ONE

I have that dream every night. The day the wheels came off the world. Bye-bye physics. Natural laws, who needs 'em?

And every morning I wake, realizing it's all real.

Okay, no buildings literally melted, nor did the sidewalks and streets actually roll like ocean waves. But the whole world experienced it, this moment of cosmic mayhem, this thing most of us refer to simply as "the Change." At least, we think it did. Nothing we've seen in the intervening weeks has suggested otherwise.

I have other dreams, too, also terrifying, also rooted in so-called reality. One of them is about a girl named Tina Griffin. Like our world, she changed—or began to change—in that moment of upheaval. So did a lot of other people. But Tina's in my nightmares because I know her. She is the reason we left New York, the reason we head inexorably west—because her brother Cal has the same nightmare, and because that's where the Megillah has taken her.

The Megillah is my pet name for what all the evidence points to as the cause of the Change. No one else calls it that. They have their own pet names for it: Armageddon, Doomsday, Kali Yuga, the Day of Judgment, the Real Thing.

Ek velt, Grandmother would've said: the end of the world.

Apparently, in elite government circles it was known simply as "the Source." A science project of sorts. Funny, the words "science project" usually bring to mind papiermâché volcanoes and ant farms, not something that has the power to rip the world apart and put it back together all wrong.

But it appears that the Megillah has that power.

Tina Griffin, all of twelve years old, was one of the things it reassembled. And after it warped her body, clothed her in light, and granted her the power of levitation, it sorted her from among its other various types of "makeovers" and simply took her. And others like her. Where or why, we have no idea. Sort of a perverted take on the Evangelical Christian Rapture.

Before she was wrenched, screaming, out of her brother's arms in the tiny back bedroom of a run-down house in Boone's Gap, West Virginia, the changeling Tina spoke of Something in the West—a power, an entity, an Enigma. Something that came into the world with a roar and that now grows in it like a malevolent cancer.

And so, a Quest. Or a monumental game of hide and seek. We seek the Enigma and it…well, it doesn't so much hide as it evades. It's that thing you're certain is behind you in the dark. But a swift about-face only nets you empty air and a dark slither out the corner of one eye.

And whispers.

Since that moment in Manhattan when buildings did not melt and sidewalks did not ripple, I've heard its whispers. Which makes (lucky) me the only one with half a clue about what part of the West the Megillah inhabits. And that's about all I have—half a clue. I listen for it; I hear its Voice and we go. Tag, I'm it. Marco Polo. Games. Rough, deadly games.

Since leaving Boone's Gap our quest has taken us through varied terrain. Quiet pastoral countryside where cows and sheep still graze and watch our passing with little interest. Places where it seemed the earth had erupted in boils, or a giant hand had reached down, dug in, and tried to wrench the bedrock out through the grass and trees and soil. We avoid cities. Cities are places of unimaginable darkness and violence. I suppose they always were, but it's a different kind of violence now, at once more focused and more mindless, soul-deep and brutal.

There's violence of a sort in the country, too. And its effects have been devastating. We've seen ghost towns and ghost suburbs and ghost farms. But nothing like what we saw as Manhattan unraveled like a cheap sweater.

We see other folks ever so often. And ever so often we see not-folks. Ex-people who, like Tina, had their DNA radically rearranged. "Tweaks," Colleen calls them. I prefer "twists"—it's a gentler word. Although there's nothing gentle about what the Change has done to them. People tend to avoid them, and they tend to avoid people. Something I understand, completely.

Most often we don't see them, but merely feel them. Since some of them are rather unpleasant, it pays to be vigilant. You develop a sort of ESP about these things. The sense of being watched creeps over your skin and through your brain like a trickle of freezing water. When this happens, Cal's hand goes to his sword, Colleen's goes to her machete, Doc's makes the sign of the cross. Mine does nothing. At the moment, I carry neither weapons nor gods.

We're traveling on potholed tarmac today as we head for the border between West Virginia and Ohio. Cal and Doc are mounted on fine steeds (Sooner and Koshka, by name), Colleen drives our spiffy home-built wagon, while I ride shotgun. I mean that figuratively, of course. Since the Change, no one I know has yet figured out how to make a shotgun work. This is one of those good news/bad news things.

Our "wagon" is a pickup truck from which the transmission has been removed and the engine compartment gutted back to the firewall. It still has its vinyl-covered seats, but no roof, no windows, no windshield, and sawed-off doors. You can crawl from the front seat right over into the bed. It was, as they say, a find. Only cost us our bicycles and a couple of days work in the bed 'n' breakfast from hell.

Water barrels are ranked outboard down both sides of the truck bed, which has an awning that extends from the tailgate all the way out over the remains of the cab. We roll it down in the event of inclement weather. The whole thing looks a lot like those old World War Two troop transports; only it's a brilliant shade of macintosh yellow. For the first time in many days, the awning is rolled all the way up to the topmost strut of the support framework.

I glance at the sky and realize that's likely to change. It's a chill, cloudy afternoon—unseasonably cold. The sky presses down on the land like a heavy, gray sponge full of rain. Somewhere, there are calendars that say it's autumn, but it feels like half-past winter, and the trees are turning rapidly, as if hurrying to catch up.

Copyright © 2002 by Paper Route, Inc.