Friday, August 12, 10:30 PM. Brewer.

Bit of a milestone today. I was able to find a Geiger counter at an Army surplus store. I’ve been concerned that the reason no one’s around could be that they’ve all evacuated. That in itself would be good news: it means they’re out there somewhere. The bad news would be that we’re still here, living with whatever it is they evacuated from.

What could be present in an area to require everyone to leave?

It could be poisonous air, but you would think that would have affected us already. If not us then the animals.

Could be radiation. If bombs had gone off you’d get a mass evacuation to escape the fallout. If a thermonuclear plant had melted down you’d get a lot of radiation and a mass evacuation. It doesn’t exactly match what we’re seeing but who knows? I was concerned that we might be getting irradiated every day without knowing it and wouldn’t know until we got sick.

Now I know it’s not true. The Geiger counter is showing perfectly normal readings all around the Dallas area.

Of course, the danger could be something else, something I haven’t thought of or don’t even know about. “Tachyon beams” or neutrinos or who knows what. It could even be something that hasn’t happened yet, a bomb that’s yet to go off.

The truth is, I’m not that worried about an invisible danger. The Geiger counter just confirmed what I was already pretty sure was true. I don’t think the population evacuated. It doesn’t look like an evacuation around here. There are no big lines of abandoned cars, no signs of chaos, no bodies. We haven’t seen a human body, dead or alive, in two weeks. If there’s a big mass of Texans waiting in Canada for the air to clear, you’d think we’d see planes going over at least a little. Planes wouldn’t be worried about poison on the ground or maybe even radiation. We’ve seen no planes. That means one of two things. Either no planes want to come here. Or there are no planes going anywhere.

The Geiger counter put my mind at ease in one way. It took away one source of urgency for getting out of Dallas. But my mind is far from at ease. We still haven’t decided whether to go on the road or to settle here. We’ve been busy taking care of the emergencies of the moment. But we have to make a decision soon.