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Kid hits the gas. Rubber squeals, finds its grip, and hurls his vintage Mustang out past boarded shops, vacant lots, and the smokestacks of a derelict mill that stretches for a quarter of a mile along the town’s east end. A sign on the gate reads Aiden McClarin Works, though it’s clear the place hasn’t worked for years. Its terminals are dark, rusted, overgrown with weeds. There is only one other car on the road, a late-model coupe with rounded contours, fiberglass body, blue-white headlights—harbingers of things to come as the world teeters on the cusp of the twenty-first century.