About fifteen minutes in, the van pulled up at the biggest barn I’ve ever seen. Painted on its front it read “Cowtown: Often Imitated Never Equaled.” Next to the giant red barn was a giant red cow. It was distracting enough that I almost lost sight of the van. I pulled into the mostly empty lot and parked a few cars down from my target.
I tried to get a look at the guy. He was wearing a blue denim shirt and a white cowboy hat. His belt was buckled at the base of a tight, round belly. I only got a quick glimpse at his face as he pulled a few big cases out of the back and put them on a hand truck to wheel them inside the massive barn. I waited a couple minutes and then followed him in.
Or I tried to. A young man stopped me. “We’re not open for another half hour.”
“What is this?” I asked, truly perplexed.
“Cowtown,” he said. “It’s a flea market. Open Tuesdays and Saturdays.”
“So all the people currently inside are . . .” I asked.
“Vendors . . . just people setting up.”
“Oh, so this is like a farmers’ market.”
He laughed. “Yeah, it’s like a hundred farmers’ markets in one building. Come on back in a half hour, you’ll have your mind blown.”
—
So that’s how I learned that Carson Communications didn’t own its trucks. In fact, a lot of the technicians that worked for Carson didn’t actually work for them. They were independent contractors and had other gigs. Gigs like, apparently, selling stuff at a giant flea market. I did not come back in a half hour because April May was alive somewhere and searching a giant flea market would not help me find her. I’d already wasted my first morning in South Jersey.
The trouble was, even after I refined my system (only following trucks that went to the dispatch center for supplies first being the main change), there were no patterns.
Trucks went all over the place. Mostly Vineland, because that was the biggest city in the affected range. But also Bridgeton and Glassboro and Salem and Swedesboro and even occasionally back to Wolton. I was getting familiar with the area, which turned out to be equal parts too cute and too weird. I don’t think I’m cut out for small-town life.
At least I had my potato plant, which, yes, at this point still just looked like a big pot of dirt. But I kept it watered and warm. And I had the Dream Bean, which, over the weeks of me following cable repair vehicles, had quickly become a part of my morning routine.
The morning the nightmare came back was also the one-year anniversary of April’s first video. The one-year anniversary of me waking her up in the afternoon with coffee that I knew she was going to hate. The anniversary of my world—and the world—completely losing any anchor it once had. I didn’t want to be bored in a truck alone with my thoughts and radio broadcasts playing “Mr. Roboto” and “Starman,” with DJs loudly joking about the anniversary of the arrival of aliens. I understood why they had to make it a joke—what other choice did we have? I just didn’t want to be there while they did it.
But I also had made my decision, and I was sticking to it.
“Morning, Derek,” I said.
“Hiya, Maya!” He was a good guy, but, like Wolton, a little too cute. It almost seemed like me arriving each day was a dream come true for him. Maybe it was a sign that someday he would have lots of regulars, maybe even regulars who weren’t old people. Maybe his coffee shop could be hip! Even though I’m sure he knew deep down that nothing in Wolton would ever be hip.
“Want anything to eat?”
“Yeah, get me a bagel. Onion.”
“Feeling adventurous.”
“Derek, I don’t think I’m going to work today.”
Derek never asked me about my “job”—I think he felt like it would be rude—but I was glad because I didn’t really want to explain.
“Gonna go see the sights?”
“Are there any?” I smirked.
He laughed. “No, not really. Cowtown? It is Tuesday.”
“I mean, I’ve driven past it. I’ve never been, like, called to enter.”
“Oh my god. Big-city girl, you have no idea what you have been missing.”
“I don’t even really get what it is . . .”
“It’s a farmers’ market, but also a flea market, and also it has weird food. I have no idea why, but it’s kinda a big deal. It’s open on Tuesdays and Saturdays, so you’re in luck. Honestly, I’m sorry I can’t come with you, it’s pretty cool.”
I didn’t think that Derek’s idea of “pretty cool” was likely to be actually cool, but it was something to do at least.
He handed me my latte, and I said, “I guess I’m going to Cowtown.”
I ate my bagel and checked the Som. It was the only social media I used anymore. I privated my Twitter account after April died—I couldn’t handle the 99 percent of people who meant well, much less the 1 percent who didn’t. I mean, Jesus, I understand people didn’t like April, but how does it feel like a winning strategy to go after a recently deceased murder victim? Just a note to everyone: Don’t do that. Even if you’re right, it makes you look wrong. And I had figured out by this point that how things look is more or less the same as how they are. A story caught my eye, one that I’d been ignoring for a while. Not about New Jersey or Philly, but about Puerto Rico.
PETRAWICKI PROJECT NAMED
We’ve been following developments around the secret project Peter Petrawicki [PP] has been building and gathering funding for the last few months. Peter’s obsession with April and fear of the Dream brought him notoriety, and now he has somehow leveraged that into a project that has been hiring [EXT-WIRED-MAGAZINE] at a tremendous rate.
