The car turned out to be a seven seater Toyota Previa. Slate gray, baked-on dust covering the panels, with a duck tape X over one broken headlight. It'd gone off the road into the ditch, nudging a tree with its nose on the way down, but that looked like it was just the latest in a series of accidents.

Its hood was wedged under a mess of branches, but the ditch wasn't that deep, maybe a couple of feet down from road level, with a soft grassy climb between the depression and the highway. It looked like it would just be able to reverse back out onto the road.

"You sure the engine's good?" Dawn asked.

"Yeah. The engine looks good," the stranger said.

He disappeared around the back of the car and reappeared in the back row, shuffling across the bench seat to stare at us through the window.

Hayden wedged her glowing spear into the roof rack then popped the driver's door and slid behind the wheel. Ben went for the passenger side, but was blocked by Monroe stepping up and pulling weakly at the handle.

"Shotgun," Monroe muttered.

His face was still a mess. Face red from crying, mucus drying on his top lip, but the blank look in his eyes was even worse.

"Monroe. Derek. I need to sit up front to use my thing on the road," Ben said, waggling his bracer. He put a hand on the man's shoulder and guided him to the next door back. "You want to sit back here with Dawn?"

"I want my mom. I want to go find my mom."

"I know. Okay. We'll try and look for her later, after we get out of here."

From somewhere behind them that alien cry came again, a one-note fanfare of vocal trumpets. That more than anything got Monroe moving. He sat in the back passenger seat without protest, dragging his weird purple sword after him.

Ben slammed the door then took the seat at the front, dumping his bag of Target supplies in the foot well.

"Keys are in the cup holder," the stranger called from the car's back seat.

"I really hope this runs," Ben said.

Hayden found the key, slid it home into the ignition, and twisted. The car spent ten seconds making a sound like it was trying to throw up without ever getting there, and then finally gurgled into life, labored, hood grumbling, chassis buzzing, vents blowing gasoline-flavored air into the interior. Hayden put the car into reverse and started easing it backwards, slowly at first, but then faster when nothing bumped or skidded. She pulled it back onto the northbound highway in an easy two-point turn.

"See any teardrops?" Hayden asked the car, scanning the embankments herself.

Ben squished the bean on his bracer, bringing up a tracery of lights over his vision. He surveyed the road, then twisted to turn around and glance backwards. There was a tangle of purple ovals somewhere in the middle distance behind them, a bobbing crowd of teardrop shapes moving towards the noises of the battling colossus like soccer hooligans converging on a fist fight.

Ahead, there was nothing. Nothing in range of the Heaven's Glimpse machine. Just clear road and lightly wooded fields.

"We're good. Let's go," Ben said.

The station wagon took off at a sensible roll, gradually gaining speed until they were doing forty up the mostly empty highway.

Trees and fields swept past. They passed clusters of parked or crashed cars every couple of minutes, all craning their necks to look for anyone still inside. They didn't see people, just emptiness and abandonment, like a department store after closing. Ben took it as evidence of the number of bodies that'd been swept away — Cast into space? Beamed into a void by the Lirral? — Ben didn't have a frame of reference for what'd been done to humanity, except that it had left the Earth a vacant property.

When the colossus was just a raging pair of tentacles above the treeline in the rear mirror, Ben twisted to look back at the guy in the back seat.

"Hi. Thanks for showing us the car back there," Ben said.

"Sure thing. Thanks for the assist getting it back on the road."

"No problem. It didn't really seem stuck."

Ben reached down as he spoke and tweaked the button on his bracer. Lines sprung up over his vision. White outlines around Dawn, Hayden, and Monroe, and the same around the stranger.

"Well, truth be told, I don't really drive stick."

Ben glanced at Hayden for her opinion on that, but she was focused on the road.

"Okay, well, I'm Ben, this is Dawn, Hayden, and this is Derek, but he goes by Monroe."

"Tom Parrish. Great to see some friendly faces."

"Did you get the Lirral spiel back there?" Ben asked.

"I sure did. Let me tell you, I never heard such a load of hokum in my entire life."

The car was coming up on a truck pulled over on the shoulder. Hayden slowed as they got close, giving it as much room as possible, as if monsters were going to burst out through the side panelling the second they got close. She craned her neck as they passed, reading the company logo on the side.

"Grocery truck," she said. "Stop or no stop?"

"You're thinking food supplies?" Ben asked.

"No stop," Dawn called from the back.

"Stop," Ben said.

He figured that the chances of teardrops inside a truck was low, and they were far enough away from the battle between the Lirral and the colossus that the memory of it had merged with the volatile mass of all of the other horrors he'd seen. There'd be a time, soon, when that bundle of nightmares would achieve critical mass and he'd be ground zero for an emotional nuclear detonation, but right now, in the fake normality of a cramped road trip, he could still function.

"Stop," Hayden said, slowing more.

"No stop," Monroe almost shouted, like he didn't have total control over the volume of his voice.

Ben glanced in the side mirror, trying to get a glimpse of Monroe in the seat behind. Monroe wasn't holding it together. He was reaching critical mass. He couldn't function. He needed the fake normality.

"No stop," Ben said. "I'm changing my vote."

Hayden started accelerating again without litigating the decision, breezing past the truck without a second glance.

Ben went into the Previa's glove compartment and found a street atlas and a pack of gummy worms. He tore the packet open first, popping a worm into his mouth, then started flicking through the road map. He opened it to the page with Bowen's Bridge and found their approximate place on the highway.

"Anyone got a pen?" he asked.

Dawn passed him a fat purple marker, and he used it to make an X on the map, labelling it FOOD TRUCK. He spent a few minutes making more notes. Bowen's Bridge visitor center got a label LIRRAL BASE (ATTACKED), and he marked the locations of the other temporary shelters they'd heard listed on the radio. Maine Community College, Brunswick Station, Augusta Airport, he couldn't remember the rest.

"Where are you from, Tom?" Hayden asked while Ben was still writing.

"Rhode Island lately," the man answered. He shifted silently in his seat, peering out of the window like he was looking for a turn-off. "I was up here for some trade work when everything kicked off."

"Yeah? What's your trade?"

"Erecting and dismantling scaffolding."

"We're all office workers," Ben offered, turning the page back to the big map of Maine.

"Not anymore," Dawn said, almost under her breath.

"Your accent's kind of off for Rhode Island," Hayden said.

"Maybe you can hear the West Virginia on me." Tom turned his head to make eye contact with Hayden in the rear mirror. "Spent twelve years in Bridgeport, Fairmont, that area. Probably picked up a little of the twang."

"You got any family?"

Ben glanced across at Hayden. It seemed clear that she was politely interrogating the guy. He shot her a you've got a bad feeling about him? expression, but in her replying glance he saw only dull horror, barely suppressed. It'd only been about five hours since she'd burned and buried Eve, and it'd obviously left a deeper cut than she was showing.

Eve had been a nightmare for Ben, but it'd been the short, violent kind of nightmare. For Hayden it had been the long, quiet, time-to-think kind, with handling dismembered body parts as a bonus feature. She obviously wasn't ready for another Eve.

"Two daughters, seventeen and nineteen," Tom said.

"You think they're alive?" Hayden asked.

"Jesus Christ," Dawn muttered in the back seat.

"If they're not, you know, in space," Tom said, his voice not rising to the provocation. "They're tough little ladies. I'd bet on them before I'd bet on myself."

That seemed to satisfy Hayden, and killed any remaining chance of conversation. Everyone in the car probably had people they were worried about and were now privately asking themself Hayden's question.

Ben had his dad, somewhere in Sherbrooke, or else in space. His dad was not a tough anything, he was a cranky retired English teacher, and he wouldn't last two minutes in a survival situation.

It seemed like ninety-nine percent or better of humanity had just been removed from the planet, so by numbers, the chances were good he'd been one of the people frozen in weird black void stasis. It was enough of a chance to keep Ben functional, to keep the bundle of horror below critical mass.

As the car drove on, the hypnotic motion of the passing landscape and the rumble of the engine put Monroe to sleep in the back seat, and almost let Ben forget some of his worries. The growth on his chest had gone quiet under the cardboard patch. The itching had even faded. Ben didn't let himself think he'd managed to suffocate it to death, because the thought of a dead thing implanted in his skin was even worse than a living parasite.

Monroe snorted in his sleep, breaking the silence in a way that seemed to give everyone else permission to speak.

"Is anyone looking out for a place to stay?" Hayden asked.

"Yeah, I am," Ben said.

"I'm watching the right," Dawn said.

Without really thinking about it, Ben pushed the bean on his bracer. They were passing an open field on the left, and an aqua-blue outline sprang up halfway across it.

Ben sat up in his seat, suddenly alert.

The outlined shape looked like a hairy meatball, but there was nothing actually there in the field to get outlined, just an expanse of low grass.

He let go of the button and peered at the spot, trying to make out if anything was there. He thought he could see a vague blur, like there was a smudge on the window. As the car passed, the smudge started moving across the field after them.

"We might have something on the left," Ben said.

"A house?" Hayden asked.

"No, an alien."

Hayden twisted her head around to look at the field, turning back to face the road almost immediately.

"Can't see it."

The smudge disappeared. Ben double tapped his bracer and saw the blue outline had picked up speed, loping after the car like a no-legged dog chasing a mail truck.

"Yeah, it's seen us," Ben said. "Can we go faster?"

Hayden squished the accelerator to the floor. The car's speedometer crept up. Forty-two. Forty-five. Forty-eight. The car made it up to fifty, sounding mad about it.

The furry invisible ball couldn't keep up. With the way it moved — bounding on an undulating belly, it looked like — it probably wasn't even hitting thirty.

"We're outpacing it," Ben said.

"What is it?" Hayden asked.

"An invisible blob."

"What?" Dawn leaned forward into the front, peering through Ben's window. "They're invisible now?"

Ben pointed out the moving smudge, and they watched as it fell behind them, eventually disappearing when they passed into a wooded stretch.

He did regular scans with the bracer after that. First a few times a minute, then every few seconds. He could have it on for one second every twelve it spent off without it ever totally draining the battery. He figured he'd found the limits of its internal recharge function.

They drove on for twenty minutes, thirty minutes. The road got a little more crowded as they passed Freeport. Cars, vans, and trucks were strewn across the road, piled up, ditched, abandoned. He could have been imagining it, but Ben thought he could see the timing of whatever had happened sketched out.in the chaos of the crashed traffic. It was as if every driver had vanished all at once, and the vehicles had gone on without them, slowing, listing, then crumpling up in their final resting places.

In the outlines drawn by his bracer, Ben could see distant purple shapes flickering to the southeast, teardrops and whatever else now occupied Freeport's west edge. If the shapes were teardrops, and they were the same size as the ones they'd seen in Port Cardigan, then he guessed the Heaven's Glimpse bracer's range was about two-hundred meters.

They made it through the clustered cars easily at first by tacking onto the hard shoulder, but it got harder and harder going the further along they went.

"I'm going to take us off the highway," Hayden said. "We're not finding anything along here. We'll have better luck on the back roads."

Nobody argued, and the car took the next exit, leaving the highway for Mallet Drive, Durham Road, Richards Lane, the little lineless cracked blacktop back-roads that criss-crossed Maine, weaving between deciduous forests, camp grounds, and farms.

With the boredom of a long road trip descending on the car, Ben dug in the bag at his feet for the wind-up radio. He turned it on, finding it still tuned to the taped message directing people towards shelters, even including towards the Bowen's Bridge visitor center. He guessed that with no phones, whatever human had set this up didn't know that it'd been attacked by a tentacled space godzilla. He let it play for a cycle, ...temporary shelters are being organized. Make your way to the following locations... before twisting the tuner and starting another walk through its range, this time on its longer-range AM mode.

After five minutes the radio had given him nothing but static and fizz, punctuated by a few islands of silence where it seemed like something was still broadcasting a signal, just with no sound. He couldn't help but imagine radio studios with the hosts sitting dead in their chairs, surrounded by looming teardrops. Or automated computers, repeatedly and fruitlessly trying to connect to an internet that was down and not coming back up. He went through the entire range then started again, even slower.

The Previa continued to travel as he fiddled with the radio. The back roads had started to throw up likely options almost straight away, lonely inns where the windows were dark in the growing dusk, switched-off gas stations, and sprawling farms. Each time Ben thought about asking if they should stop, but a look at Hayden always dismissed the idea without either of them saying anything. She was driving with single-minded determination, always intent on getting further away from civilization. It was only twenty miles from Freeport to Lewiston, but with a map and half-full gas tank, there was a thousand mile corridor of national park and mountain roads they could take without getting closer than a half mile to built up towns. Eventually the fading light would make the decision for them — there was no way they'd be using the headlights with nebulous unknown threats out there — but until then, Hayden was making the call to keep looking.

The whole car jumped when Ben finally hit something on the radio. It was a sudden, alarming blast of sound, halfway through his second search. Discordant electric tones, weird and startling, full of static and fry.

At first Ben thought they were hearing an alien signal, then the drum and bass tracks kicked in.

"What? What is that?" Tom asked from the back.

"Music," Ben said. "It's just music."

"Who's still playing music?" Dawn said, gazing out through the window.

The song went on for a few minutes. Ben thought he recognized it, but couldn't put a name to it. Monroe snorted himself awake halfway through, but didn't speak, even to ask where they were or where they were going. Finally the song finished, giving way to the smooth voice of a half-baked radio DJ cutting in over the last few fading bars of music.

"That was 'A.M. 180' by Grandaddy, brought to you battery powered and royalty free courtesy of the creepy-crawly cosmic FUBAR brigade. They really pooped our party, didn't they. If you just joined us on the hour you're listening to Radio Chiptune Armageddon-1423 AM, beaming out live for all you ghosts and huddlers out there."

"Is this live?" Dawn asked. "Someone's broadcasting this, right now? Now?"

Ben turned the volume up, feeling a sudden craving to hear a distant voice.

"We've got a great line-up coming to you this evening. Paisley West is here from the defunct Saint John department of animal control to tell us all about the ongoing FUBAR, and we've got the evil spirit inhabiting the restrained body of former chief of police Paul Daniels to give us a run down on all the horrible ways we're going to die. More on that later. Right now, here's some music. This is Autoheart with 'Oxford Blood'."

"Saint John is Canada," Dawn said.

"That's right, New Brunswick," Tom said. He was leaning forward, hands on the corners of the seats in front of him.

The next track started up, and Ben pulled the handle out of the back of the radio and started winding furiously, determined to give the thing enough power to play through the night.

"Can we find somewhere to stop now? I want to hear this," Ben said, still cranking.

"Yeah," Hayden said, not slowing, but looking around.

Before the song had ended they were slowing to check out a cluster of buildings built in the middle of a clearing, a hundred yard patch of cut grass surrounded by aspen forest. It looked like a farm house with a pool and upper deck, and an outbuilding like a barn with a couple of glass windows. There was a pickup truck in the drive and no lights on inside.

Ben remembered a second later about the Heaven's Glimpse and mashed the bean on his bracelet. Lines sprang up, but only the white outlines of people inside the car. There was nothing over the house, the grounds. Nothing in range in the surrounding woods.

"It's empty," he said. "No people. No aliens."

"You sure that thing's reliable?" Dawn asked, meaning the bracer.

"I have no idea."

Hayden parked the car away from the road and shut off the engine. She opened her door quietly and got out, pulling her spear out of the roof rack. Monroe, Dawn, and Ben did the same, dragging bags out from under seats, Monroe holding his dimly glowing purple sword like an umbrella. After a few seconds Tom followed, appearing behind them as they approached the house.

At some point in the last ten minutes the sun had set below the treeline, and they walked towards the house in near-dark. Ben was carrying the flashlight from Target in his bag, advertised as a 350-meter super-bright model, but he didn't want to light it up outside where it would be a beacon for anything with eyes.

He found himself at the front of the group, stepping up to the door with the others a few feet back. He glanced over his shoulder. Everyone was watching expectantly. He faced the door and tried the handle.

The doorknob turned smoothly. There was some resistance as he pushed, the door wanting to stick in its frame, but he put weight on it and it opened with the cracking sound of old paint sticking to itself.

The kitchen was in disarray. Drawers had been opened and left open, cupboard doors were open or ajar. It suggested to Ben that at least someone in the house had survived the ejection, or whatever it was that had zapped so many people away. Whoever it'd been, they weren't there now. He imagined someone rushing around, gathering supplies, before leaving for whatever reason, maybe not knowing what kind of horrors were out there.

Dawn stepped in through the doorway behind him, following him into the kitchen. She saw something in a drawer and pulled out a pack of white wax candles. A second later she'd grabbed a box of matches.

"I'm gonna light some of these," she said.

"Yeah," Ben said. He stepped to the kitchen window and started closing blinds. There were some french windows on the other side of the kitchen that opened on wooden decking, which he lowered the blinds down in front of too.

Tom came in, then Monroe, closing the door behind him.

Monroe looked better than before. He'd wiped his face, his eyes and cheeks weren't red anymore. He was still holding himself, arms wrapped around his body, hands placed over the places where Ben thought the harvestmen had hit him.

Dawn started lighting candles and passing them out, melting the bases into coffee mugs before handing them off. Hayden took one, then Ben. Monroe stared at Dawn's outstretched hand for a second before letting go of his hip to take it.

Tom refused politely, stepping back away from the candle.

"No, no thank you. My hands feel like all the strength's gone out of them. I'll get by in the light from your all's."

Ben glanced back at him. Hayden was giving Tom a hard stare, too.

Light spilled over the kitchen as Monroe opened the fridge, burying his head inside.

"Oh cool, they have go-gurt." He came out of the fridge holding a fistful of plastic tubes, looking around, eyes bright, as if finding yoghurt in the fridge had been enough for him to forget being attacked by alien bugs. "Who wants go-gurt?"

Hayden stared blankly into space for a second, then raised her hand. Monroe tossed her a packet.

"Tom?" Monroe said. He tossed a packet before Tom could say anything.

It sailed through the air. Ben caught a weird momentary expression on the man's face. Alarm, disappointment.

Tom vanished the second the go-gurt packet touched him. Gone. He was just gone. As quick and hollow as a popped soap bubble.

"What," Monroe said. He stood there with strawberry yoghurt leaking from his mouth. "Fucking what. Oh my god." He stepped forward, waving his hands through the space where Tom had been standing.

Ben looked to Dawn, who had an expression on her face like she was absolutely done.

Hayden wasn't reacting, just sucking on her go-gurt tube. Either she'd got acclimatized to impossible surprises really quickly, or she was repressing as hard as Ben.

Monroe turned and started throwing go-gurt tubes at everyone. One bounced off Dawn onto the floor. One hit Ben in the shoulder, which he caught and put down.

"Let's get set up in the den," Ben said, picking up his candle from the counter. "I'll make some cocoa and we can listen to the radio."

Hayden grabbed her spear from where she'd leaned it on the counter. "I'm just going to clear the house. You can get set up without me."

Monroe grabbed his sword and swiped the air where Tom had been a few times.

Ben switched the radio on and the sound of synthesizers being murdered by trashcans filled the room. Carrying the radio, he passed through a set of double doors into the lounge.