What Happened Next

One: An Ordinary Sunday in Masterson

The day the world started to end, it was hot outside. When the sun came up over Masterson that fateful Sunday, nobody could have foreseen the carnage that was about to unfold. Before lunchtime, half the citizens of that sleepy New Hampshire town would be dead.

It was a little after nine, and it was already getting warm out. Dick Carnaby on The Weather Roundup said it would hit a hundred degrees by midday. But nothing seemed out of place in Masterson. It looked like a typical Sunday morning. Sprinklers showered down on luscious green lawns. Songbirds fluttered from one tree to the next. The paperboy peddled through the streets, tossing the Sunday Gazette onto porches. And perhaps most traditionally of all, Milo Winters and his dad were out on the driveway, washing the car - a chore they tackled together every weekend.

Milo's mom had insisted that they both wear their thick-brimmed hats. The ones they used to take fishing, back before Milo became a brooding teenager. But while Milo could give fishing the cold shoulder, he couldn't say no to washing the car with his dad - it was the only condition of his weekly allowance, which he'd been saving up for the latest Goblin Avenger game.

Besides, it wasn't a particularly hard chore. He just had to stand on the driveway and hold the bucket up every time his dad came over to re-dunk his sponge. Bucket holder, as his dad called it, had been Milo's job every Sunday morning since he was too young to remember. He was thirteen that hot, awful day, so he was well-practiced by then.

Milo was scrawny and pale and had an untidy mop of mousy-blonde hair. He wore an oversized white t-shirt, with black lounge pants.

In contrast to his son, Dallas Winters was tall and well-built - the result of many an evening spent with the lifting bench in the garage. His hair was dark, and he wore it in a crew cut. He had an all-year-round tan even though he spent most of his time in the office, and he wore ugly, tinted glasses that went brown in the sun.

'Binko, play The Berries,' Dallas said as he dunked his sponge into Milo's bucket.

The smart speaker he'd set down on the lawn started to play. The Berries were a little-known and even-littler-appreciated barbershop band from the sixties. Dallas had become obsessed with them after hearing them on Throwback Hour on Radio Six. Now he played them on loop: while driving round town in the Mamba, while mowing the backyard, while working out, even while washing the car on a Sunday morning.

Milo watched his dad run the sponge over the car's hood. The suds turned crusty white the second they touched the Mamba's skin, and vapor drifted softly upwards into the hot morning air.

That car was his most treasured possession. It was a classic red sportster (Volcanic Red, if Dallas was to correct you) from the late seventies. He'd gotten it five years back when it came up for auction at Riley's Motor House, down on Benvale Street.

He knew he shouldn't have bought it, but when his dad died, it triggered something in him, and he felt like life was too short not to treat yourself once in a while. So he went down to the bank and withdrew half his retirement pot (even though he was still a good thirty years off retiring).

'I'll have three long decades to build it back up,' he told his wife, but she wasn't the biggest fan of that reasoning.

That was all ancient history now, though. Milo's mom had gotten over it, in the end. She even admitted it was a nice car. She might mention the whole debacle, though, once in a while if Dallas ever questioned some lavish online purchase of hers. Remember the time you spent half your retirement fund on that fucking car? He'd bite his tongue pretty quickly.

The Berries suddenly cut off, and a news reporter began broadcasting, 'More casualties are being brought into emergency rooms across the states, with as yet undiagnosed symptoms. The strained services are urging you to...'