Part Two
Drive off, roll the window back up. Hadn’t bothered trying my cell phone. I pull over and turn it on. No signal, no surprise.

I’m almost home when I decide to swing by the police station. Chances are

they know something. More people are on the roads now, it’s almost noon.

Surprising, very few cars at the police station, guess people haven’t gotten

curious yet. It’s starting to heat up, the walk from my car to the station

is eased by the shade of the old trees. A cop is standing at the door; my

outfit makes it pretty obvious I don’t belong here. A few lights are on

inside, I hear a generator humming somewhere.
“Go home, kid.”
“Officer, what’s going on?”
“Just go home, I honestly can’t tell you.”
“Has it been some kind of attack?”
“Leave.”

Never piss off a cop. It’s a simple rule to follow so I do as he says. The

birds chirp in the trees, a squirrel sitting on the sidewalk dashes up a

tree. A perfectly normal scene. Without my cell phone, without a TV, without

the internet, I’m sunk. Family’s out of town, which makes them now

unreachable. No way of getting the news. I wish I could check up on some

friends, but I don’t know most of their home numbers. I’ll drive to them

eventually. Or should I? I realize that without electricity getting gas

might become a problem. Are the cops expecting this to last a while? Are

they anticipating riots? Without refrigeration food’s gonna go bad fast.

It’ll rot in homes and on store shelves. People might start getting

desperate for nonperishables. Is the National Guard coming online? FEMA? Can

civilization collapse overnight? I’d heard of peak oil, global warming, but

that couldn’t cause this, could it? I sit in my car, roll down the windows,

it’s boiling inside. I stare out the windshield for a second. This is the

same lot I parked in for two years when I worked at the library, on

beautiful days just like this. But now things had an unsettling sense about

them, a surrealness, an undertone of gravity. Is this what 9/11 had felt

like? I had been rather young then and hadn’t really grasped the immensity

of that day. But then you still knew what was happening, this felt bigger. A

strange urge wells up inside you, and urge to know that deep down the world

is still ticking away, that although something is broken, you can pick up

the pieces and fix it. I start the engine, get on Ryders, head toward New

Brunswick. College town, Rutgers is there. The safety of big buildings,

civilization, surrounded by hundreds of human beings who must be up and

active now, in such a large crowd someone must know something. I’m a couple

miles away when I hit the gridlock. Maybe because the traffic lights are

dead? Maybe a bad accident on Route One, people must all be rushing to work,

now. Fuck waiting. I pull into a parking lot, and begin to walk towards the

city. The opposite lane is empty. Sirens in the distance grow louder as two

police SUVs speed back to the station, their tires covered in mud.