The bald man in the Celtics jacket made as if to charge him, and the other went running up the ramp toward Route One. Celtics Jacket started to bend down for his prize, registered Clay, Alice, and Tom, and straightened up again. It was three to one, he had a black eye, and blood was trickling down the side of his face from a badly torn earlobe, but Clay saw no fear in that face, although he had only the diminishing light of the Revere fire to go by. He thought his grandfather would have said the guy's Irish was up, and certainly that went with the big green shamrock on the back of his jacket.

"The fuck you lookin at?" he asked.

"Nothing—just going by you, if that's all right," Tom said mildly. "I live on Salem Street."

"You can go to Salem Street or hell, far as I'm concerned," the bald man in the Celtics jacket said. "Still a free country, isn't it?"

"Tonight?" Clay said. "Too free."

The bald man thought it over and then laughed, a humorless double ha-ha. "The fuck happened? Any-a youse know?"

Alice said, "It was the cell phones. They made people crazy."

The bald man picked up the keg. He handled it easily, tipping it so the leak stopped. "Fucking things," he said. "Never cared to own one. Rollover minutes. The fuck're those?"

Clay didn't know. Tom might've—he'd owned a cell phone, so it seemed possible—but Tom said nothing. Probably didn't want to get into a long discussion with the bald man, and probably a good idea. Clay thought the bald man had some of the characteristics of an unexploded grenade.

"City burning?" the bald man asked. "Is, isn't it?"

"Yes," Clay said. "I don't think the Celtics will be playing at the Fleet this year."

"They ain't shit, anyway," the man said. "Doc Rivers couldn't coach a PAL team." He stood watching them, the keg on his shoulder, blood running down the side of his face. Yet now he seemed peaceable enough, almost serene. "Go on," he said. "But I wouldn't stay this close to the city for long. It's gonna get worse before it gets better. There's gonna be a lot more fires, for one thing. You think everybody who hightailed it north remembered to turn off the gas stove? I fuckin doubt it."

The three of them started walking, then Alice stopped. She pointed to the keg. "Was that yours?"

The bald man looked at her reasonably. "Ain't no was at times like this, sweetie pie. Ain't no was left. There's just now and maybe-tomorrow. It's mine now, and if there's any left it'll be mine maybe-tomorrow. Go on now. The fuck out."

"Seeya," Clay said, and raised one hand.

"Wouldn't want to be ya," the bald man replied, unsmiling, but he raised his own hand in return. They had passed the stop sign and were crossing to the far side of what Clay assumed was Salem Street when the bald man called after them again: "Hey, handsome!"

Both Clay and Tom turned to look, then glanced at each other, amused. The bald guy with the keg was now only a dark shape on the rising ramp; he could have been a caveman carrying a club.

"Where are the loonies now?" the bald guy asked. "You're not gonna tell me they're all dead, are ya? Cause I don't fuckin believe it."

"That's a very good question," Clay said.

"You're fuckin-A right it is. Watch out for the little sweetie pie there." And without waiting for them to reply, the man who'd won the battle of the beer keg turned and merged with the shadows.

"This is it," Tom said no more than ten minutes later, and the moon emerged from the wrack of cloud and smoke that had obscured it for the last hour or so as if the little man with the spectacles and the mustache had just given the Celestial Lighting Director a cue. Its rays—silver now instead of that awful infected orange—illuminated a house that was either dark blue, green, or perhaps even gray; without the streetlights to help, it was hard to tell for sure. What Clay could tell for sure was that the house was trim and handsome, although maybe not as big as your eye first insisted. The moonlight aided in that deception, but it was mostly caused by the way the steps rose from Tom McCourt's well-kept lawn to the only pillared porch on the street. There was a fieldstone chimney on the left. From above the porch, a dormer looked down on the street.

"Oh, Tom, it's beautiful!” Alice said in a too-rapturous voice. To Clay she sounded exhausted and bordering on hysteria. He himself didn't think it beautiful, but it certainly looked like the home of a man who owned a cell phone and all the other twenty-first-century bells and whistles. So did the rest of the houses on this part of Salem Street, and Clay doubted if many of the residents had had Tom's fantastic good luck. He looked around nervously. All the houses were dark—the power was out now—and they might have been deserted, except he seemed to feel eyes, surveying them.

The eyes of crazies? Phone-crazies? He thought of Power Suit Woman and Pixie Light; of the lunatic in the gray pants and the shredded tie; the man in the business suit who had bitten the ear right off the side of the dog's head. He thought of the naked man jabbing the car aerials back and forth as he ran. No, surveying was not in the phone-crazies' repertoire. They just came at you. But if there were normal people holed up in these houses—some of them, anyway—where were the phone-crazies?

Clay didn't know.

"I don't know if I'd exactly call it beautiful," Tom said, "but it's still standing, and that's good enough for me. I'd pretty well made up my mind that we'd get here and find nothing but a smoking hole in the ground." He reached in his pocket and brought out a slim ring of keys. "Come on in. Be it ever so humble, and all that."

They started up the walk and had gone no more than half a dozen steps when Alice cried, "Wait!"

Clay wheeled around, feeling both alarm and exhaustion. He thought he was beginning to understand combat fatigue a little. Even his adrenaline felt tired. But no one was there—no phone-crazies, no bald man with blood flowing down the side of his face from a shredded ear, not even a little old lady with the talkin apocalypse blues. Just Alice, down on one knee at the place where Tom's walk left the sidewalk.

"What is it, honey?" Tom asked.

She stood up, and Clay saw she was holding a very small sneaker. "It's a Baby Nike," she said. "Do you—"

Tom shook his head. "I live alone. Except for Rafe, that is. He thinks he's the king, but he's only the cat."

"Then who left it?" She looked from Tom to Clay with wondering, tired eyes.

Clay shook his head. "No telling, Alice. Might as well toss it."

But Clay knew she would not; it was dйjа vu at its disorienting worst. She still held it in her hand, curled against her waist, as she went to stand behind Tom, who was on the steps, picking slowly through his keys in the scant light.

Now we hear the cat, Clay thought. Rafe. And sure enough, there was the cat that had been Tom McCourt's salvation, waowing a greeting from inside.

Tom bent down and rafe or rafer—both short for rafael—leaped into his arms, purring loudly and stretching his head up to sniff Tom's carefully trimmed mustache.

"Yeah, missed you, too," Tom said. "All is forgiven, believe me." He carried Rafer across the enclosed porch, stroking the top of his head. Alice followed. Clay came last, closing the door and turning the knob on the lock before catching up to the others.

"Follow along down to the kitchen," Tom said when they were in the house proper. There was a pleasant smell of furniture polish and, Clay thought, leather, a smell he associated with men living calm lives that did not necessarily include women. "Second door on the right. Stay close. The hallway's wide, and there's nothing on the floor, but there are tables on both sides and it's as black as your hat. As I think you can see."