The Corolla started on the second try, which was one better than average, and Noah sat there with both hands on the wheel and let it idle a while because he didn't trust his legs to do the pedals yet.
The radio came on where he'd left it. There was a tone first, the long flat one they test on the first Wednesday of the month, except it didn't stop when it was supposed to. It ran about nine seconds too long.
Then a man's voice, reading.
"...the following message at the direction of federal authorities. This is not a test. This is not a test. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has advised, has advised that all residents of the listed counties shelter in place immediately. Do not attempt to travel by vehicle. Interstate 35 is closed in both directions. I-35 is closed in both directions. Repeat, do not attempt to travel by vehicle."
Paper moving. Somebody talking behind him, fast, not close enough to the mic to make out.
"Residents should move to an interior room on the lowest floor of the structure, away from windows and away from exterior doors. Do not go outside to observe. Do not, uh. Sorry. Do not go outside to observe. If you are currently outdoors, seek shelter in the nearest building. Do not remain in open ground. Parking lots, fields, athletic complexes, uh, golf courses."
The voice stopped for four seconds.
Four seconds is a long time on the radio. Four seconds is the longest thing that had happened to Noah all night, and he'd been buried in a cemetery under four hundred and eleven people about ninety minutes ago.
"Emergency services in the metro area are currently at capacity. Do not call 911 unless." A breath. "Unless."
More paper.
"I don't have the rest of it," the man said. "I'm sorry. That's the whole page. That's everything they gave me."
Somebody behind him said something.
"Yeah," the man said, not to the microphone, and then to the microphone: "If you got people with you, keep them with you."
Then the station went to a commercial for a mattress sale. Twelve months, no interest.
Noah put the car in drive.
Delaney was full of cars going the other way and most of them were going fast, and one was a minivan with a mattress on the roof and nobody holding it. People were standing out on their lawns in pajamas with their heads back, all of them lit up blue from underneath by the phones in their hands. A guy on the corner of Fifth was watering his grass. Noah watched him in the mirror until the road turned.
The gas station on Fifth had power. It was the only thing for six blocks that did, sitting there under its canopy glowing like a fish tank, every fluorescent going, the pumps lit, the cooler doors lit, the whole thing so bright it hurt to look straight at.
He pulled in because he had a quarter tank and because it was lit.
The pump asked him to see the attendant. The attendant was a kid about his age behind the counter, name tag TREVOR, and under the name in smaller letters it said ASK ME ABOUT REWARDS.
"Card only," Trevor said. "System's down for cash. I can't open the drawer."
"Okay."
"It's been like that since like nine forty."
"Okay," Noah said.
Trevor looked at him then. Actually looked. And his face did something.
Noah understood, sort of distantly, that he was standing in a gas station in one shoe. His funeral shirt was open on the left in four long slices and the whole left half of it had gone black and stiff. Grave dirt to the elbows. No skin on the outside of his right forearm. His face had been dragged across a headstone and hadn't been washed since.
"Man," Trevor said. "You okay? Were you in a wreck?"
"Yeah," Noah said, which was the easiest answer available and not really a lie.
"You want me to call somebody?"
"All circuits are busy."
"Yeah," Trevor said. "Yeah, I tried too."
He put the bathroom key on the counter. It was zip tied to a paint stirrer.
*****
The bathroom had two fluorescent tubes and one of them had been dying so long the flicker had settled into a rhythm you could keep time to.
Noah put both hands on the sink and looked up.
He didn't recognize the face for about a second and a half. That happens. There's a gap where the mirror's just showing you a stranger having a much worse night than you are, and then the gap closes and it's you, and it was him, and his mouth came open a little.
He washed his hands first because they were the worst of it. The water came off him brown, then pink, then brown again. He got the grave dirt out from under his nails with the corner of a paper towel and it took a long time and he did all of them, every nail, because it was a thing he could finish.
Then he pulled his shirt up.
Four pale seams across his ribs where the skin had opened at ten o'clock and closed by four minutes after. Not scabs. Not stitches. Seams, smooth, a little shiny, already going soft at the edges the way something fades after twenty years.
He pressed on them. Didn't hurt. Nothing hurt that should've.
"Okay," he said to the mirror.
That's when he saw his hair.
He leaned in. Got close enough that his breath fogged a circle on the glass and he had to wipe it with his thumb.
Above his left ear, in with all the black, there were six white hairs.
Not gray. People go gray. Gray's a color that says you're forty three and you have a mortgage. These were white the way paper is white, and they weren't dark at the ends either. White the whole length. Root to tip, every one of them.
He counted them. Then he wiped the mirror again and counted a second time, slower, moving them with his finger.
Six.
[HUMAN: 99.4%]
The number sat there in the corner of everything where it had been sitting for six hours.
A hundred minus six tenths.
Six.
Noah stood in a gas station bathroom with his shirt in his teeth and did arithmetic he didn't want the answer to.
He took hold of one of them, low, right at the scalp, and pulled it out. It hurt exactly as much as pulling out a hair hurts, which is a very small amount for a very short time, and it came free and lay across his fingertip, white from one end to the other.
The number didn't move.
He looked at it a while. Then he folded it into a square of paper towel and put it in his front pocket, and he couldn't have told anybody why, and nobody ever asked him.
His mother used to cut his hair in the kitchen. Every six weeks, a stool and a bath towel and the clippers she bought in 2011 that had one working guard, and Noah would sit there while she went around him complaining, tilting his head with two fingers on his jaw the way you turn a jar.
She used to say he got her hair. Said it every single time, and she said it like it was money in the bank. You got my hair, mijo. Thick. Lucky. Your dad was gone on top at thirty.
Noah put both hands on either side of the sink and stood there with his head down and the fluorescent going on and off over him, and he breathed, and the breath came apart in the middle twice before it worked.
"Hey," he said.
"Yeah."
"Did you see that."
"I counted six too."
"Does it grow back."
A pause. Not a stalling pause. The other kind.
"I don't know," Ellery said. "I wanna tell you yes."
"Don't."
"Okay."
*****
Outside, the canopy lights were still going and the air had gone cold in a way that was too fast for August.
Noah stood by the Corolla with the pump handle in his hand and the numbers rolling and he wasn't thinking about anything at all, and that's when he noticed it'd been on the whole time.
The buried things. On since the cemetery. He just hadn't been anywhere that had any.
Now he was standing on a concrete apron on Fifth Street and he let himself actually look at it, and under the asphalt there was nothing, no bodies, just pipe and fill and a tank of gasoline, and he could feel the shape of all of it like furniture in a dark room.
Then he turned his head north, toward the houses.
There were people in them, and people aren't buried things, and the sense slid off them the way your hand slides off glass. That was the first mercy he'd been given all night. He couldn't feel the living.
He could feel the ones on Cypress.
Four of them, close together, up on the surface, not under anything. New. The word the sense used for them, if it used words, was the same word it had used for his mother, and it hadn't used that word for one living person on that entire street.
He went very still.
While he stood there it went from four to seven.
"No," Noah said.
Seven to nine. Then a jump, all at once, from nine to something in the twenties, two streets over, near the school.
He let go of the pump handle. It clicked and stopped and the numbers froze at eleven dollars and change.
He could feel Delaney. He could feel the block where he'd watched a guy water his lawn nine minutes ago.
"How far does this go," he said.
"I don't know."
"How far does it go."
"Kid." Ellery's voice had gone very quiet and very tired. "I don't know. I'm gonna say that a lot. I'd rather say it than lie to you."
Noah looked at the glowing box of the gas station with its one employee inside it, standing behind the counter under all that light where anything could see him from a quarter mile out, restocking the little rack of phone chargers because the system was down and there was nothing else to do.
He counted Cypress again. It'd gone up.
Then he put the nozzle back and walked across the lot and pulled the door open, and the bell did the two note thing that bells on gas station doors do, cheerful, completely unaware.
"Hey," Noah said. "Trevor."
Trevor looked up with a phone charger in each hand.
"Get in the car."
"What?"
"Get in the car," Noah said. "I know where everybody is."