"No ... no, he was inside. Martha was gone. I didn't understand. I left."

"That's not true, Jeremy." I shake my head, speak gently, coaxing. "What did you do to her?"

"I told you, she wasn't there." He twitches and yelps, rising quickly, improbably, to his feet. "I told you. I love her."

He stumbles toward me, the gun raised, and I take a step back on the stairs, putting up my one good hand in front of my face as if I could catch a bullet, like Superman, pluck it from the air and throw it back at him. A year and a half ago, I would have been a detective, interviewing suspects-except not even. I still would have been a patrolman, looping Loudon Road, picking up shoplifters and litterbugs.

"Jeremy-"

"No more," he says, and I say, "No, please-" and he's waving the thing in a wide arc as he comes down the steps, now the barrel is aimed at the wall, now at the floor, and then at me, right at my face.

My heart flutters and dives. I don't want to die-I don't-even now, I want to keep living.

"Wait, Jeremy," I say. "Please."

There's a bang at the bottom of the stairs, as loud as a firework, and Jeremy's eyes go wide and I whip around to see what he sees. The wind carried open the splintered door, flung it aside to reveal Houdini on the porch, staring stone-faced into the house, silent and cruel, eyes unwavering and teeth bared, sides flecked with ash and mud. The dog is lit from behind by the roaring furnace of the prison. Jeremy shrieks as the dog glares up at us, yellowed and ferocious and strange, and I leap up the three steps remaining and press my left forearm into Jeremy's throat to pin him to the wall.

"Where is she?"

"I swear-" He's struggling to breathe. Staring goggle eyed over my shoulder at the dog. "I swear, I don't know."

"Not true." I tower over the kid. I'm leaning into his throat with the blunt object of my arm, and it's killing him and I don't care. "You saw Cortez coming and you smashed him with a shovel."

He gasps, squeezes out words. "I don't know who that is." He struggles, breathes. "I would not hurt her."

I stare at his terror-stricken eyes and try to think. She waved me away, Cortez had said, she treated him like a Jehovah's Witness. Why did she do that, dismiss her protector? And she had a suitcase, he said, she was waiting for someone. Not Jeremy, surely-but who? I'm thinking about the timing of this-what day was Brett shot and when did Jeremy get back from shooting him and what time this morning did Martha tell Cortez to leave her be? The world is spinning, days and events spilling over one another like loose marbles in a bag.

"I'll die," Jeremy gasps, and I recover myself and I let him loose.

"No, you won't."

"You don't understand," he says. "I'm already dead."

I can see it now, in his eyes, the welling sickness, the pupils tightening. Dammit.

"Come on," I say, crouching, pulling on his left arm with my left arm. "Let's get to the bathroom."

He waves me off, slumps back against the bannister.

I roll him down the stairs, drag him to the bathroom, watching the black bruise take shape across his Adam's apple where I attacked him. I don't know when he took the pills, I don't know how long he was sitting there before I showed up. If I can get him to the john I can bend him over the toilet, get those pills up. Clear whatever it is from his system. I can do that. His body can't have metabolized much of the poison, not yet, it's too soon.

"Jeremy?"

Laboriously I settle him on his knees in front of the toilet and he wobbles, body rolling forward and back. I clap my hands in front of his face. His head lists on his neck and his torso slides forward.

"Jeremy!" I throw the taps so I can splash cold water on his face, and of course nothing comes out. The flesh of his body is getting strangely warm, like he might begin to melt like a wax candle, turn from solid to liquid and drip away from my grasp.

I try one more time: "Where's Martha, Jeremy?"

"You'll find her," he says, almost gently, encouragingly, like a coach-and you can really see it, with an overdose, you can watch the light dripping out of someone's eyes. "I bet you can find anyone."

Houdini and I look in every corner of that house. In every corner and under every bed and mattress, in the cheap wood pantry, overrun with roaches and water bugs, in the dark spiderwebbed corners of the basement.

My arm swells and radiates heat and pain. Sweat runs down my forehead and into my eyes. We look and look.

But it's not that big a house, and I'm not looking for misplaced keys or a wayward pair of glasses. It's a human being. My terrified friend, bound and trembling, or her body, hollow and staring. But we keep looking. There's no attic; the second-floor bedrooms are arched and peaked, but I get up on a chair and bang on the plaster of the ceiling to eliminate the possibility of a hidey-hole or secret room where Martha might have been shoved, duct-taped and struggling. The closets, the kitchen, the closets again, tearing everything out, kicking against the beadboard for a false back or hidden chamber.

Houdini yelps and sniffs at the floorboards. I find a claw hammer in a tool chest in the pantry, and I use the claw to pry up the floor in the living room, board by board, my back aching against the strain of it. I ignore the stabs of pain and the waves of nausea, drag up the boards one at a time like peeling open a stubborn fruit, but beneath the floor is insulation and pipes and the view of the basement.

I check it again, the basement, but she's not there-she's not here-she's nowhere.

I keep looking. The noise of the guns and the screaming outside, the windows lit up with the fire across the street, I keep looking, long after even the most diligent investigator would be forced to conclude that Martha Milano is not inside this house.

I look and look and scream her name until I'm hoarse.

Jeremy's body I leave in the bathtub. There is no other option that makes sense. I happen to know that the Willard Street Funeral Parlor is home now to a clutch of doomsday prophets, just as I happen to know that the morgue in the basement of Concord Hospital is abandoned, Dr. Fenton now upstairs doing furious triage along with whoever else is around.

There is nowhere to report this death or deliver this corpse, because suddenly the streets are on fire and ours is a savage land. I lay the man out more neatly in his claw-footed bathtub, push his eyelids shut with my forefingers, and go.

My house is gone.

When at last the dog and I get back to my address on Clinton Street, we find just the bones of a house, just the beams, leaning precariously in the summer darkness among the shadowy silver maples. It was stripped for the metal and the siding and the bricks and then burned; or possibly it burned first, and then the looters came and carried away the remains. Grim drifting heaps of ash and stray pieces of furniture. My hoard of goods, my jars of peanut butter and my gas mask and my jugs of water, these were beneath the floorboards under the sofa in the back end of the living room. The hoard is gone. The floorboards are gone. The sofa is gone. The living room is gone.

Houdini and I wander slowly through the ruins like we're walking on the moon. The cement foundation is still in place, and I can trace the rough outlines of where the rooms used to be: the living room, the bathroom, the kitchen. Disintegrating plasterboard piles that used to be walls. Houdini noses at the wreckage and comes up with a table leg, clutched in his jaws like a shankbone. I find my copy of Farley and Leonard's Criminal Investigation, charred, recognizable by the pattern of colors on the cover. Piano keys like teeth. A scattering of old Polaroids: my parents mugging at a holiday party, Dad in a mistletoe cap, Mom's lips brushing his cheek.

I am aware, in an abstract way, that this is a catastrophe. The countdown has begun, and all the haphazard arrangements-the rummages and the ersatz restaurants and the bartering and the residents associations-all of the vestigial institutions are crumbling into the past, and it's every man for himself from now on, and here I am with no house, no gun, no possessions of any kind. I'm down one arm. I'm wearing a borrowed shirt and torn suit pants.

But what I feel is nothing. Numbness and cold. I'm a house full of burned-out rooms.

I told Martha I would make every effort to find her husband and bring him home. I told her I could do it. I promised.

The man she longed for is dead. And now she, too, is dead, or somewhere dying, somewhere alone, and the only person who knows her whereabouts is yet another dead man. The world collapsing, turning into death, disappearing before my eyes.

I sat at her kitchen table, smiled to see her again after all these years, looked into her worried eyes, and made a promise.

Houdini hunts around me in a circle, nose down, lifting and then dropping bits of plaster with his sharp teeth.

There is a bright and beautiful glow in the direction of downtown, a radiant bulb, pulsing with light. I stare at it until I understand that this is the capitol dome of the statehouse of New Hampshire, and that it is on fire.

The practicalities of my situation are hard to grasp. I will need help, but from whom? Dr. Fenton? Culverson?

I sink down cross-legged in the dirt and Houdini takes a position next to me, erect and watchful, panting. I lift a photograph from the mud, Nico and me with arms wrapped around each other at her high-school graduation. My expression is adult, serious, self-congratulatory, quietly proud for having seen to it that she made it to that day. Nico for her part is grinning, ear to ear, because she was high as a satellite.

I could have stayed on that helicopter. Could be in Idaho or Illinois right now, reconning with the team. Saving the world.

The thought of Nico is suddenly devastating, and I can't pretend to be cynical about it, not even to myself-the idea that I'm sitting here, and she is there. What have I done? What have I done? I should have stayed on that helicopter. I never should have let her go. I lie in the rutted crater that was my home and consider my choices: calling my sister a fool for pursuing a one-in-a-million chance at survival while I'm the one who's accepted a hundred percent chance of death.

A screech of tires and the slam of a car door, ancient and familiar sounds, and I sit upright and jerk my head around and Houdini takes a stance and barks. Parked diagonally across my yard is a Chevrolet Impala, the standard Concord Police Department vehicle, a glimmer of moonlight dancing across the hood.

Footsteps, getting closer. I struggle to my feet. Houdini barks louder.

"Let's go, Henry."

Trish McConnell. I gape at her, and she grins like a naughty kid.

"What are you doing here?"

"Saving your life, Skinny." Officer McConnell somehow looks more like a cop when she's out of uniform: short and tough in blue jeans and a black T-shirt. "What happened to your arm?"

"Oh-" I wiggle the thick limb. It hurts. "It's fine. What's happening?"

"I'll tell you in the car. Come on."

I look at Trish and then toward downtown, toward the fires and the wildness. The city smells like smoke. "Shouldn't you be on patrol?"

"No one's on patrol. Our orders were to stand down, let this shit burn itself out. Risk no department resources. The rest of the force is at School Street, drinking beer and looking at dirty magazines."

"So, why aren't you there?

"I don't like dirty magazines." She laughs. McConnell is all fired up, that much is clear, this is her play, she's ready to roll. "I am away without leave, Officer Palace, and I ain't going back. I borrowed the Chevy from the Justice Department and I am taking off, right now, very quickly, and you're coming, too."

"Why me?"

She smiles cryptically. "Come on, you dummy."

The vehicle is on and purring, the exhaust from some real genuine DOJ regular unleaded gasoline pouring out of the tailpipe. It's a beautiful thing, a Chevrolet Impala, it really is, clean lines, efficient: a pure police car. Houdini is over there, peering up at its tinted windows. I'm trying to think quickly and smartly, trying to process everything. The statehouse is blazing ferociously in the distance, a Roman candle burning down in the heart of our little skyline.

"Come on, Palace," says McConnell, standing at the driver's side door. "The worst of the chaos is up by the reservoir, but we're going exactly the other way." She pounds on the hood of the car. "You ready to rock?"

"Yeah," I say. "Let me just ..." I look around. I have no suitcase. No clothes to pack. Someone took my house. I tug Culverson's dress shirt closer around me and walk toward the car. "Okay," I say. "Let's go."

The shotgun seat is stuffed with suitcases and cardboard cartons of food and bottles of Gatorade. So I slide into the backseat next to McConnell's children, and Houdini takes a position between us.

"Hi," I say to Kelli and Robbie, as McConnell guns it and screeches out onto Clinton Street. Robbie has his thumb in his mouth, a ragged blue teddy bear tucked against his chin. Kelli looks solemn and scared.

"What kind of dog is that?" she asks me.

"A bichon frise," I say. "He's tougher than he looks."

"Really?" says Kelli. "He actually looks pretty tough."

McConnell takes the Chevy down Clinton Street, away from downtown, toward the highway, and while Houdini consents for Robbie to tickle his neck scruff, I lean forward into the mesh grate and ask McConnell where we're going.

"The mansion."

"What mansion?

"I told you, Palace." She laughs. "Me and some of the others, the old-timers-Michelson, Capshaw, Rodriguez-we blocked this all out months ago.

"Oh, yeah," I say. "Oh right."

"It's in Western Mass., a little town called Furman, near the New York border. We got the place all set up. Plenty of water, plenty of food. Cooking oil. Necessary precautions." She raises her voice, glances in the rearview mirror. "And there are even some kids there, other kids. Officer Rogers has twin boys."

"Those guys are assholes," says Kelli, and McConnell says, "Language, honey," and leans on the gas, hits ninety miles an hour, sure and straight, barreling over back roads on the way out of town.

"I thought you were kidding about all that. The mansion in the country. The whole thing."

"I never kid."

McConnell smiles, sly, elusive, proud, the Impala whooshing along Highway 1, the Merrimack a brown ribbon to our left. Holy moly, I think, holy cow, easing back into my seat. Western Mass. Kelli asks for a bottle of water so Houdini can have a drink, and McConnell pushes two bottles through the seat-grate opening, not without a small wince of anxiety-nothing as precious as a bottle of water. I say thanks on the dog's behalf, and McConnell says, "Sure," says "Drink one yourself, you damn scarecrow."

McConnell, I like-I always have.

The moon glimmers through the tinted backseat windows of the Impala as we rattle over untended roads, out across the bridge, toward the junction with 89 South, the city in flames all around us. Robbie falls asleep. We roar past a long line of people, a block and a half long, lugging backpacks and duffel bags and pulling rolling suitcases, a residents' association heading together into exile by some prearrangement, headed out of town but God knows to where.

Despite everything, I lean back and let the exhaustion overtake me, let my eyelids drift and flutter, Houdini safe in Kelli's lap beside me, and I start to feel that kind of dreamy magic that comes with car rides late at night.

There's a word my mind is looking for.

I said, McConnell, what are you doing here? and she said, Saving your life, Skinny.

What's the word I'm looking for?

I lay in the dirt patch that had been my house, and the Impala came and what did she offer me?

Tell him he has to come home, Martha said, urgent and imploring. Tell him his salvation depends on it.

My eyes shoot open.

Kelli and Houdini are both snoring gently; we're way on the outskirts of the city by now, coming up on its limits and the westward highway.

Salvation.

All these people braving the terrible seas, getting shot or dragged out of the water in nets, casting themselves upon unfamiliar shores in search of what-the same thing my sister is chasing across the country in a stolen helicopter.