V
The police had arrived in the Grove by the time Tesla, Witt, Hotchkiss, and Grillo left the house to start the descent. Lights were flashing at the top of the Hill; and ambulance sirens wailing. Despite all this din and activity there was no sign of any of the town’s occupants, though presumably some of them were still in residence. They were either holed up with their deteriorating dreams, as Ellen Nguyen had been, or locked away, mourning their passing. The Grove was effectively a ghost-town. When the siren wails wound down there was a hush through the four villages more profound than any midnight. The sun beat down on empty sidewalks, empty yards, empty driveways. There were no children playing on the swings; no sound of televisions, radios, lawn-mowers, food-mixers, air conditioners. The lights still flipped colors at the intersections, but—excepting patrol-cars and ambulances, whose drivers ignored them anyway—nobody was on the roads. Even the packs of dogs they’d seen in the gloom before dawn had gone about business that didn’t bring them into the open. The sight of the brilliant sun, shining upon the empty town, had spooked even them.
Hotchkiss had made a list of items they were going to need if they were to have a hope of making the proposed descent: ropes, torches and a few articles of clothing. So the Mall was first stop on the journey. Of the quartet it was William who was most distressed by the place when they got there. Every day of his working life he’d seen the Mall bustling, from early morning to early evening. Now there was nobody. The new glass in the store-fronts that had been damaged by Fletcher gleamed, the products stacked in the windows beckoned, but there were neither buyers nor sellers. The doors were all locked; the stores silent.
There was one exception: the pet store. Unlike every other business in the Mall it was open for business as usual, its door wide, its products yapping, squawking and making a general hullabaloo. While Hotchkiss and Grillo went to pillage their way through the shopping list, Witt took Tesla into the pet store. Ted Elizando was at work refilling the drip-feed water bottles along the rows of kittens’ cages. He didn’t look surprised to see customers. He didn’t express anything in fact. Not even recognition of William, though from their first exchange Tesla gathered they knew each other.
“All alone this morning, Ted?” Witt said.
The man nodded. He hadn’t shaved in two or three days; nor showered. “I…didn’t want to get up, really…but I had to. For the animals.”
“Of course.”
“They’d die if I didn’t look after them,” Ted went on, with the slow, studied speech of one who was trying hard to keep his thoughts coherent. As he spoke he opened up the cage beside him and brought one of the kittens out from a nest of newspaper strips. It lay along his arm, head in the crook. He stroked it. The animal enjoyed the attention, arching its back to meet each slow motion of his hand.
“I don’t think there’s anybody left in town to buy them,” William said.
Ted stared at the kitten.
“What am I going to do?” he asked softly. “I can’t feed them forever, can I?” His voice dropped in volume with every word, until he was barely whispering. “What’s happened to everyone?” he said. “Where did they go? Where did everyone go?”
“Away, Ted,” William said. “Out of town. And I don’t think they’re going to be coming back.”
“You think I should go too?” Ted said.
“I think maybe you should,” William replied.
The man looked devastated.
“What will the animals do?” he said.
For the first time—witnessing Ted Elizando’s misery— Tesla was struck by the scale of the Grove’s tragedy. When she’d first wandered through its streets, message-carrying for Grillo, she’d plotted its fictional overthrow. The bomb-in-a-suitcase scenario, with apathetic Grovers throwing the prophet out just as the big bang came. That narrative had not been wide of the mark. The explosion had been slow and subtle rather than quick and hard, but it had come nevertheless. It had cleared the streets, leaving only a few—like Ted—to wander in the ruins, picking up whatever shreds of furry life remained. Her scenario had been a sort of imagined revenge upon the cozy, smug existence of the town. But in retrospect she’d been as smug as the Grove, as certain of her moral superiority as it had been of its invulnerability. There was real pain here. Real loss. The people who’d lived in the Grove, and fled it, had not been cardboard cut-outs. They’d had lives and loves, families, pets; they’d made their homes here thinking they’d found a place in the sun where they’d be safe. She had no right to judge them.