Today is a great day. The sun is shining, and my job is amazing. Hannah sighed. This wasn’t working. At least she had dinner with Grace to look forward to tonight.

She looked up at her team’s mission statement, proudly emblazoned beside a cartoon panda. The PandaWeb Customer Happiness Team aspires to make our customers’ lives easier. Someone should’ve been fired for coming up with the name, ‘Customer Happiness Team.’

“That’s stupid,” the caller spat. “Why can’t you just give me their phone numbers?”

Hannah sighed—in her mind, at least. She was careful not to let her frustration show through her voice. Most of her customers were angry and rude if they didn’t get what they wanted, and this guy was no different. She put on her best, well-practiced, pleasant support voice.

“PandaWeb does indeed share others’ personal information if they consent to it. Unfortunately, these individuals didn’t consent, so we can’t share their details. Perhaps you could expand your search to a wider target audience?

“Perhaps you could just do your jobs and be useful for once!” he shot back, before hanging up on her. Mercifully. She understood his frustration, but she simply couldn’t help him.

PandaWeb’s AI could compose music, hold conversations, and even create your sales strategy. It could tell you—generally—who your likely customer group would be, even though the system knew exactly who they were. But PandaWeb would never give away personal information. Sure, it was unethical, but bad press was worse. Not to mention the lawsuits.

This was vastly different from where Hannah thought she’d be in her career. She’d graduated with her psych degree two years ago but struggled to find the clinical work that she enjoyed, so she took this customer service job, just to pay the bills. Grace, her oldest friend in the world, teased her about it mercilessly. But Hannah stayed, even though some days it felt like she spent her whole life on the phone with angry people. It was a petri dish of human dysfunction, but it was right there for her to examine, a real-life experiment. Well, that was the story she told herself.

And on top of it all, Grace and Noah just got engaged. Hannah was thrilled at the news. She almost believed that one, too.

The next customer immediately appeared on her queue. A new user, with the ID ‘nobodyhome’. Well, at least he had a sense of humor. His account showed his name as Ryan—it was always important to use the customer’s name, after all. She connected the call and put on her best, happy-customer-service voice.

“Hello Ryan, and thank you for calling PandaWeb! My name is Hannah. How can I make your day great?” she asked.

The person on the other end laughed. “Wow, that’s quite the greeting! Congratulations, you’ve already made my day. Do they give you lots of free coffee or something?”

Hannah smiled—it was nice to finally talk to someone who wasn’t angry. “Oh, I’m just a naturally awesome person,” she retorted. If the Quality Team reviewed the recording of this, she’d get her wrist slapped for going off script. But her customer happiness stats were pretty good, despite the grumpy callers, so she wasn’t too worried. “So, how can I help you today?”

“I’ve kind of locked myself out of my account, and I need help getting back in.”

“Just ‘kind of’, huh? Sure, I can help you with that one.” This was an easy fix. After her last few calls, Hannah could use an easy one. “Did you try resetting your password online?”

“Yeah, so, uh… no. I couldn’t. I entered the wrong password too many times and it took away the option.”

“Really? How many times did you enter the wrong password?”

“Um… twelve…”

Hannah stifled a laugh. It was hard. Really hard. “And then it finally locked you out, huh? Can’t imagine why. You didn’t want to hit the ‘forgot password’ button before it locked you out entirely?” Quality would roast her for saying that. But come on, she had to. Some people just deserved it.

“I was sure I remembered it! I was so close…” Hannah could hear the grin in his voice. He was enjoying this, too. “Aren’t you supposed to be nice to me or something?”

“Okay,” Hannah put on her sweetest, most reassuring tone, “I’ll be nice. I can help you reset your password. Can you confirm your full name for me, please?”

“My name is Ryan Cooper.”

“Thanks, Ryan, it’s nice to meet you!”

“It’s nice to meet you too, Hannah, even though you’re being very mean to me,” Ryan teased her back. He remembered her name. Hannah was impressed. Callers don’t often bother to do that.

“And can you confirm your address for me, Ryan?”

“Are you sure you aren’t going to start stalking me?” came the response.

“Only if you’re cute…” Okay, Hannah mentally slapped herself for that one. She truly should not have said that. Quality was going to discipline her for sure. But it was surprisingly easy to get caught up bantering with this guy. She took a breath. Get back on script, she told herself.

“You’re in luck then!” Ryan replied. “I’m totally cute. And I’m not at all biased about it.” He gave her the address.

Hannah looked at Ryan’s account info. The address checked out. He was in Portland, just like her. And yes, his profile picture was there, and he was actually pretty good-looking. She was intrigued. He was unusually friendly, easy to chat with, and in the same city. It was a promising coincidence, but in the back of her mind, something also seemed a little off. She wasn’t a suspicious person, but this was awfully convenient.

He could be a contractor, hired to find holes in the company’s security. Hannah knew enough about human behavior to know that tricking people was always the easiest way to break into a company. And PandaWeb had some serious cutting-edge tech, which came with competitors very eager to get their hands on it. This guy was a super smooth talker. He could easily be some kind of social engineering security consultant.

But then, for all she knew, ‘Ryan’ could even be one of the company’s AI bots, software pretending to be human and probing for weaknesses in employees’ security training. He sounded real, but PandaWeb’s AI bots were sophisticated. Really sophisticated.

“We’re still connected, right?” Ryan’s voice came floating back into Hannah’s consciousness. “I didn’t scare you off, did I?”

Hannah laughed. Well, fine, even if he was a bot, at least she was going to enjoy the chat. And as long as she stuck to the script—mostly—then he wouldn’t be able to use her to get past the company’s security.

“I’m still here! Just confirming your address. And can you confirm your phone number for me, please?”

Ryan laughed again. He laughed easily, she noticed. “You want my number? Okay, now I definitely know you’re hitting on me.” But he still gave her the info, which matched his account.

Hannah sighed in mock exasperation. “You wish you were so lucky. I’ll text the number with a link to reset your password. Okay?”

“Sure, that works. But this isn’t fair. Aren’t you going to give me your phone number, too?”

“Sorry. Doesn’t work that way,” Hannah countered with a smile. “At least, not yet. Did you get the text?”

“Fair enough. But don’t think I’m giving up that easily.”

“Oh, you’re clearly persistent. I’m sure you’ll never give up. You did try to enter your password fifteen times…”

“Ouch! And it was only twelve.”

“Right. That’s much better. So, did you get the text?”

“Yup, just going through the link to reset my password… And we’re in! I’m going to write it down this time, so I don’t forget it.”

“Smart. Is there anything else I can help you with today?” Hannah didn’t want to end the conversation, but she did have a job to do and lots of angry customers waiting for her to brighten their day.

“Nope, you’ve been wonderful. But I’m sure I’ll think of something tomorrow that’ll absolutely require your help.”

Hannah smiled. Again. “I’m sure you will.”

When I was young, my neighbors buried their house. I had been in the house before it was buried, because Tim Fisher and I had the same bus stop and we were kind of friends. We never had the same teachers, but we sat in seats on the bus across the aisle from each other and walked home together most days. Sometimes, he shared cookies his mom made, decadent saltine crackers soaked in butter and salt with chocolate on top and toffee bits sprinkled in. My mom never allowed treats like that in our house. I’m salivating thinking of them now.

Some days before the burial we’d stop in at the house, where he had video games I wasn’t normally allowed to play and other snacks like sodas I couldn’t always drink. We didn’t go crazy. I never even stayed for long, maybe an hour, because that was all I could spare before my mom would be home too. Sometimes Tim would ask me if I couldn’t stay longer, or if I could come over on the weekend instead so we could have more time for games. Once, he wanted to go outside with me and play catch with his dog. I told him I was afraid of the dog running away.

“He won’t run away even though we don’t have a fence,” Tim had said. “He’s good like that.” But that wasn’t the real problem, and Tim knew it, and I knew he knew it, and I didn’t even have the guts to tell him that. The real thing was my dad’s office window faced their backyard, and he would see what I’d been doing before Mom got home. The real thing was my parents didn’t want me over there, even though nobody had ever actually said so. I just knew I couldn’t ask them. In any case, we stayed in his house in the living room, played a video game for a little bit and then I went home like I usually did. We never did play with the dog outside. I can’t even remember the dog’s name.

---

I don’t know what set the Fisher family apart when they first moved in. They arrived later than many in the neighborhood, sometime the previous winter, so Tim was the new boy in school halfway through the year. That’s never easy. Tim’s father didn’t have a strange job. It was something suit-and-tie as far as I could tell, similar to many of the breadwinners of the neighborhood. His mother worked too; she was a hairdresser. Yet my father didn’t invite Mr. Fisher to golf with his business friends when he could help it; my mother didn’t include Mrs. Fisher in her and our other neighbor friend Renée’s Friday wine nights. If I asked to have Tim over, the answer was almost always no, even when Renée’s daughters were allowed. There were small differences I know bothered everyone, though as a child I couldn’t see why they mattered, and I hope I don’t think they matter now. So it just must have been something that set them apart at first that I couldn’t see which made everything afterward so harsh.

---

The school year ended, summer passed, and the Fishers’ house abruptly disappeared one day from their lot. Renee was the one who noticed; my mother got a call while I was eating a piece of toast.

“What do you mean, look out from the garage?” my mother was saying into the phone. “Hold on, I’m on the old landline.”

She put down the wired phone and I heard the garage opening a moment later. When she returned, she accidentally knocked the phone off the counter in her haste to get back. She hauled it up by the wire. “Renée, I’ll be right over.”

My mother hurried my breakfast and slipped my jacket and backpack on. It was the first day of a new school year, but the mornings were already beginning to cool. My mother marched me through dewy grass toward the Fishers’ yard, where of course the house was gone. I thought it looked the way a recently unsaddled horse might – relieved, unburdened.

Renée was there with her twin daughters, freckled girls who picked on one another when Renée wasn’t looking. “Rob left for work already, otherwise I’d send him in to investigate,” Renée said to my mother.

“What do you mean, in?” asked my mother. “Shouldn’t we just call the police?”

“Oh, that I already did,” said Renee. “I meant into that jungle they call a garden.”

My mother visibly relaxed at the news that the police were on their way. “Let me give my husband a ring. He can be here in five.”

But before she could even raise her phone to dial, I heard the creak of metal from between a clump of rosebushes, and from there flipped up a large metal hatch. There was a “Bye, Mom,” and a shouted “watch the hatch!” and then Tim was scrambling up and out, his backpack on, his mouth thin.

He approached us five. “Hi, Sean. Hi, Mrs. Thorne.” He was always so polite. He greeted Renée and her daughters the same way. “Why are you on our lawn?”

And then the police cars rounded the corner, lights flashing but not making a sound.

---

Before they moved underground, my mother often tried to avoid the Fishers but didn’t always succeed. Her feeling of social obligation sometimes got her in the end, especially when the Fishers were being what anyone else might see as kind. Once, Mrs. Fisher offered to my mother to cut my hair for free, the same day she was doing Tim’s.

I remember my mother was hesitant to accept. “We have a regular place, I wouldn’t want to disappoint them,” she had said, a weak attempt at graciousness that Tim’s mother all too easily overturned. Tim’s mom sat me and him next to each other in high chairs in her kitchen. The elegant sweep of the cape over me, and the snick of her scissors in my ear. When it was done, she held mirrors in front of both of us. I expected our haircuts to be exactly the same, but they weren’t.

My mother watched it done, and she chatted with Mrs. Fisher as she worked–about the weather, the neighborhood, their husbands, the challenges of raising kids. Tim and I were quiet. He didn’t fidget at all.

As we were leaving, my mom tried to pay Mrs. Fisher for the haircut anyway, which embarrassed me deeply. Mrs. Fisher waved it away. “It’s what neighbors do,” she said. My mother laughed and returned the cash to her purse, but she gripped my hand very tightly the whole way across our yard.

We had left their front door open, and when I looked back, I could see through into the kitchen. Mrs. Fisher was sweeping up all the hair, mine indistinguishable from Tim’s.

---

Aboveground, Mr. Fisher had a beautiful garden, the one Renee always said was a jungle. I saw him tending to it early in the mornings before school and every evening after he got home from work, even if it was dark out. There were large and fragrant roses, ranging from jewel tones to soft pastels. Forget-me-nots bloomed in a riotous layer beneath the rosebushes in the summer. They were choking some of the other plants and covering ground he was hoping to use for bulbs eventually, daffodils and hyacinths and tulips. I only know the names because Mr. Fisher once patiently explained them all to me. You have to plant daffodils in the fall if you want to see them in spring, he told me. They have to suffer the cold below to emerge when it’s time.

There was a vegetable garden, too, mostly roots. Carrots, beets, rutabagas, everything for a stew. Onions, garlic, shallots, alliums that made my eyes water. Watermelons that would swell into existence and just as soon disappear, turning up chopped up bloody on the Fishers’ kitchen counter in the weeks after. It wasn’t as contained as my parents and the other neighbors would’ve liked it to be; my mother once complained that gardening encouraged groundhogs and other burrowing vermin to wreck their own yards as well as theirs. The other neighbors mowed their lawns aggressively, and more than once I saw Renée call out to Mr. Fisher from atop her tractor mower, asking if he needed her to just carry on over the border between their properties and get it done for him. He used to laugh and wave her off.

Our own landscaping was lifeless compared to theirs. Pruned shrubs which reminded me of poodles trembling in the wake of a shave. No riotous flowers. Nothing I could eat, either, not even dandelions, since my mother had a gardener come by to pluck those away at the root. I didn’t know I could eat dandelions until Tim told me. But our landscaping looked a lot like Renée’s and everybody else’s, and that was the way my parents liked it.

The kid paddled in on a sundown, oil-slicked tide. Somewhere beyond, the Killer Wave waited.

Aidan had opined, loudly, that he and the rest of the Old-Timers should pretend they’d never seen the kid. They were Rec workers, and it was payday; let the security boats deal with it.

Once the kid really got moving, though, Aidan might as well have suggested blindfolds at a firework show.

The currents of what had once been the Sacramento Valley were strong, unpredictable, and intermittently evil. The wreckage beneath the waves never quite settled, creating white-knuckle rapids between the husks of old city blocks and half-buried bridges.

At first glance, the kid looked like he might snap his paddle, board, and neck, in that order, at any moment. But as he got closer, Aidan could see the confidence. What had looked like lurching imbalance became split-second corrections. The test of a mechanical bull isn’t looking good doing it, after all. The kid held on.

When he made it to shore, the Old-Timer crew gave him a round of applause. Varsha whistled a few bars of “We Are the Champions,” and the kid’s eyes lit up. He hefted his cherry-red board onto the sand and rummaged through a pack bungie-corded to the tail-end.

Then he pulled out the case and unsheathed the ukulele, and there went the night.

---

Payday usually meant heading down to the Windsong for some beer that they could actually taste and waiting for a shot at the only pool table in town that still had most of the balls. But the kid, Chance, stuck out like a sore thumb, so Rin and Ekoye grabbed a fresh lighter and a case of nothing-ale from the corner shop, and they all hiked out to one of the more private dunes for a bonfire. It was the six of them, Aidan, Varsha, Rin, Ekoye, Pedro, and Skyler, plus the kid. The Old-Timers and the wayward child.

“Old-Timers” wasn’t an ironic handle; they were all old enough to remember the concept of retirement ages, but they had missed that boat like the dinosaurs missed the Ark, or so Pedro liked to say. They were certainly old enough that Aidan thought they were lucky no one broke an ankle dancing like fools in the firelight that night.

Chance was a one-man throwback playlist. He knew his way around his chirpy little instrument and was a decent tenor to boot. There wasn’t much for Aidan; there was some half-remembered song lilting around the back of his head that he would’ve liked to hear, but he couldn’t remember the words and didn’t bother to ask. But the kid played some Stones, some Swift (Skyler shrieked in delight), and eventually Buffett.

That brought the house down like storm surge could only dream about.

Age being what it was, the rest of the gang needed a breather after all that excitement. So, Aidan started interrogating the kid. Where was he from? Was he even old enough to be traveling alone? What the hell was he doing here?

That last earned Aidan some harsh glares around the bonfire, but Chance didn’t seem to mind. He was from a commune built around a lighthouse on the Old Coast up north. They were big on music, apparently. A human song library. It sounded a bit Kumbaya for Aidan, but to each their own.

As for age, Chance reported himself at twenty-two, though he looked closer to seventeen, and a lean seventeen at that. He had unzipped his wetsuit down to his waist, and even in the firelight, they could see the arches of his ribs and the hollow of his stomach under teak-colored skin. Too thin. But then again, who wasn’t, these days?

What he was doing here was fuck-all, because he had come to check on the “reconstruction efforts.” When Ekoye told him there weren’t any, just corporate scavenge operations, the smile left his face for the first time that night.

“When are they going to start?” He asked, looking between them.

“They’re not,” Aidan said. “Sorry, champ. The world ended.”

“Oh,” he said.

For a while, they sat with it, no songs but the duet of wind and tide. Then he picked up his uke and started idly plucking at the strings.

“Hey, do you guys know what cheeseburgers tasted like?”

For everyone but Aidan, that blew up like pure, nostalgia dynamite. Aidan disengaged, cutting his eyes out to the sea, watching for swells, waiting for signs.

The kid didn’t pack up and paddle off at sun-up, despite Aidan’s hopes. He had a tent on the back of that board of his, and his spine was still young enough for sleeping on sand. He set up a camp in the goldenbush and marram grass where he could happily stay a week, or possibly forever.

He didn’t seem to understand why he had to lay low, paddling in unwanted on a corporate reclamation site. Honestly, he didn’t seem to understand a lot of things. Why were they working for a company instead of just salvaging for themselves? Why were they paying to rent run-down housing instead of camping out or building their own places? Why didn’t they leave if they didn’t like it here?

Never mind that this was all that was left anymore. There was nothing freeing about a government, global economy, and biosphere on the verge of collapse. If anything, you held on tighter. Shit job? At least you knew you would be eating every day. Shit apartment? At least it was a roof overhead when the next super-storm blew through. Shit longitude and latitude? Well, a couple of centuries of industrialization hadn’t exactly left any Edens in their wake.

The biggest thing the kid didn’t seem to understand was the fear. Everyone who had survived out here had a story about the time they almost hadn’t. And Aidan didn’t even mean the big stuff: the San Andreas 9.0, the Second American Civil War, and the Hell Summer Double-Pandemic.

Those were just stamps on the bingo card these days. At Aidan’s age, he had seen much closer, more intimate brushes with death. For Rin, it was a jagged piece of rebar and an antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection; three straight weeks in the kind of fevers that usually kill the virus by taking the body with it. She got a fresh reminder looking at the scar in the mirror every morning.

For Ekoye, it was his dog, Walker, swept away in a flood. Ekoye knew better than to wade into that water, but “man’s best friend” were never just words to him. The man had been knocked unconscious against a lamppost for about thirty seconds and ended up under the water. Woke up just in time, and Walker was saved, never to know how close his human came to dying in the line of duty. The dog was still around, as gray in the muzzle as Aidan.

For Pedro, it was the one-eyed seagull. He still refused to talk about it.

For Aidan, it was the Killer Wave.

This was years ago, when his hair was more red than white. He and Clara had parted ways right after Hell Summer, neither one at fault, nerves just too raw to handle a team of two. He still missed her. That woman had never been second-best.

He’d traded Atlantic for Pacific, like you do. Surely if any place needed construction work and was willing to pay, it would be California, right?

But then came San Andreas, and the state of emergency stretching into double-digit months, and the fire season that just wouldn’t stop burning.

So, Aidan was paddling up the PCH, pulling day work, building make-shift hospitals and temporary schools.

The weather forecast called for a goddamn monsoon in three days, and he was surrounded by toothpick architecture, so Aidan had started paddling immediately. It was all blue skies and smooth breezes the first two days. The third day, there was a bit of a current to fight, but he had been doing this how many years? Plus, he could see the chop building. If he had paddled back in to take a rest, he would have been Poseidon’s punching bag trying to get back out past the breakers.

He kept going. Careless.

The birds had all scattered. He never forgot that part. They must have seen it coming.

It was nearly high noon and high tide both. The coast was curving out in front of him, the space between the steady blue and the whitecaps starting to go ombre. The tide kept pushing him toward the splash zone, all in on a Royal Flush. He fought back until his obliques were a wildfire. And all the while, there it was.

It brooded on the deep, rising and falling, but keeping its distance. It peeked above its lesser brethren like a crocodile surfacing to lay eyes on its prey. Then it sank, and Aidan knew, immediately, that he was in for it.

The Killer Wave was coming.

The nose of his board drifted relentlessly toward shore, and the onslaught began. He caught the first few—he wasn’t an amateur—but as soon as one had broken, the next was yanking him back, and the shore was closing in by inches instead of yards. It was a wave train, plain and simple. Each one was seven feet, eight feet at the outside; all together, they were the overture.

He pushed too hard, trying to gain ground (so to speak) on the beach, over-balanced, tumbled.

The board was bungie-d to his ankle, like the bobber to his hook. He climbed the cord to the surface and broke for half a gasp of air before the next breaking wave, which dragged down the board and him by transitive properties. Minutes of this felt like hours, but he still wasn’t ready to give up the board. The main event was still out there.

It waited. That was the part he could never get over. At that size and speed, it should have passed right through the lesser waves, broken beyond him while he was still under water. But no. It waited until he was tired, waited until he was bruised, waited until the fear had dug its fangs into him.

When the last of the waves in the train broke, he managed to splay himself across his board, praying that the big one had already passed. Then he looked up.

It was a plunging wave, a drop-you-in-the-trough-and-blot-out-the-sun wave, an abandon-hope-ye-who-tread-water-here wave.

On the third day, the kid came out salvaging with them. Aidan was dead-set against it. Corporate security patrolled by on speedboat and jet-skis at all hours of the day, but it wasn’t their security those teams worried about. They didn’t even carry life preservers. Reclamation teams lost people with security in line of sight. But they weren’t Coast Guard or Life Guards. They were Corporate, Fuck-You-That’s-Ours Guards. Loss prevention. Keep your friends off the jobsite, or we’ll find a cage big enough for all of you.

Aidan was overruled.

Reclamation work wasn’t glamorous. Mostly they puttered out in their piddly little motorboat (oldest hands got the worst boat, by reason that you want to keep all of your expendables together), hunting down shipping containers. Storms and seaquakes had made trans-pacific shipping a real gamble. But where there’s value, a large corporate entity will swoop in to suck it dry. Hence Green Trove, a “recycling” operation that raided any containers or wrecks that found their way to the coasts and inland seas of California.

The work was that timeless, blue-collar cocktail: hands-on and straightforward, hold the easy. They climbed into the piece of junk boat and followed transponder signals to the day’s plunder. Once they got close, they’d paddle out and dive to check all the seals. If it was beyond saving, they reported in and hauled their asses on to the next one. If the whole thing was still sealed, they tagged it with a beacon for a real team (ie. one with a ship, staff, and actual equipment) to hoist it aboard and return it to port.

But that day, they had the real shit job: a mystery box.

The container was painted royal blue with a large, white W. It was caught between some toppled concrete pillars that were holding it mostly steady. One of the seals, top-front corner, starboard side, had been shorn off like a monstrous bite in the steel. But here was the trick: the box was hauling sealed MREs, so there was a chance that everything inside was still A-OK. That meant getting up close and personal with the behemoth, hoping it didn’t shift, flip, or in any way demonstrate the principle that when steel meets flesh, only the latter yields.

It was Aidan’s turn. They anchored the boat about twenty yards away. He sat passenger on Pedro’s board as the latter paddled him most of the remaining way. Rin, Skyler, and the kid all got out on their boards, ready to come after him if he lost his footing.

The corrugated steel was slick under his heels as he stepped off Pedro’s board, and he was feeling every one of his years as he crossed to the open end. The missing seal was a razor bloom of gunmetal and blue paint. Aidan took the camera off his hip, a water-proof number with a light and lens on a long, adjustable neck. You snaked it into a broken seal, took a look around, and sent it off to central dispatch, who made the call. Or, maybe, asked if you could get your whole arm in there and wiggle it around, they thought they saw a shark.

Standard Operating Procedure, except Aidan could never get the damn thing to work, proof positive that he had truly gotten old, technology turning against him. The screen was taking forever to boot up, and he had to keep bracing on one knee when the sea spat up against him.

A squadron of sea birds passed over him, beating their wings like hell had taken flight. Aidan tore his eyes from the screen and scoured his horizons. He knew the signs of the Killer Wave, and even one put his whole body on edge.

“Watch it!” Pedro called.

Aidan looked down, just in time to see a broadside wave topple into the container. He fell forward, dropping the camera, which slid off into surf. He threw his arms out, too late, tumbling toward the shredded metal—

And fell on his back, wind knocked clean out of him, the flat of a paddle in his chest.

“I got ya!” Chance called out, towering above the old man.

That earned a round of applause from the rest of the Old-Timers and a swooping feeling of frustration and relief from Aidan. Before he even got up, he scanned every direction. Too flat for his wave to hide.

“Yeah, thanks,” he said.

“For sure. We’re all in it together,” Chance said.

Aidan pulled himself up with the paddle wondering which bumper sticker the kid had got that one from.

Upon further inspection, the box was worthless. One of the missing shards of steel had got caught up in the container, and time and tide had shredded the contents. Tens of thousands of meals gone, all because of a bad weld. At least they had probably fed some fish.

They were back on the boat and ready to move on when the kid spotted the other container: white paint with red scars sticking up at a thirty-degree angle from a sandbar.

It took a second for Aidan to make sense of the paint: two rusty, red lines intersecting at the center.

Red Cross.

Another win for the kid. Good eyes, pats on the back all around. He was thrilled.

“We’re stocked up on food, solar panels, and water filters back home, but short on medicine. Does your company do trades?”

“Yeah, cash, barter, IOU, whatever works,” Aidan grumbled.

“Really?”

“No, hon,” said Varsha, comforting him and scolding Aidan with just those two, spare syllables. Downright maternal in the economy of it.

“No transponder,” Rin remarked. “It’s uncatalogued.”

“Probably drowned in that buried half,” Ekoye said.

“Shouldn’t we check it out?” Chance asked.

“Quotas,” Ekoye said, sadly. “Need to be going.”

The kid looked ready to protest, but he clamped his mouth shut.

“Yeah, OK.”

Kate Calhoun broke the news when she came by to clean the other day. At first, she teased me with what my father always called “woman talk, who was dating who, who was sneaking off with who, that kind of thing. I sat in my easy chair in the living room and read the paper, nodding and grunting responses, the way I had when Muriel used to run her gob. But suddenly, she sucker punched me with something that hit deep.

“They’re closin’ up Chad Riley’s bar,” she announced.

Down came the paper, and I peered over my shoulder at her while she dusted off the living room lampshades. “What now?”

“Heard it from Dan Riley hisself!” she declared, as if I had dared contradict her. “They’re closin’ her up. Gonna sell it to some outfit from outta town.”

There was more, but I didn’t bother listening. My mind drifted immediately elsewhere, back to better days when I was a younger man. I sat there long after Kate had left and let the memories come flooding in like the tide. I could taste the cold draft beer, hear them pool balls clacking like cassinettes, and smell the mix of smoke, whiskey, and Chad Riley’s English Leather cologne that had always hung in the air around the bar.

And suddenly, I was there on the stool, which was my stool, at the corner of the bar which was my corner, and Dusty was there at my elbow like a ghost. I could even hear the boys, all the boys, from Johnny King to Nick Little, from Willy Cashum to Pete Bigelow, they were all there, laughing and drinking draft and talking about girls, trucks, anything and everything. Chad Riley’s, a lynchpin of my existence that had stood for five decades, and which I had taken for granted would stand for ten more.

I’ve lived in south Texas my whole life, in the same town where I and Muriel raised a family. I grew up on daddy’s farm, which I inherited when he retired. We had Bobby here, and I kept the place up after he moved and Muriel died. And all that time, nearly twenty-five years, there was a Chad Riley’s to serve as my second home. I was thirty when Chad opened it (he come down from Vegas, where he used to be a bar tender at one of them Caesar’s Palace-type outfits) and it had become as much a part of me as my fingers and toes.

Though I was sitting down, I could feel myself floating out of the chair and into the air, like one of them Astroturf projections that I heard about on TV. I was walking through the front door of Chad’s, into the dark wood interior with the tables all in one corner, the bar on the right by the jukebox, and two pool tables taking up the rest of the place with a little hallway that went to the bathrooms. Over the bar hung a wall-to-wall neon silhouette of a sexy lady showing some leg, which Muriel had once petitioned to have taken down to no avail. When you came into Chad’s, you felt like you were coming home, like the whole place always had its arms open, ready to embrace you.

Hearing about the bar being closed, I felt the way you would if somebody you loved had finally died of cancer. Watching them slog through life in pain was more burden than the thought of them dying, and you felt free when they finally kicked the big one. I had felt that way when Muriel passed, and I felt that way when I heard Chad Riley’s kids had finally decided it was time to end their father’s legacy.

The cancer that killed Chad’s, of course, was The Chopping Night. Nothing was ever the same after that, and those memories tainted the bar forever. Chad Riley retired a year after all that hullabaloo and his kids tried to keep the doors open, but the boys all gradually left off coming. Me and Dusty started hanging out at Rudy’s pub instead, and though we talked about going in to say hi to Dan Riley from time to time, we never did. We couldn’t.

Part of it was the men in suits, who showed up and started making life difficult. This is south Texas: nobody wears a suit, not even on Sundays. But after the Chopping Night, almost every day, two or three preppy fellas in two-piece business suits would troop in and hang around asking questions about Carl Bannon. They was like Joe Friday from that cop show, and made a habit of pestering everybody in the bar. Funny thing, even though Chad normally took absolutely no shit from anybody, he wouldn’t even look those button-up Bills in the eye. Willy and Pete petitioned him to have those suit guys barred several times, but Chad wouldn’t even give them a straight answer. It was clear as day he was scared of’em, and Chad Riley wasn’t scared of nobody except Marv McMurphy, who got the needle after he carried out one of the most brutal crimes in Texas history.

Oh, there’s books about the Chopping Night and true crime podcasts and even an episode of one of them crime report shows that Muriel used to watch. Over the years, I’ve talked to journalists and writers and even a couple of young people who blew into town to make a YouTube video about it. I told them the same balooey I’ve told everybody, the basic rundown that leaves out everything that actually happened. What me and Dusty and Chad Riley saw ain’t something you can tell folks. It ain’t’ something you can even admit to yourself, because it implies a universe that’s far too wide and far too deep to be comfortable in.

It’s been enough years, I guess, and everybody involved except me is dead. I’m eighty now, and I ain’t got much longer left. So, it’s as good a time as any. You won’t believe me, and I wouldn’t expect you to. When Muriel, God rest her, asked me about it I just changed the subject. Maybe it was them suit guys, and maybe it was just the idea of being sent to the funny farm, but I didn’t want to talk about the Chopping Night. But I saw what I saw, and I’ll go to my grave with that night floating in my memories.

The first thing I reckon you got to understand is what kind of man Marv McMurphy was, even before the Chopping Night. To sum it up: he was an ugly guy married to a beautiful woman. Loretta McMurphy was as gorgeous as a dream, and nobody could blame Marv for being jealous. But suspicion worked on Marv like one of them cocaine speedballs, making him powerful gungy whenever another man was within a hundred feet of his baby girl. When he came into Chad’s on Friday and Saturday nights, you had better not give his lady a look if she were with him. I had seen Marv lay one or two of the boys out on the floor for making eyes at Loretta and he beat Pete Bigelow half to death for giving Loretta a whistle. The sheriff had threatened him and Chad had talked of barring him, but Marv was a dangerous guy to cross and everybody in town knew it.

Poor Loretta. For a pretty woman, she never seemed to have no fun. I reckon she was about twenty-five then, but you could tell three childless years with Marv was aging her prematurely. I saw lines forming around her mouth and eyes, her skin folding under the pressure of being shackled to that crazy fool. Why she married him I can’t figure, but he had a miser’s love for her affection.

The other thing you got to understand is Carl Bannon. He was twenty-something, but what he did in the two decades before he wandered into town will forever be a mystery. He was a drifter who just blew in one day and was a quiet kind’a fellow who never talked much. The town was always small, and everybody knew everybody, so an out-and-out stranger like Carl stood out like a sore thumb. My best friend, Dusty Stalburg, said he just showed up in his office at the garage one day, hands in his pockets, looking kinda lost. He was dressed in faded denim with long, tangled blonde hair and a fidgety look to him.

“What you need, boy?” Dusty asked.

“Lookin’ for a job.”

“What makes you think I need anybody, son?”

The kid swallowed. “I’m good with my hands. I can show you.”