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Breakfast. He chose a sunny patch of grass where he could see the north end of town. The town was waking up, but in a slow, lazy way. A few more cars were prowling the streets. More shops had opened their doors. The distant plume of smoke continued to rise, but it was unhurried and unchanged.
    Clifford crumpled the paper candy bar wrapper and stuffed it into his shirt pocket. He took the cardboard liner down to the creek and let it float away. It tumbled over a rock and capsized. It was the Titanic in A Night to Remember . The unsinkable ship.
    He climbed the embankment and looked again at Two Rivers—the town where nothing much ever happened.
    The unsinkable town.
    He checked his watch. Twenty after eleven. He rode home, wondering whether his mother was up and had found the note; she might be worried, he thought. He dropped the bike in the driveway and hurried inside.
    But she was only just awake, tangle-haired in her pink bathrobe and fumbling over the coffee maker.
    “Damn thing doesn’t work,” she said. “Oh, hello, Cliffy.”

    Between breakfast and lunch, Dex Graham formulated the same idea as Clifford Stockton: he would go out and survey the town.
    He left Evelyn in the kitchen and promised he’d be back by noon.
    He drove west on Beacon to his own apartment, one bedroom in a thirty-year-old building, sparsely furnished. He owned a sofa bed, a fourteen-inch TV set, and a desk where last week’s history papers waited to be graded. Yesterday’s breakfast dishes were stacked in the drainer. It was a collation of postponed chores, not a home. He checked to see whether his lights were working. They weren’t. So the problem wasn’t confined to Evelyn’s house or street—it wasn’t only local. Somehow, he had doubted that it would be.
    He picked up the phone, thought about calling somebody from the school—but his phone was as dead as Evelyn’s had been.
    Back to reconnaissance, he thought. He locked the door behind him.
    He drove downtown. The streets were still too empty, the town sluggish for a Saturday morning, but at least a few people were moving around. He supposed the blackout had kept a lot of people home. The big stores were closed by the power outage, but some of the smaller businesses had managed to open—Tilson’s Grocery was open, illuminated by daylight through the broad glass front windows and a couple of battery-powered lanterns in the dim corner where the freezer was. Dex stopped to pick up some groceries. Evelyn had asked for canned goods, anything nonperishable, and he thought that was a good idea; there was no way to predict how long this crisis might last or what its nature might turn out to be.
    He filled a handbasket with canned vegetables and was about to pick up a bottle of distilled water when a man shoved in front of him and took two jugs. “Hey,” Dex said.
    The stranger was a big man in a hunting jacket and a John Deere cap. He gave Dex a blank look and took the bottled water to the checkout counter, where he added it to a formidable stack of canned goods—the same sort of thing Dex had come for, but more of it.
    The girl behind the counter was Meg Tilson, who had graduated from Dex’s history class last year. She said, “Are you sure you want all this?”
    The man was sweating and a little breathless. “All of it. How much?”
    The register was down, of course, so Meg began to total everything on a pocket calculator. Dex lined up behind the man. “You seem to be in a hurry.” Another blank look. The man was dazed, Dex thought. He persisted: “So you know something we don’t know?”
    The man in the John Deere cap turned away as if the question frightened him, but then seemed to relent: “Shit,” he said, “I’m sorry if I got in your way. I’m just . . .”
    “Stocking up?”
    “You bet.”
    “Any particular reason?”
    “A hundred seventy-six eighty,” Meg announced. “At least I think so.”
    The man pulled two hundred-dollar bills out of his pocket