Relentless

triskelion that matched the one on the windshield sticker. I put Rink’s in my shirt pocket.
    Each of them also had a thin leather wallet, a simple one-fold that held a badge and a laminated credential, with photo, identifying him as an agent of the National Security Agency.
    “You think that’s real?” Penny asked.
    “I’m not sure anything’s what it appears to be anymore except you, me, and Milo.”
    “And Lassie,” Milo said.
    “She appears to be a dog, and she is,” I acknowledged. “But sometimes I’m not sure a dog is all she is.”
    The becalmed sea of fog suddenly began to move, not because a breeze had sprung up, but because the thermal balance between land and sea had tipped in the opposite direction than it had tipped the previous twilight, when I had been walking from Smokeville Pizzeria to our cottage at the motor court.
    The fog flowed from the evergreen forest, across the lay-by, pulled westward by a new tide. As it gained speed, it began again to look more like smoke than like mist. The entire world seemed to be smoldering, evidence of an unseen fire raging just below the surface of things.
    “I think the fog helps us,” I said. “So we better move before the day clears. Remember—Waxx told Brock that any car not obviously one of theirs is going to be stopped, not just at the roadblocks but wherever they encounter it.”
    She said, “But we’ve got one of their sedans, and the triskelion is on the windshield.”
    “They’re looking for Cullen Greenwich, the writer, but he’s got strange hair, and I don’t have any hair at all. They’re looking for a man, woman, and child traveling together, but I’m a man alone.”
    “Alone?” Penny said. “Where are the woman and child?”
    “And the dog?” Milo added.
    “You’ll be riding in the trunk,” I said. “Won’t that be fun?”

   From the lay-by where we abandoned the Mountaineer, I turned south, away from the Landulf house and Smokeville.
    Within moments, a sign announced TITUS SPRINGS —4 MILES . Waxx had told Brock that the southern roadblock was established this side of Titus Springs.
    I traveled less than a quarter of a mile before I began to miss Penny, Milo, and Lassie. I wished that somebody else would have been available to drive, so I could be in the trunk with my family.
    The road rose and fell through geography that might have struck me as grand and harmonious at another time but that seemed portentous now, and as full of pending violence as missiles in their launchers. Every unusual shadow was an augury to be interpreted, the westward-racing fog an omen of fast-approaching chaos, the suffocated morning light a presentiment of mortality. Cedars and hemlocks and pines stood on both sides of the pavement, like rankedarmies waiting only for a trumpet blast to signal the start of an epic engagement.
    A low growl behind me instantly—and irrationally—brought to mind the deformed face of the man in Henry Casas’s painting, but when I glanced over my shoulder with alarm, I saw only our Lassie on the backseat.
    I smiled, said “Good girl,” and returned my attention to the roadway before realizing that Lassie in the backseat was no less astonishing than if the Maserati monster had been there.
    Only a couple of minutes earlier, I had lifted the dog into the trunk of the sedan. I had closed the lid on her.
    Certain that I must have imagined her impossible liberation, I glanced back once more. She grinned at me.
    My confidence in the reliability of my senses was so shaken that when, five seconds later, I decided to check on her presence one more time, I tilted down the rearview mirror with the expectation that a figment of my imagination would cast no reflection. But she regarded me with cocked-head insouciance.
    She had
not
jumped out of the trunk before the lid slammed. I would stake a fortune on that wager.
    Behind me, Lassie again issued a long, low growl.
    Having been saved by something like a miracle when I was six years old, I decided two things: first, that a refusal to accept this phenomenon was not merely healthy self-doubt but was instead cynical skepticism that was unworthy of me; second, that young Milo had some explaining to do.
    The land was repaying its debt of fog to the sea with such dispatch that already I could see much farther than when I had left the lay-by.
    Downhill, on the left, headlights stabbed across the roadway and then arced toward me as an SUV appeared between trees and