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"No, you can't have time to think about it," said the woman on the box. "I meant it when I said we have to leave right now. Maybe we can swing by your place to pack up some clothes and whatever medications you're on—you're on a few, right?—and to tell the parent or grandparent you live with that you'll be back late next week. But it has to be real quick, in and out."

"I can't even tell my dad where I'm going?"

"You'll tell him that a friend needs you to help with a job that pays a bundle, that it's being done on behalf of a celebrity and has to be kept quiet so the press doesn't sniff it out. And that it's nothing illegal. That's, like, ninety percent true. Or eighty percent. It's mostly true."

"Is your employer a celebrity?"

"He's not a movie star or anything, if you're trying to guess who he is. But your dad shouldn't question it." She waved a hand in the vague direction of Los Angeles. "Out there, you've probably got a hundred professional fixer types doing jobs like this as we speak."

"Then go find one of them. If you think I'm such a loser, what makes you think I can even get us there?"

"All right, enough of that." She stood and put on her lime-green sunglasses. "You don't even have your heart in it anymore. Come on, help me load the box. It's really heavy. We've been sitting out here too long, and people are starting to stare."

In the coming days, many words would be spent speculating as to why Abbott had agreed to the trip. Was it the money? Or did he genuinely want to help this woman he'd never met? The truth was, not even Abbott himself knew. Maybe it was just that by the time she was lugging the box toward the rear of the Navigator, it'd have simply been too awkward to stop her.

MALORT

Considering he was 275 pounds, bald, covered in tattoos, and wearing mirrored sunglasses, Malort could have wound up with many nicknames. But a drunken bet in a Milwaukee dive bar decades earlier had resulted in a bicep tattoo of a Jeppson's Malört bottle, the Chicago-area liquor so infamously bitter that the label featured a lengthy paragraph apologizing for the taste. His friends had all agreed the tattoo and nickname fit him, but never dared to explain their rationale in his presence. He did have to drop the little dots above the o in recent years, as nobody knew how to add those in text messages.

The man they called Malort rolled up to find that the Apple Valley Fire Department had apparently arrived just in time to turn the shack in the desert from a smoldering ruin into a wet smoldering ruin. Only two and a half walls of the flimsy structure were still upright, exposing the charred interior like a diorama. It told a fairly simple story of a loner hiding from and/or rooting for the apocalypse. From where he sat, there was no sign of the black box, and he had a sinking feeling it was long gone.

He stepped out of his metallic red Buick Grand National and approached a young man whose build and face made him look like a kid who'd dressed up in his dad's helmet and turnout coat. He was hosing down the aftermath to cool the embers and looked like he would have a stroke if two thoughts appeared in his brain simultaneously. He noticed Malort, and a beam of curiosity pierced his haze.

"This your property?" asked the kid.

It was a dumb question, thought Malort. The type of guy who sets up in a wilderness survival shack probably doesn't get around in a sparkly Buick that surely lists at least one pimp in its CARFAX report. He took the dumbness of the question as a good sign. Instead of answering, Malort pulled out his phone and pointed the camera at the scene, acting like he had an important job to do. Generally, if you can project enough confidence and purpose, all the uncertain nerds of the world will just part like the Red Sea.

He stepped toward the smoldering structure with his phone and, without looking at the kid, grumbled, "Is there propane?"

"There was. It already popped; that's what blew out the sides here. The ruptured tank is on the floor. There's some kind of apparatus attached. Maybe a booby trap, or maybe they were trying to deep-fry a turkey? You ever seen one of those go wrong? Nightmare. So, uh, are you a friend? One of the neighbors?"

Malort peered into the half-standing structure from afar, trying to stay out of the hose splatter. The other firefighters hadn't seemed to register his presence, most of them distracted by the task of spraying down the landscape to keep stray sparks from triggering a brush fire.

"The strangest thing just happened," rumbled Malort. "You know the big house over the hill there, behind the fence with all the barbed wire? The crazy bastard who lived there owns all this, it's all his property. So, I was chasing an intruder through that house, then they went round a corner and vanished into thin air. I looked all around, saw neither hide nor hair of 'em. A few minutes later, I looked out the window and noticed the smoke over here."