wombat football

Oakfield, II

Two days later, the alarm was still sounding. It turned out I was right: there was no fire: it had to be a malfunction of some sort. The problem now was that there was no way of shutting it off. We thought about calling Joel Miller, but nobody had a working number for him.

We were still calling it ‘the Miller place’, though the house itself was empty. The Miller family had moved out three weeks previously, not long after Joel lost his job at Omicron, a multinational software company. Oakfield, our quiet Arizona suburb, lay just a few miles from the Omicron office campus; its employees formed the majority of the local population. Joel had been laid off as part of the company’s latest restructuring plan; with no other work in the area, he was forced to relocate back to Oregon to live with his wife’s parents, until they could get back on their feet.

One of the fire fighters had explained apologetically that there was really nothing they could do; as there were no visible signs of fire, state law prohibited them from breaking in without the express permission of the home owner. Except no-one in the neighbourhood really knew who owned the house now: it could have been an Omicron company property, or maybe it belonged to the banks.

So the fire trucks had rumbled away, with the alarm still wailing its banshee cry into the night. They left us with the small consolation that the back-up battery would probably run flat within a day or so.