there last evening. Backed up in traffic.”
“Be glad you weren’t there this morning. Mind if I get in with you? Sit down for a minute? I’m pooped, and Jenny will have gone back to bed. I don’t want to wake her up, especially with bad news.”
“Sure.”
Gus got in the car. “This is bad, my friend.”
“It sucks,” Marty agreed. It was what he’d said to Felicia last night. “Just got to grin and bear it, I guess.”
“I’m not grinning,” Gus said.
“Planning to take the day off?”
Gus raised his hands and brought them down on the lunchbox in his lap. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll make some calls, see if someone can pick me up, but I’m not hopeful.”
“If you do take the day, don’t plan to spend it watching Netflix or YouTube videos. Internet’s down again, and I’ve got a feeling it might be for good this time.”
“I’m assuming you know about California,” Gus said.
“I didn’t turn on the TV this morning. Slept in a bit.” He paused. “Didn’t want to watch it anyway, to tell you the truth. Is there something new?”
“Yeah. The rest of it went.” He reconsidered. “Well . . . they’re saying twenty per cent of northern California is still hanging in there, which means probably ten, but the food-producing regions are gone.”
“That’s terrible.” It was, of course, but instead of horror and terror and grief, all Marty felt was a kind of benumbed dismay.
“You could say that,” Gus agreed. “Especially with the Midwest turning to charcoal and the southern half of Florida now basically swampland fit only for alligators. I hope you’ve got a lot of food in your pantry and freezer, because now all the major food-producing regions of this country are gone. The same with Europe. It’s already famine-time in Asia. Millions dead there. Bubonic plague, I’m hearing.”
They sat in Marty’s driveway, watching more people walking back from downtown, many dressed in suits and ties. A woman in a pretty pink suit was trudging along in sneakers, carrying her heels in one hand. Marty thought her name was Andrea something, lived a street or two over. Hadn’t Felicia told him she worked at Midwest Trust?
“And the bees,” Gus continued. “They were in trouble even ten years ago, but now they’re completely gone, except for a few hives down in South America. No more honey, honey. And without them to pollinate whatever crops might be left . . .”
“Excuse me,” Marty said. He got out of the car and trotted to catch up with the woman in the pink suit. “Andrea? Are you Andrea?”
She turned warily, lifting her shoes as if she might have to use one of the heels to ward him off. Marty understood; there were plenty of loosely wrapped people around these days. He stopped five feet away. “I’m Felicia Anderson’s husband.” Ex, actually, but husband sounded less potentially dangerous. “I think you and Fel know each other.”
“We do. I was on the Neighborhood Watch Committee with her. What can I do for you, Mr. Anderson? I’ve had a long walk and my car’s stuck in what appears to be a terminal traffic jam downtown. As for the bank, it’s . . . leaning.”
“Leaning,” Marty repeated. In his mind he saw an image of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. With Chuck Krantz’s retirement photo on top.
“It’s on the edge of the sinkhole and although it hasn’t fallen in, it looks very unsafe to me. Sure to be condemned. I suppose that’s the end of my job, at least in the downtown branch, but I don’t really care. I just want to go home and put my feet up.”
“I was curious about the billboard on the bank building. Have you seen it?”
“How could I miss it?” she asked. “I work there, after all. I’ve also seen the graffiti, which is everywhere—we love you Chuck, Chuck lives, Chuck forever—and the ads on TV.”
“Really?” Marty thought of what he’d seen on Netflix last night, just before it went away. At the time he’d dismissed it as a particularly annoying pop-up ad.
“Well, the local stations, anyway. Maybe it’s different on cable, but we don’t get that anymore. Not since July.”
“Us, either.” Now that he had begun the fiction that he was still part of an us, it seemed best to carry on with it. “Just channel 8 and channel 10.”
Andrea nodded. “No more ads for cars or Eliquis or Bob’s Discount Furniture. Just Charles Krantz, thirty-nine great years, thanks, Chuck. A full minute of that, then