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where did they go? More than a dozen dead cars sit up there on the causeway like gulls on a wire strung between here and home.
    Davy noses his Wrangler up the grade to the row of barrels blocking the ON ramp and gets out, thinking to walk around the markers and find somebody to tell him what came down out there, but they’re all busy, frantic with it, whatever it is.
    He shouts, to everybody in general. “What’s going on?”
    An angry voice he can’t source shouts back, “Don’t know. Nobody does.”
    Cleverly, Davy rolls a barrel aside, jiggling it until there’s a gap big enough to slip through. He needs to stand face to face with somebody who does. A state trooper intercepts him. “Back off. Nobody on the causeway past this point.”
    He presses forward. “I live over there!”
    â€œSo do a lot of folks, Mister.” Davy thinks he said, “Or they did.”
    â€œWhat happened, what the fuck happened?”
    â€œToo soon to tell.”
    â€œBut my…” whole life is over there.
    â€œNo civilians allowed.”
    â€œI have to see my…”
    â€œYou have to go.”
    The trooper doesn’t exactly aim his weapon at Davy, just nudges him back with it, nosing the barrel higher and higher, stampeding Davy toward the crowd crammed behind the police tape. He can either scramble up the bank and join the gawkers or get back in his car, take off the brakes and roll backward down the ramp and go back the way he came, aware as he does so that there are places he will have to ford and places where he may get stuck in the shifting sand.
    Back. No way is he going back.
    Davy fake-leaves the ramp, moon-walking backward until the trooper is satisfied and turns away. At this point, it seems important to study uniforms, find somebody he knows. “Hey, Jack,” he shouts. They’ve known each other since first grade. “Jack Stankey.”
    The Poyntertown cop turns. “Yo.”
    â€œWhat the fuck happened?”
    â€œI’m not authorized to say.” Exact same speech the MPs back at the Bartlett Circle recited. Jack’s face is empty, a surface that was just wiped clean.
    Someone shouts, “He doesn’t fucking know!”
    â€œNobody knows!”
    Davy made it through the long morning on the belief that whatever happened was happening somewhere else; he’s made it this far on the strength of a lie buzzing like a mantra inside of his head, she’s fine, nothing is wrong, but with the sun high and the causeway deserted and the unknown at work on Kraven island, with no way to find out what’s going on out there and no access, everything is wrong. “What?” he cries. “What!”
    A high, clear voice knifes through the confusion, cutting deep. “They’re all gone.”
    Desperate to source it, Davy whirls. “What?”
    â€œGone,” she cries.
    He looks here, there. “What!”
    â€œThey all vanished. Every mortal soul on Kraven is gone!”

 
    4
    Merrill Poulnot
    The first day
    â€¦ This.
    This what? What! In the void Father roars, “This is outrageous,” and for a second I’m seventeen again and living at home, trapped on that runaway express train to despair.
    This nightmare! I grope for Davy, but my hand closes on a foreign body and I snap awake. For a strangled second, Delroy Root grabs hold and we hug, but our bodies know better and we recoil— nothing personal, just, ewww : not-Davy.
    Delroy, grieving and baffled: not-Ada. Blinded by the glare, we lock hands and cling.
    Blink.
    Poleaxed, he and I let go. I lunge here, there in the sudden, staggering heat, blinded by sun glinting off the dead white buildings that surround us like slabs of porcelain waiting to be toppled.
    There are at least a hundred of us here. One second we were safe in our houses, submerged in the last sleep before the alarm or just starting the day— steam on the bathroom