Friday, August 5, 2:44 PM. Brewer.

We are resting an hour or so before loading up and heading back to Dallas. Things have taken a turn for the weird and I need to think this through.

We made good time yesterday—too good as it turned out. Downhill hiking is always deceptive. It seems easy and fast, but as Claire discovered, the danger of twisting your ankle is as great as ever. I thought it might be broken but it’s probably just sprained. “Just” sprained, but you can tell it hurts pretty bad.

At first I encouraged her to walk it off. Sometimes the best way to get through an injury is to ignore it. But when she tried, it became clear that it was a serious sprain and putting weight on it would be a mistake. She’s not one for whining but it hurt enough that she shed tears. We stopped there for the night and let her rest.

I carried her the rest of the way this morning. She’s pretty tall for ten years old and still has some baby fat, but not too much trouble to carry on my back. We planned to find her a doctor when we got back into town. Garrett was a trooper, hauling the tent so I could handle her. That was a big job for him. At home he doesn’t do much but play video games, he’s on the scrawny side, and that tent weighs forty pounds or more.

We reached Sawtooth about noon. She still couldn’t walk, but the pain had subsided and the swelling wasn’t any worse. We were all in good spirits, tired, and ready for a decent, civilized restaurant meal.

The town looks like it did when we left on Sunday. There are cars parked here and there. We didn’t see anybody. We put our things into the van—it was still safe in the parking lot—and trudged over to “Betty Lou’s” for as much BBQ as we could eat. Claire’s ankle was good enough, and her stomach growling enough, that the doctor could wait a bit.

The door to the restaurant was open. We came inside. But it was very strange: nobody was here. (We’re back in the restaurant now, lying down on seats across a few different booths.) We called out. We called back into the kitchen. Nobody. Amy said, “I guess it’s closed Fridays. Maybe this is one of those towns where nobody locks anything.” So we went back out and she sat in the van with the smaller ones while Garrett and I looked for the doctor’s office and for somewhere else to eat. The donut shop across the way was closed, of course. Too late in the day. Shotgun Jim’s looked promising, but when we got there we found it was in the same state as Betty Lou’s. Open but empty.

All this time we had seen nobody. For all the world it looked like a normal town on a Friday afternoon, but there were no pedestrians, and isn’t it a bit of a tourist Mecca? We looked inside the ski shop. The lights were off, nobody there. We found the doctor’s office but it was locked up. We looked at the hiking store. I thought about buying a sprain kit for Claire, but again the place was open, dark, and empty.

Garrett is not the most expressive of fellows, and I was trying to demonstrate calm and confidence, but it was pretty clear we were both frightened.

On the way back to our van we passed the gas station. Same story.

When we got back I told Amy everything we’d seen. She went white. Before anybody could get too scared, Trevor suggested maybe there was a festival. Maybe the whole town was over in some park breaking piñatas and cutting ribbons or something. That helped us feel a little better at least. Claire was back on her Nintendo—which in other circumstances I wouldn’t of approved—and it kept her distracted and oblivious.

Just past the van is a hotel. I sent Garrett to check it. He reported back that it was empty too, and here again the power was off. While he did that, I checked Betty Lou’s again to see if there was any food around. There is, so we all came over and that’s where we are now. There’s some prepackaged stuff, and in the kitchen there are a couple of cold crocks of soup that still seem good. I can’t tell how long they’ve been sitting there but it can’t be more than a few days. So we’re eating that and I left thirty bucks on the countertop. Gotta eat something.

Could it be that the town had some sort of electrical problem that hit in the last few days? Maybe a rock slide or a forest fire has knocked out the power station. Maybe—hopefully not—the outage is all over the region. That would explain our cell problems. People could have evacuated or just gone over to neighboring towns that still have power. But then, if that’s right, where is the sound of generators? In a place like this, a few people would stay back, and they’d own generators. We haven’t seen a soul.

Could it be a gas leak, or something nuclear, that drove everybody far away?

I guess we’d better get going.