On the outskirts of Houston there were apparently places where the big radial freeways leading into and out of the metropolis were equipped with crossover lanes that could, with the flip of a switch, be shunted into a special evacuation mode. A freeway that normally had, say, five lanes going into the city and five going out would suddenly become a one-way, ten-lane behemoth, a fire hose of traffic aimed outward into the higher and dryer hinterlands. Or, given that it was Houston, maybe the correct figure was fourteen or eighteen lanes. Anyway, that switch had been thrown yesterday. So, as Saskia and her team tried to consume food as rapidly as Mary Boskey and her son-in-law Reggie were producing it, they were treated to imagery on the screen of Rufus’s laptop showing a webcam feed of a vast unidirectional traffic jam in open territory some forty miles west of downtown Houston. The camera was rocking slightly in what they assumed were powerful bursts of wind. The image was frequently blurred, or blotted out, by waves of what looked like static. It was actually rain coming down with such intensity as to stop all light. When it abated they could see a galaxy of red taillights.