Free Angels of Detroit by Christopher Hebert

Dobbs said. “What if you needed to fix the engine so it would run on something else?”
    “Why would you need to do that?” his father said.
    He couldn’t seem to make them understand. These were potential questions of life and death. Who knew what the future held?

    The final fix for the van was the city seal, making it disappear. A can of spray paint, and Dobbs was done.
    He took to the highway first. Not knowing where he was going, he circled around and around, ramp after ramp, swooping and rising, as if the road were a roller coaster. There was the city, laid out before him, mile after mile of emptiness. The place seemed simpler speeding by, its vastness shrunk.
    But the most promising places were ones that couldn’t be seen in passing, the dark spots on the grid where nothing seemed to be. He headed north, and on a whim he pulled off the highway near an old assembly plant. The place was huge. The miles of streets surrounding it still contained a couple of small houses. Old blue-collar neighborhoods, by the look of them. But there were no cars, no lights.
    Dobbs turned east and found main street, the old commercial drag. Everything was long out of business. What made the street different was that everything here was still standing. The buildings were packedin together: a pizzeria, a grocer, a tailor, a cocktail bar, a dry cleaner with an airy upstairs apartment. And there was a nightclub of some sort done up in tar shingles, its marquee pointing the way inside. The strip went on for blocks, and at each intersection there was a traffic light, still cycling through the colors, as if they mattered. A ghost town within a ghost city.
    Behind the storefronts on the northeast side of the street ran an alley. And back there, utterly hidden unless one was looking for it, was a warehouse, cut off from the surrounding streets by shade trees. Even without knowing what was inside, Dobbs knew it would be perfect.

Five
    They stood in the wind and intermittent rain, waving the signs McGee and April had spent the night painting. The words were already washing away. Except for the ten demonstrators, the plaza was empty. It seemed the only other people in the entire downtown were the ones perched up there in the tower, unaware that anything at all was going on down below.
    The cold had come out of nowhere, blowing into town early that morning while they were still asleep. The air felt ominous, full of bad intentions. And being tucked away in the van, McGee had discovered, was no better than being out on the sidewalk. Outside they could at least move around when they needed to keep warm.
    She breathed on her fist, turning away from the window. She hadn’t thought to bring mittens. The newspaper had put her on hold almost ten minutes ago. Since then she’d been taking turns shifting the phone from hand to hand so at least one of them would be warm at a time. The synthesizer solo in her ear was beginning its fourth loop.
    They couldn’t afford to run the engine just for heat. Fitch and his parents were fighting again; they’d taken his credit card away. For almost a week the van had been running on fumes.
    McGee didn’t usually mind the cold. She was used to making do. It just felt odd to be suffering here, in Fitch’s playhouse on wheels. His parents had sprung for every amenity: a full-size flat-screen TV, surround sound, gaming system, massaging captain’s chairs, a mobile table with charging ports. It was a vehicle that could have been built only by people unaware of the existence of human suffering.
    The music stopped. A voice cut in at the other end.
    “Yes.” McGee straightened her legs, her knees creaking like ice cubes. “Hello, yes, I’ve been holding.” She’d been waiting so long it took a moment to remember what was going on, who had called whom.
    The man at the news desk sounded as if he were shuffling cards. “Something about a demonstration?”
    “Downtown.” Her brain seemed to have slowed in the cold.