Excerpt from The Locals by Jonathan Dee, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Even though the day off helped me out I was actually somewhat torn about it. I knew we were all getting paid, and would get paid until the lab reopened. There's no way they'd use a national tragedy or state of emergency or whatever to dock our pay, I mean granted they're Columbia University, so they're assholes, but they're not insane. They care how things look. So fine, whatever, a paid holiday. "Safety concerns," they said, which made me laugh. You really think somebody somewhere wants to cross the world to blow up some random research lab? To bring down, what, the evil cosmetics empire? We get the PETA people, for sure, but that's a whole different order of magnitude. They mostly just carry signs, and they yell their little gay rhyming chants that are actually the funniest shit. If they were ever going to shut us down, that would have happened years ago, those clueless douchebags. Holding up their pictures of rabbits with no eyes or whatever.

But now the whole city had lost its mind and that was that. Everyone thought someone they'd never met was suddenly coming for them, had been planning it for years. Pretty arrogant, if you think about it. Who gives a shit about you, really? Not that many people.

What made me pissed about missing work was that work was where I saw Yuri. He'd started as a lab tech about a year after I did, but that wasn't how he made his real money. He always had clean credit card numbers for me. I don't know how he got them. All those fucking Russians know each other. Sometimes he charged me, if he felt like being a dick about it, and sometimes he just threw one my way for nothing, because he said I was funny. I needed at least one, the last one he gave me was getting flagged now when I tried to use it. I thought what with the whole patriotic air or whatever, this would be a good time to catch him in a non-mercenary mood where he would lay one on me for free, but as long as the lab was closed I wouldn't see him, and the guy changed his cell number like every two weeks.

The lawyer's address was all the way down on West Forty-eighth Street. His name was Greg Towles. I was saying that second bit like "towels," which I wasn't sure was right, but every time he called me now he'd just say, "It's Greg." A few months ago he'd met me for lunch at a diner near the lab; he explained what a class action was, and asked me if I wanted to be a part of it. I said would I get my money back or did that mean I would have to split it with a bunch of other people. He said I'd get my money back and probably more besides. I said what's your fee, and he said zero, my fee comes out of the money you win, so I thought what's to lose, other than a day of work to go downtown and get, what do you call, deposed, and now thanks to this Tragic Time I wasn't even going to get docked for the day.

All of a sudden the little voicemail chime goes off on my phone in my pants pocket—I must have walked into some zone that had service restored—and I stopped on the Broadway median to see if maybe it was Yuri, or Mr. Towels, but no, it was from my mother, hysterical as usual. Freaking out right along with everybody else. She should have known better—she's lived in Bayside her whole life, for God's sake, you'd think she could remember on her own that Manhattan is a big place. I'd sent her an email to let her know I was fine but she never checks her fucking email, it's too complicated, you might as well ask her to tune up her car. She couldn't put it together herself that I lived all the way up on 131st Street, miles from everything, and so obviously nothing had fallen on me and I wasn't dead. It was true that when the wind was right, like it had been last night, even up on 131st you actually got that burning smell, to the point where I'd had to get up and close my window. It was almost worth telling my mother that story just so she'd maybe have a stroke from it and be paralyzed and not able to dial her fucking phone anymore.

Excerpted from The Locals by Jonathan Dee. Copyright © 2017 by Jonathan Dee. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.