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painted on the remains of the floor, and just enough light to read it: GET OUT OF TOWN YOU
PAKI BASTARD.
I walked across the broken concrete of the courtyard. The lot where the millworkers had once
parked was gone. Nothing had been built there; it was just a vacant rectangle filled with smashed
bottles, jigsaw chunks of old asphalt, and listless clumps of trash grass. Used condoms hung from
some of these like ancient party-streamers. I looked up for stars and saw none. The sky was covered
with low-hanging clouds just thin enough to allow a little vague moonlight to seep through. The
blinker at the intersection of Main Street and Route 196 (once known as the Old Lewiston Road) had
been replaced at some point by a traffic light, but it was dark. That was all right; there was no traffic
in either direction.
The Fruit was gone. There was a cellar-hole where it had stood. Across from it, where the
greenfront had been in 1958 and where a bank should have been standing in 2011, was something
called Province of Maine Food Cooperative. Except these windows were also broken, and any goods
that might have been inside were long gone. The place was as gutted as the Quik-Flash.
Halfway across the deserted intersection, I was frozen in place by a great watery ripping sound. The
only thing I could imagine making a noise like that was some kind of exotic ice-plane, melting even
as it broke the sound barrier. The ground beneath my feet briefly trembled. A car alarm blurped, then
quit. Dogs barked, then fell silent, one by one.
Earthquake in Los Angle-ees, I thought. Seven thousand dead.
Headlights splashed down Route 196, and I made it to the far sidewalk in a hurry. The vehicle
turned out to be a little square bus with ROUNDABOUT in its lighted destination window. That
rang a faint bell, but I don’t know why. Some harmony or other, I suppose. On the roof of the bus were
several revolving gadgets that looked like heat-ventilators. Wind turbines, maybe? Was that possible?
There was no combustion engine sound, only a faint electrical hum. I watched until the wide crescent
of its single taillight was out of sight.
Okay, so gas engines were being phased out in this version of the future—this string, to use Zack
Lang’s term. That was a good thing, wasn’t it?
Possibly, but the air had a heavy, somehow dead feel as I pulled it into my lungs, and there was a
kind of olfactory afterscent that reminded me of how my Lionel train transformer smelled when, as a
kid, I pushed it too hard. Time to turn it off and let it rest awhile, my father would say.
There were a few businesses on Main Street that looked like half-going concerns, but mostly it was
a shambles. The sidewalk was cracked and littered with rubbish. I saw half a dozen parked cars, and
every one was either a gas-electric hybrid or equipped with the roof-spinner devices. One of them was
a Honda Zephyr; one was a Takuro Spirit; another a Ford Breeze. They looked old, and a couple had
been vandalized. All had pink stickers on the windshields, the black letters big enough to read even in
the gloom: PROVINCE OF MAINE “A” STICKER ALWAYS PRODUCE RATION
BOOK.
A gang of kids was idling up the other side of the street, laughing and talking. “Hey!” I called
across to them. “Is the library still open?”
They looked over. I saw the firefly wink of cigarettes . . . except the smell that drifted across to me
was almost surely pot. “Fuck off, man!” one of them shouted back.
Another turned, dropped his pants, and mooned me. “You find any books up there, they’re all
yours!”
There was general laughter and they walked on, talking in lower voices and looking back.
I didn’t mind being mooned—it wasn’t the first time—but I didn’t like those looks, and I liked
the low voices even less. There might be something conspiratorial there. Jake Epping didn’t exactly
believe that, but George Amberson did; George had been through a lot, and it was George who bent