Chapter 10: Ray Knows

I could have lied to Lou.

I'd been lying to him since Tuesday, and he'd let me.

"I've done these years once already," I said. "I lived to forty-six. I died on the downtown wall."

Lou looked at the empty freezer for a while.

Then he looked at the padlock with Ray's name on it.

"Who killed you?" he said.

That was the first question, before "how" or "are you crazy."

"Ray."

Lou nodded slowly, like I'd told him a delivery was going to be late.

"Did I make it?" he said.

"You made it to the wall. You told jokes in the soup line for nine years."

"Nine years of my jokes." He put his cap back on. "That's the real apocalypse."

He put his hand on my good shoulder and kept it there.

"Okay, Danny. Let's go home. You're not limping up that alley twice."

Ray came to the church on Tuesday afternoon, alone, in his Carhartt jacket.

He brought two boxes of donuts, and the forty people in the yard looked at the donuts and then at me.

"Relax," Ray said to the yard. "They're from the Tim Hortons on Walden. The whole place is open to the sky, so they're free."

He set them on the rectory steps, and the kids swarmed them.

Then he walked over to the side door, where I was sitting with my bad leg up on a pew cushion.

He sat down next to me.

"Tables on Tuesday," he said. "The Market on Friday night, when everybody else was running for the Thruway. A cold room nobody knew still had power."

He counted them off on his thick fingers.

"A nest in Silo City, the night before it opened."

"You followed us there."