easily enough. Leo wasn't ready for the featureless, silver, gaping mouth at the back of it, though. The portal undulated in the open air of the canyon, its movement hard to follow with the eyes and somehow greasy. It felt immediately to Leo and Joe both that the portal didn't belong there; yet Leo knew that was where Joe wanted them to go.

So he'd steeled himself and gone through. And found himself on a featureless plain that stretched as far as he could see in all directions. There was a sky, of a sort; but it was black and starless and dead. The plain itself was utterly flat and smooth while somehow seeming unpolished. It was a matte black that reflected no light; indeed, there was no light to be seen at all, although Leo could still somehow see. He felt his mind wrestle with this concept for a second and then give up. Behind him, just above the surface of the plain, hung the silver portal, looking just as unsavory and somehow wrong on this side as it had on the other.

"Why, hello, chap," said a creaky, rusty-sounding voice behind him. The voice belonged to Mother Abigail. He turned and saw her standing a few feet behind him, although he could have sworn she hadn't been there a minute ago. She was holding a goodish-sized tree branch of some kind, which she laid on the ground as he watched. "I guess you're my escort home," she said, and took his hand. "I been having a long jaw with the Lord, but I guess I'm ready to go now."

Leo realized in a flash that by "ready to go" she didn't only mean back to Boulder. Then Joe came rushing up in his head and this time he couldn't be stopped. After that, Leo didn't remember much of anything until they were back in Boulder, and Doctor Dick was there, hugging him and saying "How'd you do it, Joe? How'd you find her?"

After that he'd been a lot better at holding Joe back, when he wanted.

He'd only ever called Joe up deliberately a few times, and most of them were a few weeks after the incident with Mother Abigail. Leo had woken up from a dream of terrible, cleansing fire and suddenly knew he had to know where Larry was right that minute. He hadn't so much pulled Joe forward as yanked him by the scruff of his neck, and Joe was too shocked and angry over it to do anything but scream for a while. That had brought Lucy at a run, and Leo had tried to tell her what was wrong, but Joe would only scream and scream. And once he could be calmed down he refused to do anything for Leo or even acknowledge him.

Leo had tried again the next day, and the next, although more gently than that first time, and Joe had been more cooperative. But in the end it didn't matter, because no matter how many times Leo insisted on looking, Larry was nowhere to be found.

The front door blew open with a bang, jerking Leo out of the light doze he'd fallen into. He sprang up and went to close it. As he did so, he glanced outside, and saw something that froze him in his spot. Peter was standing at the end of the walk, looking up in terror at the low men who surrounded him – yellow coats, shiny rainboots, heads like coyotes. And standing in front of him, unperturbed by his company, was Jess Rider. He was reaching out a hand toward Peter as if to calm him. As soon as Jess' hand touched Peter's head, though, the whole group disappeared. Just there and gone as if they'd never been standing there.

"Peter!" Leo tried to call out, but then Joe came rushing up, unstoppable for the first time in years. He heard himself make an ineffectual hooting sound instead, and then he knew no more.

Chapter Text

Leo came back to himself to a sharp stinging in his face and a ringing in his ears. As his vision cleared he saw Fran standing in front of him. Her eyes were wide and frightened, and her hand was pressed to her mouth. He was still in the living room of Fran and Stu's house. Behind Fran, Stu stood, looking worried.

Leo shook his head a couple of times to clear it. "Fran," he said. He touched his cheek where she had slapped him; it still stung, and he could feel it reddening. Joe had fled to the deepest recesses of his mind; he was curled up there, crooning to himself.

"Leo," Fran said, letting her hand drop from her mouth. "I'm sorry I hit you, only you weren't making any sense, you were just hooting, like – like -"

"Like you used to do in the old days," Stu said. "Back in Boulder. You were yelling loud enough to wake us both up."

"Sorry," Leo said, embarrassed. "That hasn't happened to me in a long time." Suddenly, he remembered what he had seen that had made him fall back into Joe. "Peter!" he exclaimed.

"He's not in his bed," Stu said. "I started to look for him, but then you were – well, you know."

"Where is he, Leo?" Fran asked him, grabbing his upper arm. "Where is my son?"

Leo took a deep breath. How was he going to explain this to them? He'd thought they'd have more time to prepare before the low men made their move. He'd never dreamed that Jess would be working with them – but then, he'd never dreamed Jess would turn out to be Peter's father, either.

"Jess took him," he said finally, when Fran gave him a little shake.

"Jess?" The name exploded out of Fran almost like a laugh. "That doesn't – why would he – where would Jess even take Peter?" Her face was pale, and her eyes, frightened before, had taken on a look of sick dread.

"I'm not sure," Leo said, "but I might know why. He wasn't by himself."

"Lucy?" Fran said uncomprehendingly. "But she wouldn't – but why - "

"Or was it someone from the Caravan?" Stu broke in.

"Not Lucy," Leo said. "Not the Caravaners, either. Look, I can't take the time to explain. I think I can find him. Will you trust me?"

"Of course," Fran said immediately. Stu nodded agreement. "What do you need?"

"I can get a couple of guns out of the study," Stu offered. "We can go after them together."

Leo held up one hand. "Guns aren't going to be any good," he said. "I don't think the laws of physics are quite right there, anyway. And I'm pretty sure I'll need to go alone."

"Laws of physics? Leo, you're not making any sense." Fran was shaking her head in nonstop denial. He saw that she was shaking.

"Just trust me, okay, Frannie? I'm going to do the best I can to get Peter back." To Stu, he said, "A lantern would be good, if you've got a gas one. And some matches."

***

Peter had been half-sleepwalking when he walked out of the house to meet Jess, and when Jess had laid his hand on Peter's head and made the world go away, Peter had gone away, too. His mind had just refused to process what was going on and shut down for a little while.

When he came back to himself, he was tied, hand and foot, and lying on a little hand-pulled cart. One of the low men was pulling it, he thought; from where he lay he could see a back and a pair of shoulders in one of their yellow rainslickers.

"I wish we could have met some other way," Jess said from beside and above him. Peter rolled his eyes up to see Jess, walking alongside the cart. "I wish I could have seen you being born, watched you grow up." His face twisted. "So much has been taken away from me by the goddamn germs."

Peter had to try several times to bring enough spit into his mouth to talk. "Where are we? Where are you taking me?"

Jess laughed hollowly. "He wants you," he said. "He's promised to make it all better if I bring you to him."

"Who wants me?"

"The King," Jess said. "The King in his crimson robe, and his hood. He probably would have gotten you anyway – his agents were pretty close. But he'll reward me anyway, for making his life easier.

"It wasn't supposed to be like this, Peter. Not the world, not my life, not yours. I was supposed to be a poet. Grad school, then tenure, and I could have taught a little and put out a poetry collection every couple of years. Maybe won a Pushcart or a fellowship. Maybe even a Pulitzer; who knows? But then someone went and got careless with their damn diseases and they screwed up the whole world and my life with it.

"But the Crimson King's going to make all that better. There are other worlds than these, Peter. He's going to send me to one of them. A world where Trips never happened. Just imagine it! I can blend in, start a new life. Maybe I won't end up with tenure publishing poetry, but it's more of a chance than this world has ever given me."

Peter fought down panic. "Why does this – this King – want me?"

Jess' brow wrinkled. "I'm not sure exactly," he admitted. "It's something about you – something you can do. All I know is that he wants you."

"Stop talking to him," Norma said in Peter's ear. At the same time, one of the low men said something to Jess in a snarling, guttural language that was unlike anything Peter had ever heard.

"Someone's coming?" Jess said. "But how? Who could have followed us?"

Peter's heart skipped a beat. He didn't know whether to be hopeful or more afraid.

"Don't worry about that right now," Norma said. "Listen to me."

What am I going to do? Peter asked her.

"Help is coming," she said. "You need to be ready. I want you to look for rays that look like this." She showed him. They were a deep, dark red, darker than blood, and shot through with oily black streaks. Even looking at Norma's image of them made him shudder.

What do I do when I find them? He asked.

"For now, just wait. When it's time, though -" She showed him what she wanted him to do. It made him even sicker than looking at the rays did. "Can you do that?"

I think I can, but...

"No buts! If you want to get out of this, that's what you're going to have to do. Now try to find them. As many as you can."

Peter relaxed into the cart as well as he could, letting his eyes go unfocused.

***

It took them most of an hour to get to where Leo's Joe-sense told him he needed to go. He'd agreed to let Stu come with him as far as the portal. They'd taken motorcycles, using a little precious gas, to try to make up some of the lead Jess and the low men had on them.

At last Leo signaled a turn onto a dirt track off the main road. It led through a stand of trees into a clearing. At the center of the clearing was the ruins of what might have been a hunter's cabin, once upon a time. It was hardly more than a pile of debris now, as if a hurricane had hit it, although the trees at the edge of the clearing showed no damage.

Hanging in the center of the ruins was the portal, looking every bit as silver and greasy and wrong as the one Leo had used to find Mother Abigail.

He dismounted, and Stu did the same. "What are we doing here?" Stu asked.

He can't see it, Leo realized. Joe hooted mournful agreement in his head. "This is where I need to be," Leo said. "Listen, Stu – I'm not sure what's going to happen here. There's a – I guess you'd call it a portal. I'm pretty sure you can't see it, but I'm also pretty sure that's where Jess took Peter."

"And if I can't see it that probably means I can't get into it either, is what you're saying?" Stu took this pronouncement with surprising equanimity, given how crazy it must have sounded to him. "I guess it's my job to wait and find out what happens again. At least I don't have a broken leg this time."

"I think I'm probably going to disappear when I go into the portal," Leo said. "But Stu – if I'm not back by morning, it means we're not coming back."

Stu nodded, his eyes full of sadness and worry. "I hear you," he said. "You be careful, Leo. I want my boy back, but I don't want you dyin' for it."

"Let's hope it doesn't come to that," Leo said. He took the matches out of his pocket and used them to light the Coleman lantern he'd brought with him. He put the matches away and then, holding the lantern high, he strode into the wreckage and into the portal.

As he'd half-expected, it deposited him on that featureless plain again. Far ahead of him he could see a cluster of specks that he was pretty sure were Jess, Peter, and the low men. Keeping his eyes on them, Leo began to jog.

***

"I think it's Leo," Jess said from beside the cart.

Peter did his best to ignore him. It was hard enough keeping his concentration on the rays with the way his heart kept pounding in his chest; keeping up a conversation was beyond him.

"Ah, hell," Jess said. "I didn't want to have to hurt anyone. But I guess I'm going to have to, if he won't give up."

"Jess," Leo yelled. He sounded very close by to Peter. "What do you think you're doing? Let's talk about this."

"There's nothing to talk about," Jess called back. "Just stop there where you are and we won't hurt you."

"Whatever he's promised you, it's a lie," Leo yelled. "That's all he has, lies and dreams and falsehoods. That's all he is, really." His voice was coming closer. Peter could hear a shuffling as the low men came around the other side of the cart, and he ached with the frustration of not being able to see what was going on and the need to keep that careful, relaxed concentration on the rays. They slipped in and out of his sight as he kept losing and then regaining the un-focus he needed to see them.

"Get ready," Norma said.

"You don't know anything about it!" Jess' voice was high, panicky. "You don't know what he's promised me. I have to get out of here. Just go on back. Tell them you couldn't find me."

"You know that's not going to happen, Jess," Leo said. "You've known me for a long time now – have you ever known me to back down?"

"Now," Norma said, and several things happened at once. A yellow circle of light fell over the cart, and Peter heard a scuffling and frightened noises as the low men backed away from it. He reached out with his mind and clamped down on those red-black, sick looking rays as hard as he could. He felt them squeezing through his mental grip like oiled rubber and heard cries of pain from the low men, but he didn't let up; he just squeezed harder. And then something bumped the cart, making him lose concentration, and the rays slipped out of his mind's grasp.

***

Leo saw the low men beginning to crumple; one of them went so far as to fall to its knees, holding onto its head with both hands and moaning in pain. He continued to advance on the cart, holding his lantern high. Jess began to back away from him, looking frightened despite his threats. After only a couple of steps, though, he tripped and began to fall backwards. He flailed his arms and nearly regained his balance, but gravity won out and he fell, banging his shoulder on the cart as he went down.

Leo was pleased at first, in a savage sort of way, to see him fall. But then his triumph turned to worry as the low men began to recoup themselves, rising back to their feet, snarling.

***

"Again," Norma said. "Come on, Peter! You can't stop now!"

Peter's head was aching – losing the rays like that had caused some kind of rebound that bounced around the confines of his mind, leaving it feeling oddly bruised on the inside – but he gathered himself for another try. The rays kept slipping just out of his grasp, or disappearing when he was about to grab them.

"Come on," Norma said. "Don't be such a big baby! Do it!"

At last he managed to grab on to one. He seized it in a viselike grip and began to bear down with all the mental strength he had. He felt it trying to slide out of his grasp and bore down harder.

When it gave, it was with a small snap that was almost anticlimactic. He heard a thump from somewhere near the cart.

"Again," Norma said. "Keep going."

Peter sucked in a breath, forcing his eyes to stay open (his head was really hurting now) and reached out for the next ray.

***

Leo could hardly believe his eyes. One by one, the low men were falling to the ground. He didn't even have to lay a hand on them – they just collapsed. He wasn't sure if they were dead or not. He didn't really care, as long as they were out of the picture.

He circled around the cart to where Jess had fallen. He saw what he'd tripped on and his eyes widened; he had to clap his hand over his mouth to keep from laughing hysterically. It was a tree branch. A goodish-sized one, about as thick as his own wrist. The very branch Mother Abigail had been holding when he'd rescued her all those years ago.

All but one of the low men were down now. Jess was trying to rise, but he'd twisted his knee or something in his fall and it didn't want to support his weight. His eyes were wide and wild as he watched Leo approaching him.

Leo ignored him, coming around the side of the cart to find Peter lying in it. Bending, he made quick work of the ropes around Peter's wrists and ankles. Peter was still zoned out, although the last of the low men were down. He gave him a little shake to bring him back into the world. "Hey," he said when Peter's eyes cleared and focused on him.

Peter shook his head briskly a couple of times. "Leo?" he said. "Norma said someone was coming to help me."

"Norma was right," Leo said with a grin. "Looks like you did most of the work yourself, though." He helped Peter out of the cart. "Ready to head home, kiddo?"

"Yes, please," Peter said in a tone of immense relief.

"Hey," Jess said. "Hey, wait. You can't leave me here."

"Can't I?" Leo said. "Seems you were going to leave Peter here somewhere a lot worse."

"You can't – I'll die here," Jess said. "I'll starve."

Leo saw that Peter had begun to look uncomfortable under the weight of Jess' pleas. "Oh, I think someone will be along to deal with you soon enough," he said. "I'm not sure he'll be too happy with you, though." He turned away. "Come on, Peter." He took Peter's hand, and together they began to walk back toward the portal.

"Come back!" Jess said. "Peter, I'm your father! You have to come back and help me!"

Leo felt Peter's hand go slack in his, but he continued to hold on. "Just keep walking," he said to him in a low tone.

Jess continued to shout at them to come back until they were halfway to the portal. Then there was a sudden crack, like thunder, behind them. Leo and Peter turned around to see what looked like a tornado tearing across the plain, bearing down on Jess. Jess' cries grew higher-pitched and more desperate. The tornado was throwing off oily black sparks like the streaks Peter had seen in the low men's rays.

"Come back!" Jess cried one last time, and then the tornado reached him. Just like that, he and the tornado both vanished, and the plain was silent and featureless again, except for the cart and the quiescent bodies of the low men.

"Come on, Peter," Leo said. "We've got to get you back to your mom and dad."

Peter came along in silence for a while. Then he asked, "Do you think he's dead?"

Leo thought about it for a minute. "No," he said finally. "I think the Crimson King is unkinder than that."

"Why did that – Crimson guy – want me, anyway?"

Leo took his time replying, looking for the right words. "That thing you do with the Beam," he said, "the way you smooth it out, make it stronger - "

"Fixing, I call it," Peter said. "I can do it for people, too. A little."

"That's a good word for it," Leo said. "But every tool like that – everything that can be used to fix something – it can be used to break things apart, too. Like a hammer. One side of it bangs nails in and helps you build something, but the other side pulls them apart and helps you tear things down."

"That's sort of what I did to the low men," Peter said. "It was terrible. I hated it."

Leo nodded and gave his hand a little squeeze. "No one who was born to fix things likes breaking them," he said. "But that's what the Crimson King wants you for. He can use people with powers like yours to help him break up the Beam and give himself more power. But he probably wants you even more than he wants most people who he can use as Breakers, because you're doing something even worse, from his point of view: you're undoing all his hard work, every time you Fix the Beam."

"But I can never Fix all of it," Peter said. "Some of the broken parts always get away from me."

"Who ever said you had to do it all on your own?" Leo said. "Just because you can't do the whole of a job by yourself is no reason not to do it."

Peter looked up at him, wide-eyed. "Can you Fix it?" he asked.

Leo shook his head. "That's not something I can do, no," he said. "But that doesn't mean you're the only one, either."

They'd reached the portal. Peter stopped just outside it to smile up at Leo. "Thanks for, uh, for saving me," he said.

Leo grinned and ruffled his hair. "Anytime."

Chapter Text

July 1, 1990

Other Worlds Than These

Jess woke up in his bed at the Lighthouse Inn, tangled in the blankets, covered in sweat. He lay there for a moment, catching his breath, before it struck him that this was a very unexpected place to be. Was it all a dream? he thought. It was several minutes before he dared to get out of bed and check.

Everything at the Inn looked just as he remembered it – his toothbrush sat at the side of the sink, yesterday's clothes kicked to the foot of the bed. He opened his room door and found the paper waiting outside for him as it always had. He felt hope spring up like a brushfire in his chest.

The date on the paper was July 1, 1990. The front page news said nothing at all about a flu epidemic – just something about the Governor vetoing some piece of legislation or other. The Governor's name was Graves, though, and she seemed to be a woman, both facts Jess was fairly sure he would have remembered.

Jess thought he might explode with joy. He didn't know why or how, but the Crimson King had made good on his promise even though Jess hadn't held up his end of the bargain. Yanking on his clothes, he rushed out of his room and down to the street to find Portland just as he remembered it, before the flu. Even his favorite coffeeshop was there. He found himself shaking the waitress's hand enthusiastically when she gave him his coffee, much to her consternation. He couldn't make himself sit still long enough to drink it, though – he had to rush out again, leaving his half-drunk coffee on the counter, to watch the cars go down the street and the people walking on the sidewalk. He stood there, marveling, taking it all in.

A hand on his shoulder made him jump. "Brave new world, isn't it?" The voice was soft and grating, as if it was produced by vocal cords that weren't quite human. He knew before he turned that it was one of the low men standing next to him.

"It's incredible," he said. "But why - "

"He always has a pretty good idea of just rewards," the low man said. "In this case, he thought your best reward was just to pick you up – just as you were, germs and all – and drop you down here."

Germs and all...Jess backed away from the low man, shaking his head. "I'm immune," he whispered.

"Immune doesn't mean sterile," the low man said, and laughed.

Jess spun on his heel and raced back to the Lighthouse Inn. He stabbed at the elevator button impatiently until the doors opened, then jittered and tapped his feet until it got to his floor.

He was standing at the door to his room, pulling his key out of his pocket, when he heard a sound from down the hall, where an open door and a Housekeeping cart stood. It sounded like a sneeze.