On a clear October day, the American skies empty after hundreds of pilots refuse to fly, triggering a complete ground stop as authorities seek to explain an act of baffling coordination that the pilots insist was anything but planned. The pilots received disturbing, middle-of-the-night calls from their mothers, and each mother had a simple and urgent request: do not fly today.
There are a few concerning elements to the calls. None of the mothers remember making them—and some of the mothers are dead.
While the nation’s military chiefs and artificial intelligence experts mobilize in search of answers, a sixteen-year-old girl named Charlie on the coast of Maine watches a strange, silvery balloon drift across the water and toward her home—a place she loathes. Her father’s dream of opening a craft brewery on an old airfield has been a disaster, and all she wants is an escape back to Brooklyn.
She’s about to get much more than that.
Her new home is ground zero for a story that begins at a remote naval base in Indiana during the winter of 1962, when a physicist named Martin Hazelton discovered something extraordinary—and deadly. All Hazelton wanted was time to seek an explanation, but pressure from both American and Russian actors forced him into a perilous race.
Moving between the two characters and timelines, Scott Carson deftly weaves Cold War espionage with contemporary terror in a story that explains why #1 New York Times bestseller Joe Hill has declared himself “a fan for life.”
On a clear October day, the American skies empty after hundreds of pilots refuse to fly, triggering a complete ground stop as authorities seek to explain an act of baffling coordination that the pilots insist was anything but planned. The pilots received disturbing, middle-of-the-night calls from their mothers, and each mother had a simple and urgent request: do not fly today.
There are a few concerning elements to the calls. None of the mothers remember making them—and some of the mothers are dead.
While the nation’s military chiefs and artificial intelligence experts mobilize in search of answers, a sixteen-year-old girl named Charlie on the coast of Maine watches a strange, silvery balloon drift across the water and toward her home—a place she loathes. Her father’s dream of opening a craft brewery on an old airfield has been a disaster, and all she wants is an escape back to Brooklyn.
She’s about to get much more than that.
Her new home is ground zero for a story that begins at a remote naval base in Indiana during the winter of 1962, when a physicist named Martin Hazelton discovered something extraordinary—and deadly. All Hazelton wanted was time to seek an explanation, but pressure from both American and Russian actors forced him into a perilous race.
Moving between the two characters and timelines, Scott Carson deftly weaves Cold War espionage with contemporary terror in a story that explains why #1 New York Times bestseller Joe Hill has declared himself “a fan for life.”
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Overview
On a clear October day, the American skies empty after hundreds of pilots refuse to fly, triggering a complete ground stop as authorities seek to explain an act of baffling coordination that the pilots insist was anything but planned. The pilots received disturbing, middle-of-the-night calls from their mothers, and each mother had a simple and urgent request: do not fly today.
There are a few concerning elements to the calls. None of the mothers remember making them—and some of the mothers are dead.
While the nation’s military chiefs and artificial intelligence experts mobilize in search of answers, a sixteen-year-old girl named Charlie on the coast of Maine watches a strange, silvery balloon drift across the water and toward her home—a place she loathes. Her father’s dream of opening a craft brewery on an old airfield has been a disaster, and all she wants is an escape back to Brooklyn.
She’s about to get much more than that.
Her new home is ground zero for a story that begins at a remote naval base in Indiana during the winter of 1962, when a physicist named Martin Hazelton discovered something extraordinary—and deadly. All Hazelton wanted was time to seek an explanation, but pressure from both American and Russian actors forced him into a perilous race.
Moving between the two characters and timelines, Scott Carson deftly weaves Cold War espionage with contemporary terror in a story that explains why #1 New York Times bestseller Joe Hill has declared himself “a fan for life.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781982191504 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Atria/Emily Bestler Books |
| Publication date: | 08/05/2025 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
1. Ash Point, Maine: October 25, 2025 <figure> ASH POINT, MAINE OCTOBER 25, 2025
“People like to talk about UFOs when they talk about Ash Point,” the sunburned man with the wild white hair said, facing the camera squarely but keeping his eyes downcast. “That’s nonsense. But the danger isn’t.”
His eyes came up, found the camera, and held it.
“Instead of looking for trouble from another world,” Abe Zimmer said, “folks would be well advised to look closer to home.”
“Love it,” Charlie Goodwin said from behind the camera. “Perfect, Abe. That’s gold.”
The old man’s stern face fractured into a smile that made his previous intensity seem imagined.
“You sure? I never like seeing myself on camera.”
“That’s why you have me,” Charlie said, and she paused the video and stepped away from the tripod on which her iPhone rested, facing the old pilot and the rusty, eight-foot-high chain-link fence behind him, which was adorned with weather-beaten signs warning away trespassers, promising criminal charges, and asserting the authority of the federal government. Beyond the fence was a long ribbon of runway, the only part of the facility that looked fresh, with unmarred asphalt, repaved every two years on the taxpayer’s dime. The handful of low-slung concrete buildings that flanked the runway were abandoned, their steel doors draped with chains and padlocks, the windows boarded up.
Welcome to Ash Point, Maine, property of the Office of Naval Research.
Charlie Goodwin, seventeen-year-old cinematographer in the making, hated everything about the place except for the stories. Well, the stories and the view. If she turned away from the runway and the rusted fence, she’d be facing the breathtaking vista of the North Atlantic, waves breaking on granite ledges beneath a cobalt sky. Abe Zimmer’s tall tales were better than the view, though, and filming them helped keep Charlie, a Brooklyn kid from birth who’d been forced to move to rural Maine by her father less than six months ago, from losing her mind and hitchhiking home. She’d picked up 10,000 followers since posting her first conspiracy video. The public loved a paranoid old man, and Abe Zimmer looked straight out of central casting.
“Ignore the camera,” she instructed him. “Be natural: Let your eyes go where they want.”
It was more effective when Abe didn’t look into the camera. He had the keen squint of the former pilot he’d once been. Watching that gaze flash around the desolate old base was by turns compelling and hilarious, as was the way he’d lower his voice to a dramatic whisper before asking a rhetorical question.
“Should I start with the construction of the base?” he asked.
“No, I want the story of the wreck. The anniversary is coming up. That’s when we’ll have the most views.”
Abe scowled. “You told me you were going to do a real documentary, like Ken Burns, not that TikTok shit that the communists want our eyes on.”
Damn it, why wasn’t she recording? That was a perfect line: she could see viewers jamming index fingers as they hit “Subscribe.”
“The social channels are samples for crowdfunding, Abe. You know this.”
He grunted, spat into the weeds. He was dressed in faded jeans and an olive T-shirt that said BUFF Brewing and had the silhouette of a B-52 soaring over a pint glass. Between the shirt and the windblown white hair, he couldn’t have been styled better, and she hadn’t even had to ask. Natural content—that was Abe Zimmer.
“Yeah, yeah, funding,” he said. “Okay, so I just talk you through the wreck like you’ve never friggin’ heard about it?”
“Exactly like that.”
He sighed, and she thought she was about to lose him, so she pressed: “We’ll finish in the taproom. Dad told me there’s fresh Tail Gunner on tap.”
“Well, let’s quit bullshitting and get on with it, then,” Abe said.
Tail Gunner IPA was what held Charlie captive to this place, although nobody had paid a dime for one yet. Her parents had been determined to turn their love of craft beer into a career. There were a few hitches to the plan. Foremost: Charlie’s mother was the brewer, and she was dead. Her dad grasped the chemistry and had the formulas that her mother had left behind from years of study, but there was a difference between having your grandmother’s recipe card and her pie, or between holding blueprints and drawing them. Talent was not a chain-of-title possession.
How did you explain this to your own grieving father?
Not that Charlie hadn’t tried. Oh, how Charlie had tried.
The whole idea was madness. No matter how wonderful the beer was—Charlie’s limited sampling suggested it was adequate but not exceptional, and her palate was already more refined than her dad would dare to consider—his chosen location was a clinical example of stupidity. Even in peak summer season, Ash Point was remote for tourist travel, more than an hour north of Bar Harbor and Acadia, a desolate peninsula in what was known as “Downeast” Maine, a reference that had something to do with the way wind currents carried sailors downwind and to the east even as they traveled north, into colder and emptier waters.
It was there, on tall cliffs above those cold, empty waters, that BUFF Brewing was to be born. Its success formula: cold beer and old planes. The “BUFF” in question was the B-52 Stratofortress, and Charlie Goodwin had been young when she learned that the nickname “BUFF” did not, in fact, stand for “Big Ugly Fat Fellow” but “Big Ugly Fat Fucker.” Her mother taught her this. Dana Goodwin, maiden name Hightower, had been a military brat, growing up on Air Force bases, and her grandfather had achieved a moment’s notoriety for the inauspicious achievement of flying a B-52 right into the side of a Maine mountain.
Oops!
That had been the title of the first of Charlie’s TikTok and YouTube videos featuring the wreck site.
The story of the B-52 had faded from the public consciousness in a blink, but it lingered in Hightower family lore. This generations-old tragedy was what led Charlie’s father, fresh off his own tragedy, to pack up his daughter and move to Maine. He was addicted to grief, not alcohol. The potential brewery had been his wife’s dream, and why should a little thing like her death get in the way of that? Then kismet happened: Greg Goodwin encountered Abe Zimmer. In the type of plan that could only be formed while consuming alcohol, Greg and Abe agreed to a brewery and museum hybrid. The people would come for the beer, but they would learn of the forgotten heroes.
It would have remained talk, as the geographic cure usually should, until Dana died and Greg began to blame the city itself for her death.
He and Charlie left Brooklyn in June, arriving in Maine to impossibly cold weather for the first month of summer, and although Charlie was outraged, she strived for patience. She knew the move was born of heartbreak. She had tried to go along. She really had. The videos were a lifeline, and her father didn’t appreciate them, because he thought they were making light of sacred history. But good news today: Greg was gone. Her dad was off for a brewing festival in Wisconsin, and that meant Charlie had the whole weekend to shoot.
She wasn’t about to waste it.
“Roll on three,” she told Abe, counted three beats, then gave him a closed fist to indicate she was filming. None of this technique was real, but it sounded real, and that was all she needed to sell Abe on her legitimacy.
He began to stroll beside the rusty fence and the freshly paved runway, moving quickly, his wiry frame seeming built for speed. He was shorter than Charlie, but he always swelled up and announced that he was perfect pilot height.
Those poor tall bastards can’t handle the g-forces like me, he would say. He was infinitely proud of his posture, and the ramrod bearing made him seem almost as tall as Charlie, who was five nine.
“Date was October 28, 1962,” he said. “Everyone was worrying about the shit going down in Cuba, but locals who were paying attention were also keeping an eye on Ash Point. Because, for a supposedly closed facility, it was awfully friggin’ busy. They’d added an electrified fence. You can still see the conductors.”
He pointed, and Charlie pivoted to capture the end of the lane that led off down the peninsula, the blues and grays of the coast tapering to dark layers of pines pressing close to the road.
“Now you tell me, why does the Navy add an electric fence and guard tower to a closed facility?” Abe asked. “Doesn’t take a detective to answer that question. During the Cuban missile crisis, this airfield was as busy as a New Orleans whorehouse on Mardi Gras.”
Thank you, internet gods, Charlie thought. You have smiled upon me. I can already see the merch.
“Now, it had been Indian summer, about like you see today,” Abe continued, striding ahead. “Clear blue skies, warm temperatures, the whole bit. Then came the twenty-eighth, and the clouds started to come in. After the clouds?”
He sneaked a glance at the camera, unable to help himself.
“After the clouds came the plane,” he said, voice dropping. “Tail number was 60-3730, but the name was the Loring Loonatic, spelled like the bird. They had the paint job on the cockpit, you know, to personalize the plane. The bomber was based at Loring Air Force Base in Aroostook County, near Limestone, up in border country, nothing around but hundreds of miles of forest, some owned by the timber companies, some owned by the government, and maybe—probably—some owned by both.”
Yes, yes, yes! Charlie wanted to shout. She had to bite her lip to keep from smiling. Abe needed the audience to take him seriously or he’d grow petulant. You couldn’t laugh during one of his tall tales. He demanded credulity.
Abe reached out to trace the old fence with his fingertips as if summoning memories.
“When Ash Point was built, they said it was a radar station. Well, you tell me: Why does a radar station need a runway like that?”
He paused and gestured at the expanse of tarmac.
“We knew they were up to something, likely had to do with Loring and the North River Depot and nuclear weapons. There were a hundred different spook projects going on in the woods up here in Maine, what with us being so far away from watching eyes, and the locals being known as a discreet type.”
Charlie fought the smile back again. Abe Zimmer loved to describe Mainers as the original mind-your-own-business breed—even while gossiping about everything he’d ever heard, new or old.
“The storm that blew in that October was like nothing I’d seen before and nothing I’ve seen since. We’re used to rough weather. A nor’easter is no more exciting than a cloudburst to us. But what they had that day was the type of storm modern folks would call a ‘bomb cyclone.’ One of those hundred-year storms that seem to happen every other damn day, but now people can’t seem to remember last week, let alone last year.”
Charlie made a beckoning gesture, trying to keep him on track. Once Abe got going about the way society had changed, he was liable to run her out of battery before he got back to the plane wreck.
“Ayuh, so Indian summer turned to a black sky and fifteen-foot swells,” Abe said. “The wind was howling, and first there was sleet, and then there was snow, and then... then came the B-52.”
He turned and eyed the hillside as if he were watching the plane descend all over again.
“She came in roaring and never slowed.” He made a steep sweeping motion with his hand. “You could hear the impact for miles, and if you lived close enough, like I did, you could feel it in your bones, right in your gut. My father and an old boy named Norbert Cyr jumped into a Jeep and drove for the wreck site. I went with ’em.”
This time the pause didn’t seem intended for drama. It felt reflective. Charlie was about to nudge Abe when he spoke again.
“We found the only survivor,” he said. “He’d ejected, but his chute didn’t deploy. His ejection seat landed in a thicket of pines that all collapsed inward...”
He made a gesture with both hands, bending his fingers toward one another.
“And he stuck right up at the top. We fished him out. Hadn’t so much as had a chance to begin looking for the others when the boys from the base showed up. DARPA, although it was called ARPA back then. Now listen: the man we found was alive. Looked right at me with the brightest blue eyes I’ve ever seen, before or since. Then the military claimed him and next thing you know, there were no survivors at all. They said everyone had ejected and been lost at sea. But I know what I saw! And it’s past time that someone admitted why Ash Point still exists at all, inactive but under military control. Take a look at that runway.”
Charlie panned over the clean tarmac as the easterly breeze scoured dust across its surface.
“The Navy repaved that last year,” Abe said. “Same as they have every two years for the past six decades. Now you tell me: Why would they do that?”
“Cut,” Charlie said. “Perfect, Abe. Perfect.”
They crossed the cracked asphalt and entered the BUFF Brewing taproom, which had once been a service station built by an enterprising local on the one road that led to the airfield at the end of the remote peninsula. Once the military moved out, the service station and the saltbox-style house behind it were left behind like battlefield casualties. When the property came up for sale, it stayed up for sale. Time went by, the property price plummeted, and Greg Goodwin’s therapy sessions did little for his grief or his growing paranoia about the city. No crime rate data could deter him from an overwhelming fear—not after his wife picked the wrong store on the wrong day. Coincidental tragedy wasn’t something he could wrap his head around; Dana’s death had to mean something, and he decided it meant the city was rotten and his duty as a protector was to remove his daughter from the threat.
Where to go?
Off to chase a dead woman’s dreams.
They’d moved in three years after Dana Goodwin’s death, and the meager solace that time had provided to Charlie evaporated with the transition to the strange place. Now she lived in an apartment above a brewery that wasn’t even open, adjacent to an airfield that hadn’t functioned in decades. Everything about Ash Point revolved around an absence. She needed only to endure two semesters and escape to college. Survive and advance, she told her friends back home. It was like a tournament—or a prison sentence.
When she followed Abe Zimmer into the taproom, she saw Lawrence Zimmer waiting on a barstool and had to hide a grimace.
Lawrence was Abe’s grandson, Charlie’s classmate at beautiful Cold Harbor High, a school whose mascot was—you couldn’t make this shit up—the Crustacean Sensation. Lawrence would regularly wear his letter jacket with the cartoon logo of a muscular lobster across the back, and he didn’t even wear it ironically. He was one of those Go, team! Hoo-rah! guys who seemed like he was auditioning for a reboot of Happy Days or some shit. Potsie Weber with a fishing boat. He wasn’t unattractive—actually, he’d probably be cute if he didn’t have a buzz cut that suggested he was in ROTC, tall and broad shouldered, built like a basketball player. He had strong features, a nice smile, and observant eyes that were a lovely shade of blue—downright pretty, in fact. The only problem with Lawrence was just... him. His door-opening, Pardon me, miss behavior, his thoughtful silence in the classroom paired with enthusiastic clapping at the pep rallies, made him feel like as much of a caricature as the lobster mascot on his jacket. The most infuriating thing about him, Charlie thought, was the way he always watched the new girl as if he were rooting for her, as if she were a cause that needed a champion.
Gross.
“Where have you been?” Lawrence asked his grandfather. He acted like a chaperone to Abe. His father had joined the merchant marine and stayed gone, and his mother, Abe’s daughter, taught first grade. Charlie had never seen the father, but Lawrence surely had inherited his height from that side of the family, because he towered over his grandfather and seemed to feel that the extra inches granted him superiority. He was always checking on how many beers Abe had enjoyed and giving little sighs of disapproval.
“Been telling stories you should know by heart, if you bothered to pay attention,” Abe said breezily.
“Is she letting you review them before she posts them?” Lawrence asked. He had notebooks spread out on the bar in front of him, an iPad propped above those, immersed in homework. If he wasn’t practicing for one of the three sports he participated in, he was studying, like a bot designed to replace a normal teen.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Charlie said.
“If it’s his story, seems like he should get a say in how it’s shared.”
“He’s the one telling it!”
“But you’re editing it.”
“And to think,” Charlie said, “most people would say your grandpa is the conspiracy theorist of the family.”
“It’s not a theory. The editor is more important than the—”
“Oh, hush,” Abe said. “It’s all to the good of the cause. TikTok will win the day for the communists if we let them, sure, but before that happens, I might as well raise some money for the museum.”
“Right,” Lawrence said. “The museum.”
He and Charlie both glanced at the vaunted museum space. It consisted of a roped-off area featuring a dozen framed black-and-white photographs, two rusty props from an unknown plane, and the signature piece: a B-52 ejection seat. A hulking piece of olive-colored metal with a red headrest, drab harness belts, yellow levers, and footrests that looked like something from a wheelchair designed by Satan, the ejection seat was Abe Zimmer’s prize. He was convinced that it would bring paying tourists and hadn’t taken kindly to Charlie’s suggestion that they charge five bucks to tip people backward in the seat and pour tequila shots down their throats to turn the old wreck into a moneymaker.
“I saw that done with an old dentist’s chair once,” she’d said, a regrettable confession that led to a conversation with her father about where, exactly, she had encountered a dentist’s chair and a tequila bottle. Charlie maintained her standard excuse: TikTok. Everything was on TikTok! Gosh, Dad!
“We’re gonna demo the ejection sequence here shortly, but first I need to wet my whistle,” Abe said, heading around the bar.
“It’s not even nine in the morning,” Lawrence said.
“He’s a grown-up,” Charlie said. She couldn’t stand Lawrence’s holier-than-thou attitude. He was so earnest all the time. Not good video content. “Dad just put fresh Tail Gunner on tap, Abe. He wanted your opinion.”
“See! Drinking’s not a problem if it’s a profession,” Abe said, grabbing a mug and heading for the tap handles.
“Is your dad off for his brewing festival?” Lawrence asked, regarding Charlie through solemn blue eyes that always held the expression of a judge on the verge of issuing a bench decree.
“It’s a business conference,” Charlie said. “They determine the proper pricing of different hops and malts and discuss commodities.”
“Is he flying or driving to the business conference?”
“Are you auditing his expenses?”
“No. But if he’s flying today, he’ll be delayed.”
Charlie blinked. “What?”
“There’s been a big ground stop. Nationwide. It was on TV all morning.”
“Huh?”
“A ground stop is when the FAA—”
“I know what it is!”
“Well, there’s one today. A software glitch or systems trouble or something. Full national stop.”
“Your dad will be just fine.” Abe waved a hand impatiently at his grandson as if he didn’t want Lawrence agitating Charlie. The idea that she might be considered emotionally tender was annoying.
“I’m not saying he won’t be fine,” Lawrence said. “It’s just that—”
“I’m not worried; I just want to know what’s going on,” Charlie snapped. The truth of it was that she was worried—a little.
Lawrence shrugged. “I didn’t read all of it.”
“I thought you said you saw it on TV?”
“Yep.”
“Do you read the TV?”
“I do when it’s muted and the captioning is on,” he said evenly.
Abe tipped his mug at the 45-degree angle that he claimed allowed for the perfect pour, pulled the tap handle forward, and began to fill the mug with beer.
“Probably was TikTok that caused the problem,” he said. “Infected the systems. Chinese aggression. You can’t say I didn’t call it.”
Charlie picked up the remote control and turned on the TV that was mounted in the corner of the room.
“What’s CNN out here?” She didn’t watch much TV, just used her phone and iPad.
“Oh, put on the real news, not that godless BS!” Abe barked, and Charlie heard Lawrence sigh softly.
“It’s 232,” he said.
Charlie punched in the channel and dropped the remote back onto the bar, prepared to have to wait for the FAA story to cycle back up in the breaking news, if they hadn’t already moved on for good.
There was no wait.
“What is the price of one sick pilot?” a blond female anchor asked the camera. “Not much. But what is the price of five hundred sick pilots? According to the Nasdaq, S&P 500, and Dow Jones Industrial, billions of dollars and counting. Trading indexes are plummeting this morning as news of the callout effort by pilots for all major American carriers began. The Air Line Pilots Association has adamantly denied that this is a coordinated labor effort, but no one is saying what else it might be. All we understand is that the impact will be felt by a lot of Americans today, as the FAA has now implemented a full ground stop while officials assess this situation. All departures have ceased nationwide.”
That explains the clear sky, Charlie thought, remembering how empty and blue it had been outside: no contrails from jets out of Logan or Bangor or Halifax.
“The White House and Pentagon have not responded to requests for comment, although we are being promised a briefing is forthcoming. Every major American carrier is affected. It’s too early to say what is happening right now, but it is not too early to say travelers are dealing with a major headache.”
The camera cut away from the news desk to show the Minneapolis airport, and then Phoenix, and then Houston. The terminals were packed with frustrated people, almost everyone looking at a phone or talking into one, some people sitting on the floor.
“That’s enough of that,” Abe announced, and muted the TV. “We don’t need to worry the girl, Lawrence.”
“The girl is not worried,” Charlie said. “Just curious.”
She had to stop herself from taking out her phone to text her dad, though. In the weeks after her mother’s murder, she’d texted him constantly when he was away from home, and now she blamed that in part for her existence in Ash Point. If she’d been braver at the start, maybe he wouldn’t have overreacted to the city’s dangers.
“For the record,” Abe said, “fear is a wonderful thing. American resilience is rooted in our capacity for alarm. It’s one of the great strengths of our national character. Why, think of Paul Revere.”
“Paul Revere had real news to deliver,” Lawrence observed. “He wasn’t alarmed; he was reporting facts.”
“You’re missing the point, grandson. Negative thinking encourages preparation.”
“Quick,” Charlie said, “let’s start digging a bunker.”
“You laugh now, but someday you won’t. Your generation has immediate knowledge but no wisdom.”
“But the problem with your generation—” Charlie began, and Lawrence cut her off.
“Please, please, don’t feed the beast,” he moaned.
Charlie ignored him. “The problem with your generation is that you’re alarmed by the wrong things. Your capacity for alarm has exceeded the demand.”
“Give me one example.”
“Pronouns,” Charlie said, and then fluttered her hands overhead like a ghost from Scooby-Doo: Wooo-oooo-ooo!
“Pfft.” Abe waved her off. “I leave that bullshit for unsophisticated thinkers. What I’m trying to tell you people, Generation Snore or whatever you call yourselves, is that you can’t sleepwalk through a nightmare.”
Charlie and Lawrence exchanged a puzzled glance.
“I think you can,” Charlie said. “If you’re sleepwalking, there’s an inherent chance that your dream is a nightmare.”
“Horseshit! Dreams come during REM sleep, when the body is paralyzed.”
“I don’t even know what we’re talking about anymore,” Lawrence said.
“The great gift of fear,” Abe said, pulling the tap handle again, topping his mug of morning beer. “If you maintain a proper skepticism of all things—the Big G not excepted—then you’re prepared for trouble. You kids aren’t ready for trouble because you’ve never seen it. Hell, you were born after 9/11. You have no memory of vulnerability. That’s a dangerous way to live.”
“Wait—are we supposed to be afraid for the government or afraid of it?” Charlie asked.
“Both,” Abe replied without hesitation.
“That’s just paranoia.”
“Nah,” Abe said. “If you’re alarmed about enough things, one of them is bound to be right eventually.”
Charlie couldn’t help but laugh. “There’s a T-shirt slogan.”
Lawrence didn’t seem to share her amusement.
“You came in here to film, didn’t you?” he said.
“Roger that,” Abe said, setting down his mug, beer foam flecking his mustache. He went to stand beside the ejection seat while Charlie adjusted her tripod.
“Okay, Abe,” she said, “tell us a little bit about the rumors surrounding Ash Point.”
“Hell, there were all kinds of rumors. You know how it goes in a small town. Or I suppose you don’t, since you get all your news from videos. But there was a time when people had to gossip face-to-face. Dark days, I know.” He belched, then wiped his mouth. “We can talk rumors later; let’s get to the ejection sequence. We need some action. Lawrence, man your post.”
When Lawrence stood up from the bar and walked to the ejection seat, Charlie saw he was wearing his letter jacket, the big, muscular cartoon lobster grinning at the world from his back. She snickered. The Crustacean Sensation. Her followers would love that.
As Lawrence fastened the harness belts that secured him to the ejection seat and then placed his feet into the ankle collars that restrained his legs, looking like Hannibal Lecter being denied a snack, Charlie was immersed in the task of filming, oblivious to the muted TV behind her. She had fans to worry about. Content didn’t generate itself. They’d reboot the FAA system and get the planes in the air, her dad would head home, and all would be well.
Later, she would remember that feeling as if it had belonged to another girl in another life.