LUTHER TILLMAN LOADED the boy’s luggage, Cornell’s bag, and the two German shepherds into the back of the Suburban. As he closed the tailgate, he heard the first loud noise from the distant residence, maybe like a door being broken down. After a minute or so came the first and second gunshots.

He stood for a moment, staring at the house, wanting to go to Jane’s side.

In the world as it had been when he’d grown up, a man went to a woman’s aid, always and without excuse. Rebecca, his wife, lost now to a controlling nanoimplant, had called him chivalrous, and he had always liked to hear her say it.

But it wasn’t chivalry, not that formal and flowery and self-aware code of knightly behavior from times medieval. It was simpler than that. There was wrong; there was right. You knew in your blood and bones which was which. If you knew what was right but you didn’t try to do what was right regardless of the risk, then you weren’t just a bad man, you weren’t even any kind of man at all.

The world in which he’d grown up had faded around him as he lived; it was now as ancient in its way as that of the pharaohs buried in the Egyptian pyramids. This darker reality had replaced it. He didn’t want this world. He wanted the one before it, the one of his youth, a mere twenty or twenty-five years ago, but if he could not turn back time, he could at least live by the values of that lost place.

While the right thing was usually the hardest thing to do, sometimes it seemed the easiest, like now, when the right thing was to avoid abandoning the urgent task at hand, get Travis and Cornell into the Suburban, and only then drive over to the house and pick up Jane. He’d been an officer of the law, four times elected county sheriff, and although he’d been through some hair-raising moments on the job, Jane had undoubtedly fought her way out of more tight spots than he had. If he’d ever known anyone, woman or man, who didn’t need to have a knight ride to the rescue, it was Jane Hawk.

Travis and Cornell were waiting in the vestibule, and when he called to them, they stepped outside.

The boy ran to the black Suburban and climbed in through the port side. Travis sat on the floor, not on the backseat, below window level, and Luther closed the door.

Cornell shambled after Travis, not bothering to make certain that his library for the end of the world was locked behind him. He had said he didn’t expect ever to return: I don’t want to live half dead anymore, please and thank you. All alive or all dead—either way is better. Now he got in the back starboard door.

Careful not to touch Cornell, Luther slipped doctored zip-ties around his wrists and his ankles, so he might pass for a prisoner.

As Luther opened the driver’s door, he heard a truck engine on the highway, rapidly accelerating and drawing nearer. He looked out there and saw the behemoth swing off the blacktop, roar across the pea-gravel landscape, shred through specimen cacti, plow through the front porch, and slam into the house.

20

HOURS OF LIGHT REMAIN, but the thunderheads allow nothing more than an enduring dusk except when lightning alchemizes the falling rain into torrents of molten silver. The wet highway flickers as if fitfully lit from underneath, and Egon Gottfrey passes vehicles with steamed windows further blurred by streaming rain, the ill-defined figures within like condemned spirits who have elected to forgo a downbound train in favor of taking the road to damnation.

Outbound from Beaumont in the Rhino GX, he is approaching Houston, in which he has no interest anymore. Beaumont, Houston, Killeen—every one is a false lead, nothing more than the Unknown Playwright’s version of a wild-goose chase. Although Ancel and Clare Hawk borrowed the Longrins’ Mercury Mountaineer, they never drove it as far as Killeen, and they never boarded a bus to anywhere.

Earlier, Gottfrey had switched on the radio, which happened to be tuned to an NPR program featuring an interview with Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and hot-tub philosopher invented by the Unknown Playwright to spice this world with humor. Musk says, among other curious things, that there is only a one in a billion chance that this world is base reality; he says it’s almost certainly true that we exist in a computer simulation. If Musk were a real person, as Gottfrey is, instead of a character in this cosmic drama, and if Musk studied radical philosophical nihilism, he’d know, as Gottfrey knows beyond doubt, that there is no computer simulation because the existence of computers, like the existence of everything else, can’t be proved. They are imaginary magical devices.

It’s no coincidence that Gottfrey was inspired to turn on the radio, that it was tuned to an NPR station, and that the interview with Musk was under way; the U.P. wants to poke a little fun at him and remind him that all his efforts on the computer, which have led to the discovery of Ancel and Clare’s whereabouts, were really the work of the U.P., who will be responsible for his triumph.

Ahead repeated lightning shapes the city out of the gloom, the buildings shivering in the storm flares, light running liquidly along the superstructure of a bridge. An ominous red beacon swivels high atop what might be a radio-station transmission tower, like some lighthouse marking the place where the world finally will end.

The Unknown Playwright is investing the scene with so much dramatic weather that Gottfrey is certain that the climax of this episode will occur soon.

In Houston, he turns north on Interstate 45, the midafternoon traffic crawling through the drumming downpour, so thick that he can no longer exceed the speed limit. He is not troubled by the delay.

Conroe is only forty miles away, a thriving city of a little over eighty thousand, on the southern edge of Sam Houston National Forest. In Conroe, Jane Hawk’s in-laws have taken refuge, certain that their sanctuary cannot be discovered.

1

THE LITTLE HOUSE GROANED IN DISTRESS, as if awakening from a long sleep and realizing how very old it was, how arthritic its joints, how brittle its bones. When Jane tried to leave, the back door stuck as though swollen and warped, but the problem was that the entire rear wall of the structure had tweaked. In the now misaligned frame, the encased door was wedged tight.

She holstered her pistol and gripped the knob with both hands and put everything she had into a hard sustained pull, but the door wouldn’t budge.

The four-pane window in the top half wasn’t big enough to get through, even if she broke out the muntins along with the remaining glass.

The bigger window above the sink was painted shut, with thicker muntins. She would need too long to clear it and clamber out.

She tried the door again, wrenching it from side to side even as she pulled on it.

Although the living room ceiling had collapsed onto the truck, the driver remained in control. Insanely, he pumped the accelerator, as if he foolishly believed that the front wheels could be forced out of the spaces between the floor joists into which they had crashed. The powerful engine screamed. The floor of the house shuddered, creaked, and cracked as the wheels strove to force the vehicle forward.

With the sleeve of her sport coat, Jane wiped sweat off her brow, out of her salt-stung eyes. She was trained, conditioned, born to deal with lethal threats, to outthink and outmaneuver whatever villainous sonofabitch—or bitch—wanted to take her down. But this was chaos, bedlam wrought by a self-destructive, unpredictable lunatic. Reason and wit wouldn’t necessarily carry the day. Anyway, the immediate enemy was the house; guns and hand-to-hand combat skills were of no use against an inanimate adversary.

She considered returning to the living room, trying to pop the driver through the windshield. However, the ceiling and the attic structure had crashed down on him, burying the truck, and she wasn’t likely to have a clear shot. Besides, things were continuing to come apart, especially toward the front of the house, and returning there might be the death of her.