Soft Apocalypse

Chapter 9 GUNSLINGER

The faded purple neon sign by the road read “Paradise Motel,” and “No Vacancy.” There was an empty pool in front, between the highway and the parking lot, surrounded by a cyclone fence choked with kudzu. The roofs on the last four units had collapsed, but the others looked to be in decent shape—a few even had glass in the windows. An ice machine was tucked between two support poles, a toppled and partially crushed snack machine next to it.

“I hope they have plenty of ice,” Colin said, “I could use a cold one.” Baby Joel, his head lolling, was asleep in the makeshift carrier on Colin’s back.

“It feels strange not having the bamboo around. I feel exposed,” Sophia said, hugging her elbows. The bamboo had tapered off just past Midville, though we knew it was just a patch—an area the scientists and eco-terrorists hadn’t bothered to target. The bamboo would make it here eventually.

“We got dibs on this one,” Colin called, peering into a room with his hand on the door knob. “There’s even a mattress, sort of.”

I opened the door to the next room down.

A woman was standing inside, a machete raised over her head. I cried out in surprise.

“I don’t have any food,” she said. “I don’t have anything of value. Just leave me alone.”

She was wearing a big floppy hat over wild, tangled auburn hair, Khaki shorts, and a white button-down sweater like my grandma used to wear. Still, she had a machete.

I raised my hands. “Okay. No problem.”

As my heart slowed I noticed that the woman was so scared the machete was shaking. She had a pretty bad cut on her shin—it was straight and fairly deep, like a slashing knife wound.

“We’re just looking for a place to—”

Behind her, the bedside table was adorned with knickknacks. A postcard of hula dancers caught my eye. The caption read Everything’s Better in Metter. It reminded me of something: I’d bought a postcard just like it once, at a convenience store when I was on a date.

A tingle washed over me—an honest to god tingle. I studied the woman carefully.

“Phoebe?”

Her look of surprise was priceless. She looked at me carefully; her eyes grew wide.

“Jasper, right?” She lowered the machete.

The rest of the tribe had rushed over when I cried out, and were crowded around the doorway and the big glassless window. I introduced everyone. Of course she’d already met Colin, Jeannie, and Cortez, but that was briefly, eight years ago.

She hadn’t changed much. She still had pretty green eyes and (despite the grime) refined, aristocratic features—high cheekbones, a perfectly shaped nose, a long, elegant neck. She could have been a young Harvard lit professor who specialized in Milton. She had nice legs—lean, shapely runner’s legs. Greyhound legs.

“That’s a pretty bad cut,” Colin said.

“I did it while hacking through the bamboo.” She looked chagrined. “I’m actually not as spastic as that suggests.”

“I’m sure the other ten thousand hacks were works of art. We all know what it’s like to swing that thing for hours.” We didn’t actually use a machete—we’d decided early on it was too energy-inefficient—but it seemed like the right thing to say. I took another look at the leg. “I hate to say this, but I think it needs to be stitched.”

Phoebe went a little white. “Really?”

“Definitely,” Cortez said. “It’s not going to heal right like that. Stuff will get in it. It’ll get infected.” He clapped my shoulder. “Colin and me will boil some water to clean the cut. I’ve got a needle and thread you can use to close it up.”

“Me?” I protested.

Cortez nodded. “You’ve performed major surgery. Compared to that, this will be a piece of cake.”

Phoebe looked confused. “You performed surgery?”

“I removed someone’s appendix once,” I said, feeling a blush of pride, but trying not to let it show.

I told Phoebe the story while the water boiled, then I cleaned out the cut with a bath towel. Colin had found a hundred of them in a linen closet in the manager’s office.

I picked up the needle, which Jeannie had dipped in the boiling water, thread and all. I may have done it once before, but I hadn’t enjoyed it, and I was still horrified at the idea of sewing up somebody’s skin. Someone had to do it, though. “I’m guessing this is going to hurt.”

Phoebe just nodded.

I poked the needle through clean, white skin. Phoebe hissed and squeezed her eyes shut. I had to resist the urge to close my eyes as well. I ran the needle under the skin on the other side of the gash, brought the needle out through the skin and pulled the thread through.

The rest of the tribe left to give Phoebe some privacy. I got her talking to take her mind off what I was doing. It got a little easier after the first stitch.

Phoebe had been living for the past couple of years in a little co-op carved out in Twin City, but had a falling out with her boyfriend and left. These details were conveyed in small pieces, punctuated with winces and a few tears. I filled her in on the low points of my life, then cast about for distractions.

“What are all those things on the night stand?” I asked. Beside the postcard, there were photos, little stuffed animals, figurines, a book, all carefully arranged.

“It’s my stuff,” she said, smiling sheepishly. “It calms me. Everywhere I stay, I arrange these things in the same way to make it feel more like a home.”

“What about if you’re sleeping outside?”

She gave an embarrassed shrug. “I still do it.”

I pictured her sleeping on a bed of leaves, her curios arranged on a cleared rectangle of ground beside her, a talisman against the icy blasts of loss and uncertainty.

“Familiar things help me cope with the anxiety. Even before things went bad I was anxious.” She squeezed her eyes shut to the pain. “Ouch. Sometimes it’s like I’m drowning—like there’s no air to breathe.” She blew a puff of air that brushed back a lock of her insanely curly hair. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to unload on you. I’ve been alone for a long time and I think it’s making me weird.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” I said. “Just keep talking. I’m almost done.”

I glanced at her curio table. There was a photo of a girl and an elderly woman. The girl was in a numbered jersey, and they were at a sporting event of some sort. “Is that you?”

Phoebe looked over my shoulder. “Mm hm. With my nana, at a track meet.”

“There,” I said, leaning back and letting my aching shoulders relax. The needle dangled against her leg on the end of an inch of thread. I cut it with a pocket knife Cortez had left beside me, and taped some gauze over the wound. We didn’t have any bandages.

“Thanks, Doctor,” she said. “I don’t have my checkbook with me, but you can bill me to this address.”

“Have you been here long?” I asked.

“A couple of days.”

I picked up a little stuffed pig from the night stand.

“Sir Francis Bacon,” Phoebe said.

I tapped the postcard with my fingernail. “I’m touched that you kept my gift in your memento collection.”

Phoebe laughed. “Yes, it’s almost like having it on display in a museum.”

Memories of those days washed over me—the music playing in the camp, the first Polio-X victims, the cops chasing us out of town. I’d been so conflicted about that date, because of my “relationship” with Sophia. Ironic that the woman I’d been so hung up on back then was right outside. I didn’t feel like I was old enough to be nostalgic for an earlier time, and those certainly weren’t good times, but I still felt an indescribable longing.

“I can’t believe we didn’t even recognize each other,” Phoebe said.

“It was, what? Ten or eleven years ago?” I said.

“It feels like such a long, long time,” she said. “Can I really be only thirty-five years old?”

“My mom once told me that I’d be shocked by how fast life flew by,” I said. “I don’t think that happens when you’re scared most of the time.”

Phoebe stood. “Shall we join the others?” We went outside.

We all lounged in the parking lot talking for a long time. Phoebe told us about Stephan, her husband of sorts who’d ditched her in the middle of nowhere, trading her in for a relationship that bordered on pedophilia. We told her about Jeannie’s delivery, and Ange, though not everything about Ange.

Finally, Jeannie stood, and the rest of us followed suit and went off to sleep. I went to my dark, empty room and sat on scraps of carpet, among the components of a smashed TV. Right before bed was the worst time. The first few months after Ange’s death had been filled with flashbacks of the killing—images I kept from everyone else. The flashbacks had grown less frequent, but I still missed her terribly. I missed talking to her, having her there. I had never really loved her, nor she me, but that didn’t diminish the incredibly strong friendship we’d had.

Colin knocked on the door frame. “So, what do you think?”

“I think we should invite her to join us, if it’s okay with the others. She has nobody, and she’s a good person.”

He nodded. “I’ll ask them.” I’m sure he could hear the depression in my voice. “Nothing else, though?”

He didn’t need to lay it out for me. I knew what he was getting at. “You know, you never see love stories set in concentration camps, and I think there’s a reason for that.”

He nodded. “You might feel different in a few months. You never know.”

I shrugged. “I doubt it.”

Colin left me alone. I stared at the wall. Laughter drifted in from a few stragglers leaving the parking lot. There was a thrumming in my eardrums, a pressure. I wanted to sleep, but I wasn’t tired.

The morning was hot and smoky, the aphids buzzing in the wild grass out past the parking lot.

Cortez leaned in my window. “We took a vote. We want Phoebe to join us. You want to ask her?” I took a big, sleepy breath and nodded.

When I stepped into Colin and Jeannie’s room, Phoebe was telling them what she’d heard about Athens. It sounded like the Doctor Happy crowd had lured thousands to join them. Maybe they could establish a beachhead to get things stabilized in the region, who knew? As long as they didn’t come my way with their needles, that was fine with me.

“I’m going to get some air,” Phoebe said after a while. She grabbed her sweater and headed for the parking lot.

“She’s such a sweetheart,” Sophia said. “I came in to check on her last night, and we talked for a long time. I told Jean Paul if we didn’t take her with us, I was staying with her.” Jean Paul smiled sardonically.

“I’ll go ask her,” I said.

Phoebe was sitting on a concrete step, her knees pressed together, her feet pigeon-toed, reading an old waterlogged book: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

“You don’t see many people reading these days, except the newspaper,” I said.

“They don’t know what they’re missing,” she said. It had to be in the 80s, but she was still wearing her sweater.

“You read a lot?”

“I read all the time. I always have.”

“What are you reading?”

She looked down at her lap, marked her spot with a finger, held the book up so I could see the cover. “It’s about Savannah, back in the nineteen nineties.”

“Really? Is it good?”

She wobbled her head. “It’s okay. I’ve read it before—I like that I know most of the places he writes about.”

“Hm. Maybe I could borrow it when you’re done.”

Phoebe knotted her eyebrows at that.

“We’d like you to join us, if you’re interested.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “That’s really kind of you.” She looked directly at me, something she didn’t do very often. “Thanks,” she said. “I was hoping you might ask. It’s difficult being alone out here.”

We ate a hellish mix of bitter grass, wild onions, and mint leaves I’d harvested since we got clear of the bamboo and there was more biodiversity. Afterward we relaxed in the parking lot. Cortez settled on the tailgate of a truck, plugged our energy pack into the radio

and took his daily stroll up and down the dial.

We all bolted upright when a voice leapt out of the static.

“The Wasteman was having a bubble, I tell ya.” The speaker had a Jumpy-Jump accent mixed with a southern twang. “Told her he was issuing a batybwoy warning on Paddy.”

A second adolescent voice laughed raucously. “Paddy’s always using a toe to do a thumb’s job.”

They rambled on, gossiping in their incoherent slang about the Wasteman and Paddy, about who better watch out, and who should represent themselves physically at the radio station.

“Come on, say something helpful,” Jean Paul growled.

More crap. Termite was working for the firemen, so he needed to be drenched.

“At least it tells us there’s something left of Savannah,” Colin said.

“Let’s go home,” I said. “I’m tired of this.”

“It could be worse there than here,” Cortez said.

“The last I heard when I was still in Twin City was that Savannah was a very bad place to be. We were in short-wave communication with people there,” Phoebe said. “Of course that was almost six months ago.”

We fell into disappointed silence, listening to the two boys talk about killing.

“I don’t care,” I said. “I’m sick of these ghost towns.”

“Where would we live if we went back?” Colin asked. “With so many people dead, there might be more places to live, or there may be less because so much was burned, but it doesn’t matter, because we have no way to pay rent.”

“The Poohbah’s making a zigzag that’s likely to terminate Twig’s hall pass,” the broadcaster said.

We looked at each other; we looked at the floor.

“Well, if Savannah’s infrastructure is intact, I can certainly provide you with all the money you need to get started,” Jean Paul said. “But I doubt that’s the case.”

I guess I could have interpreted that as a generous offer, but to me it reeked of condescension.

“Why don’t we just head in that direction?” I suggested. “We don’t want to head west toward Athens, or Atlanta, which is bound to be worse than Savannah. South is going to be hotter and dryer. North is where all those rifles are. We can scout out Savannah, and if it’s bad we could head north up the coast.”

No one had any better ideas, so we headed in the general direction of home.

“There is no such word as ‘jerkin.’ I’ve never heard or seen the word ‘jerkin’ in my life,” Phoebe said as she jumped from the roof of an SUV, crashed through bamboo stalks and onto the hood of a sedan.

“There is,” I said. “It’s from back in Conan the Barbarian times—it’s like a leather vest. You can store your quiver of arrows in it.”

“I’m going to find a dictionary. You want to make a bet?”

“It won’t be in a little pocket dictionary, but if you can find one of those giant dictionaries that could fell a charging ox, I’ll bet you. I wish there was still an Internet. We could just Google it.”

I caught a glimpse of color in the distance, felt the stirrings of a thrill deeply conditioned in me from childhood. Bright multicolor flags, red-and-white-striped awnings. A Ferris wheel, stretching high above the bamboo. “Oh my,” I said. “The carnival is in town.”

Phoebe looked confused for a moment, then she saw what I was looking at and broke into a big smile. “Oh man, do I love a good seedy carnival.”

“Me too,” I said. “You think the owners left any good salvage when they abandoned it?”

“Probably not. They were probably traveling light, moving from town to town.” She slapped at something behind her ear, looked at her hand. “Then again, the only way to know for sure would be to make a quick trip over there.”

“Good idea,” I said. “Yes, maybe a quick reconnaissance trip is in order.”

“And maybe one quick trip down that gigantic slide.”

There was indeed a gigantic slide, with three progressively bigger swells. “Let’s go,” I said.

We started at a squat snack stand that promised candy apples-cold drinks-popcorn-cotton candy-soft serve, but it was cleaned out. Most of the games were shuttered. We opened the Baseball Toss: prizes still hung from the ceiling, and all the hairy but deceptively thin trolls were lined up to be thrown at. I vaulted over the counter, and Phoebe followed. A huge crate of worn rubber baseballs sat beneath it.

“Looks like they took off in the middle of the night,” I said. “Cost too much to transport the show, so they just ditched it.”

“Yeah,” Phoebe said, holding a baseball in each hand, not sounding particularly interested in what I was saying. She climbed back over the counter. “Get out of the way.”

Phoebe could throw hard. Her arms were long and as thin as twigs, but sinewy. A little knot tensed on her triceps as she drew the baseball back and fired it, brushing the fringe of hair but missing the elusive meat of the troll.

“Damn!” she whispered.

“You’re an athlete,” I said.

She smiled. “Track and softball in high school. I sucked at softball, but I was good at track.” She grabbed another ball, tossed it in the air and caught it, getting a feel. “You’re all going down,” she shouted at the trolls. “I have plenty of baseballs here, and they aren’t costing me a dime. You can’t run, because you have no feet, and you can’t hide, because, again, you have no feet.” She whipped the ball, laughing. It sailed right between two of them. “Crap!” she shouted, still laughing. She wiped a tear from her cheek.

“You cry when you laugh,” I said. “Not just when you laugh really hard, but whenever you laugh.”

“Shut up,” she said, laughing harder. “I do not.” More tears welled up in the corners of her eyes and rolled onto her cheeks.

“You do!” I pointed at her cheek. “I’ve never seen anything like it, it’s like those birds who can’t help but make a peeping sound with every flap of their wings.”

She laughed harder, and more tears came.“ Liar,” she said, swabbing her cheeks with the sleeve of her sweater.

“Shall we to the slide?” she said when her laughter had settled down to intermittent bursts.

“We shall,” I said, motioning ladies first. It felt so good to be laughing, to be having fun and goofing off. Phoebe was so quick-witted; I didn’t remember her being like that when we met all those years ago. Of course, we’d only spent a couple of hours together.

“Did you go to traveling carnivals a lot when you were a kid?” I asked as we picked our way across what had once been the midway.

“All the time. It’s hard to imagine a time when things were that easy. You worked, you bought groceries, you took your kids to the carnival.” She shook her head. “It’s like some fairy tale world.”

Phoebe grasped a rung of the ladder, looked up. “I didn’t realize it was so high.” She craned her neck to look back at me, hand still clutching the rung. “I’m afraid of heights. We could have just as much fun sitting on the merry-go-round horses, don’t you think?”

“They won’t move, they’ll just sit there,” I said.

“That’s okay. They’re pretty, and I’ll make horse noises.”

I pointed at the ladder, laughing. “You promised we’d ride the slide, and it’s the only ride that works.”

“I didn’t promise, I just suggested.”

“The promise was implicit.”

Phoebe huffed. She grasped the rungs and looked up. “All right, but you may have to call the fire department to get me down.”

I laughed. “They’d get you down, all right. With a high-powered rifle.”

I caught a glimpse of Phoebe’s white calf as she climbed, remembered her long legs, how perfect her knees were when I’d seen her in shorts that first day in the motel. Phoebe never wore shorts around us, always jeans.

It took a bit of coaxing to get Phoebe to slide down. At first she clung to the sides and braked herself every few feet, but the first steep drop made that impossible, and gravity ruled the day.

Phoebe clung to her hat so it wouldn’t blow off, which, along with her auburn hair snapping in the wind, made her look like a woman in a Jane Austen novel.

There was something about her very proper, demure nature that was extremely sexy. There was no denying it. But the thought of the emotional part, the thought of love, the negotiation of what the physical part meant… I had no stomach for that, so better not to try to cross that bright red line between a hug and a kiss.

Phoebe shrieked her way down the third and steepest drop. So strange. Wasn’t this what I’d always hoped for? I was with a funny, attractive woman, and we got along effortlessly. We’d met only a few weeks ago, and already we were close friends.

I slid down while Phoebe shouted an undecipherable mix of encouragement and taunts. I hit the steep drop, and felt that tingly falling-feeling in my intestines. It felt great, simulating emotions I hadn’t experienced in a long time.

“What say we check out the World’s Smallest Woman exhibit?” Phoebe said as I climbed back to solid earth. “My parents would never give me the extra three dollars to go in. They said it was a scam.”

“I doubt she’s home,” I said.

“Still, I’d like to go through her tiny dresser and look at all her tiny shoes.” She led the way.

The World’s Smallest Woman’s tent was a bust. It was an empty husk—no tiny dresser, no tiny kitchen appliances.

“Well damn,” Phoebe said, letting the tent flap fall.

I wondered if, given a different past, this afternoon, in this abandoned carnival with Phoebe, could have been one of those magically romantic days that you never forget.

“You okay?” Phoebe asked. “You got quiet suddenly.”

“I’m fine. I just got thinking about something that happened to me a long time ago,” I said, covering my trail.

“What was it, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Why don’t we stop and eat, and I’ll tell you?”

We ate wild mushrooms and nettle in the merry-go-round, in a chariot. Cherubs in silver diapers and women in flowing burgundy robes were carved into its sides. The carvings were exquisitely detailed, though the fingers on one cherub’s hand, which was reaching toward the sky, were missing. While we ate I told Phoebe about my first encounter with Rumor, at the art gallery. It was the first thing that came to mind to mask what I’d really been thinking.

Phoebe reached out and stroked the hoof of the horse closest to her. Its front legs were curled under it in mid-gallop, its mouth open, tongue jutting out between square teeth.

“I can see how that would haunt you, even after all these years. The bad things get tattooed on your brain, don’t they? Even though they’re in the past, it’s like they’re not, like they’re still happening somewhere.”

“They do,” I agreed. “I wish I could take just three or four days of my life and cut them out. I would feel so much better.”

Phoebe continued absently stroking the hoof. “I know what mine would be.” She looked off into the carnival, her face turned away from me.

“Which would they be? Unless you don’t want to say.”

Phoebe didn’t say anything for a long time.

“I haven’t told anyone,” she finally whispered.

“If you want to tell someone, I’m a good listener.” I waited, studied the red Tilt-A-Whirl choked with weeds.

Phoebe laced her fingers together, looked down at her feet, and began a story.

“After I left Stephan, the guy who wanted me to share him with a fifteen-year-old, I went off to find my parents. I hadn’t seen them in over ten years, since the day I left home to live with Marlowe, a black guy, and they effectively disowned me. It took me a month to reach my parents’ house, and when I got there I found my mother in worse shape than I. She had just carried on as if nothing was happening—planting flowers in her garden, watching crap on TV, until there was no more food or power. I took her out of there, but of course I had no idea where to go. We headed east, toward Savannah.

“She hadn’t changed much in ten years. All she did was complain. Her feet hurt, she was hungry, why had I taken her out of her home to drag her across the countryside. All day long she complained.

“Then one day we were walking through the main drag of a small town, and the McDonald’s had a cardboard sign up in the window that said ‘Open,’ so I left Mom in the shade, because I wasn’t sure it was safe, and I went inside.

“The man inside was selling hamburgers made with some sort of critter meat, but he didn’t accept cash, only precious metals or guns and the like. I didn’t have anything like that, and I started to leave, and he suggested—”

She choked up. I considered putting a reassuring hand on her back, or squeezing her shoulder, but sensed that wasn’t the right thing, so I just waited.

“He suggested a trade: he’d give me the hamburgers if I’d sleep with him. I told him no and hurried out, but I was starving, and my mother was starving.” She wiped her eyes and sniffed; her nose was badly clogged. “So I did it. Behind the counter. I tried not to cry, but I couldn’t help it, and he said to me, ‘Just think about how good those hamburgers are going to taste.’” She laughed, although it was partially a sob, and now I did press my palm to her back and rub just a little to reassure her, and it seemed to work. She took a few deep breaths and calmed down.

“Two times after that, I left Mom somewhere, telling her I was going to buy food. Then I would approach a man with food and offer sex for food.

“The last time, the man did it, then called me a whore and threw me out without giving me the food.”

Phoebe wiped something from the side of her nose with a trembling hand. I wanted her to look up, to see that I was hearing her, that I wasn’t judging her, that she’d done nothing wrong, but she kept her eyes on her sneakers.

“When I went back to my mother that last time, she told me that she had figured out what I was doing to get the food. She said it was disgusting. When I asked her if she’d rather starve, she said yes, she’d rather starve.

“The next time we stopped, I sat her in the shade under a tree…” Fresh tears rolled down her cheeks; her shoulders heaved. “I told her I was going to look for food.” She struggled to get the words out. “And I left her.”

She looked up at me. “I left my mother.”

I nodded, simply nodded understanding. I wasn’t sure how to respond, didn’t trust myself to respond, because it seemed like any response would be either trite or judgmental.

She leaned back in the little seat, looked up at the wood-slatted ceiling, her cheeks wet with tears. “She walked so damned slowly. Each step seemed to require this huge effort. So I left her.” She sniffed, wiped her nose on the sleeve of her sweater. “Half a day later I couldn’t stand the guilt any longer and I went back to look for her, but she was gone.”

I had to respond; I couldn’t leave her hanging there on those words, but I felt like I’d been struck mute. So I reached over and hugged her. She hugged me back, tightly, and we went on hugging until it wasn’t a hug any more, it was more like a seated slow dance. I rocked her ever so slightly while she cried into my neck.

Finally, we separated, looking off into the mad decay of the carnival. I peered up into the steel framework of the Ferris wheel towering nearby, a series of shrinking Xs, thinking about the courage it had taken for Phoebe to tell me what she had just told me, and realized what my response should be.

I took a ragged breath, and began my own story. “One day two years ago I got it in my head to steal a pig from a farm.” I choked up almost immediately. I wondered how I would get through the story if I couldn’t even make it through the first sentence.

I did get through it, though. I told her what really happened to Ange, something I’d never told another living soul. I cried through most of it, but when it was out the relief I felt surprised me.

I didn’t stop there. I told her about how Cortez had killed Tara Cohn, and my part in that, and the time we stabbed the men who were raping Ange, and got through both of those without any tears. I was all cried out, and besides, awful as they were, neither of those events tortured me the way Ange’s death did.

We just sat for a while then. I felt drained to the point of numbness.

“I love the word ‘calliope,’” Phoebe finally said, sounding far away. “It’s so festive.”

“Mmm,” I said.

“But it’s not a cheap, simple, primary-color sort of festive, like ‘confetti’ is.”

“No. Never.”

Phoebe fidgeted with a button on her shirt, her gaze far away. She had such beautiful, delicate wrists. “When we went on that date all those years ago, I was a virgin. I was a virgin until I was twenty-six,” she said. “That’s who I am.”

“That not hard to believe, given the sweaters and all.”

Phoebe laughed. “I can’t help wondering, though: is that really who I am? I never thought I was capable of doing what I did to my mother. Now that I know I am, how can I still think of myself as the person I thought I was?”

I nodded understanding. “You wonder if doing something awful makes you an awful person, even if you didn’t have a choice,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m so afraid sometimes, that this world has turned me into a monster, capable of horrible things. Or it’s exposed me for the monster I am.”

“Yeah, that’s it. Exactly.”

Someone had gone through and smashed a lot of the mirrors in the Hall of Mirrors. Outside, the facade was painted with huge clown faces. One had a long, pointed head, another, a fat round one.

We went on talking—about our fears, about the pain we felt for the things we’d done. It felt good to have someone listen without judging.

We didn’t realize how late it was getting until the light began to wane. Phoebe raised her arms over head and stretched. As she did so one of her nipples was just barely visible through her shirt. It was like glimpsing a rare bird, obscured by thick foliage and then gone as she dropped her arms. She was a beautiful woman. I wondered if my capacity to love wasn’t as far from the surface as I thought. Maybe I was afraid of those feelings, or embarrassed by them, or felt guilty about having them. Or all of the above.

“I can’t handle any more emotion in my life,” Phoebe said, as if reading my thoughts. “My tank is empty. I can’t handle any more love, no more tearful breakups.”

“Me neither,” I said.

She looked at me with those turtle green eyes. I leaned over and kissed her, lightly, almost not at all. I didn’t intend to do it—I just did, without thinking. To my surprise, Phoebe didn’t protest. To my further surprise, a light spring breeze blew through me, lifting me just high enough to see beyond the despair I’d felt for so long I could barely remember ever feeling anything else.

Neither of us said anything. We headed back as if it hadn’t happened.

On the walk back I realized that in my entire life I’d never had a conversation like the one I’d just had with Phoebe. I hadn’t even been able to talk like that with Ange.

I was staring at a wall of thick kudzu and suddenly realized that there was an entire house hidden in that tangle of green. A wren squeezed into a crack between the slats just below the roofline. Looking further off, I spotted another house.

“Did anyone notice that there are houses right there?” I asked, pointing.

Everyone turned and looked. Phoebe laughed. “I hadn’t noticed.”

We’d spent the night sleeping outside, thirty feet from shelter. I finished rolling up my bedding, stuffed it into the duffel bag I’d salvaged at one house or another.

Phoebe was putting away her knickknacks. Each night we seemed to lay out our bedding a little closer together.

“How did your parents die?” Phoebe asked.

“In the water riots in ’21,” I said. “I don’t know the specifics, just that they were alive before the riots and weren’t after.” I plucked a bamboo shoot off a stalk, twisted it between two fingers. “How did your father die?”

“My mother said he choked on a chicken bone.”

“Wow.” It seemed an anachronistic death. But even with all the awful ways to die these days, I guess some people still choked on chicken bones.

“We should get moving,” Cortez called out.

“Whatever you say, boss,” Colin called back. Cortez gave him a “don’t make me kick your ass” look.

I shrugged on my pack. It felt a little heavier each day we continued on our survivalist diet.

Two men ambled out of the brush. One was dressed head to toe in camouflage, the other in a crisp, white Atlanta Braves baseball uniform. Each cradled an assault rifle in one hand.

“What have we got here?” the guy in camouflage asked. His close-set eyes were nearly hidden by a wiry black beard.

“We’re just passing through,” Cortez said.

“Yeah? To where?” the one in the baseball uniform asked. It reminded me of a Jumpy-Jump outfit. Had the Jumpy-Jumps made it this far out of the city? Anything was possible. He went over and pulled the corner off the tarp we’d tied over one of the big packs that held our community property. He had a meaty bully’s face, the kind of guy who was a second string linebacker on his podunk high school’s football team and never got the girl.

“Savannah,” Cortez replied.

He turned back toward us. “Tell you what—why don’t you all drop those packs?” He looked Phoebe up and down.

I knew this script, I knew where it went even though it had only begun to play out. Eat this. I didn’t want the script to play out that way.

With a calmness I never would have imagined I was capable of, I reached back and pulled a pistol out of my belt, aimed it, and started firing.

I just kept pulling the trigger; I hit one man square in the mouth, then shot the other high on the chest, then in the side. They were blown backward like extras in an action movie, their eyes wide with surprise.

The gunshots subsided. There was a moment of stunned silence, then Joel started to cry. My heart was pounding so hard that I could feel blood pulsing in my neck. “Jesus,” Colin said.

The big one, who I’d shot in the chest, was taking ragged, hitching breaths. The other guy had stopped breathing the moment I shot him.

For a change my heart wasn’t pounding from fear—it was pounding with rage. The emotion was pointing outward instead of inward, and that felt good.

“What did you do?” Sophia said, her eyes wide. “We don’t know if they were going to hurt us.” She squatted next to the guy who was still alive.

“They were going to hurt us. You know it and I know it,” I said.

“They may have been soldiers of some sort, or police. They only asked us to drop our packs. You can’t shoot people for that.”

“I’m not letting any more of my friends die,” I said, my voice trembling. “If that means shooting strangers before they let on whether they’re killers or just assholes, fine.”

The guy I’d shot coughed a spray of blood, then made a choking sound.

“Somebody help him!” Sophia said.

“We can’t,” I said, not taking my eyes off the man. “He’s dying.”

“What’s happened to you?” Sophia said, tears rolling down her cheeks. Her eyes spoke volumes. You’re not the man I thought you were. How could I have ever thought I loved you?

“I haven’t been fortunate enough to spend the last ten years behind a gate, guarded by mercenaries. That’s what happened to me.” Jeannie tried to interrupt, to defuse the situation, but I talked over her. “I’ve been terrorized by men like these every day of my life. I had to watch someone I loved be tortured by men like these. That’s what happened to me. Go figure.”

I’d like to think it just came out, that I’m not so eager to win an argument that I would pull out the truth of Ange’s death and thump Sophia with it. But Sophia had just called me a murderer.

“Okay J, calm down,” Cortez said. “Why don’t you give me your gun, okay?” He held out his hand.

I put the gun back in my belt.

I felt a hand on my back. It was Phoebe.

“Come on,” Phoebe said, leading me by the elbow, “let’s take a walk.” I saw Cortez look at Phoebe and nod, telling her that’s what they needed to do to handle the guy who’d clearly lost it, the guy who’d gone all shell-shocked on them. I let her lead me away, down a deer trail, to a wide pond that was mostly dried mud.

There were fissures in the dried mud, long jagged cracks in the parched earth that reminded me of the bark on the Live Oaks that lined the streets in Savannah. I stared at them, feeling like there was some significance there, some symbolic importance that my emotionally exhausted mind couldn’t reach.

“Here,” Phoebe said. I felt her hands slathering insecticide on the back of my neck. I hadn’t noticed any mosquitoes.

“Thank you,” I said.

The receding water had revealed a cornucopia of debris that had been thrown into the pond over the decades: rotted soda cans, bald tires, fishing line, two bicycles, a license plate.

“You okay?” Phoebe asked.

“Yeah,” I said. I walked out onto the dried pond, pulled up one of the bicycles with my toe. It made a sucking sound as it came loose. The brand was still etched in the crossbar: Hard Rock. “Was I wrong? Were they going to walk away in another minute?”

“No,” Phoebe said. “You were right.”

I spotted some bones further out, near the oval of rusty water at the center of the mud flats. They looked like they might be human. I headed back toward Phoebe. “It felt good in a way though, and that scares the hell out of me. It’s like what we were talking about just yesterday. I have changed. I’m not who I thought I was.”

Phoebe considered. I was tempted to tell her that her eyes were the color of those little turtles you bought at the pet store, back when there were pet stores, but clearly it was not an appropriate time.

“Maybe the change is temporary,” she suggested. “Maybe you’ve had to bury your true nature for now, because you have no choice.” She nodded, as if she was convinced she was on the right track. “Like a soldier. The soldiers who fought the Nazis didn’t lose their humanity, even though they had to do awful things.”

I kicked at the dry mud. I wasn’t in the mood to see myself as some sort of honorable soldier. The more time that passed, the sicker I felt about the two bodies lying a hundred yards away.

“I don’t know. I think something died in me when they killed Ange. I don’t know what it is, but it sure feels like my humanity, and I don’t think it’s coming back.”

Phoebe’s eyes filled with tears.

“Guys, we need to move!” It was Cortez. There was no mistaking the urgency in his voice. As we raced back toward him, we heard distant voices through the bamboo, maybe a hundred yards away.

We gathered our stuff (Cortez grabbed the two automatic rifles) and headed down the railroad tracks.

We’d gone a few hundred yards when shouts erupted behind us. I glanced back; one of the figures in the clearing raised a pistol and fired a shot that kicked up gravel ten yards short of us. We ran harder.

Another shot rang out. I half-expected to see one of my friends drop on the tracks, but no one did.

“They’re chasing us. Keep running,” Cortez said. I glanced back again. There was no point—Cortez had just informed us that they were coming after us, but I needed to see it for myself, see how fast they were coming, whether it was a half-hearted trot or a hard sprint.

It was a hard sprint. One of them was holding a walkie-talkie to his mouth as he ran, probably alerting a bunch of others, maybe the families of the two guys I’d shot.

“Drop your packs,” I said. We couldn’t outrun them carrying fifty pounds each. I shrugged mine off, felt suddenly light as a feather. The others followed suit, but we were still limited to how fast Colin could run carrying Joel. He was cradling Joel’s head so it wouldn’t roll around.

I looked back again. The men were no more than a hundred yards behind us. “They’re gaining,” I said.

“Keep moving,” Cortez said. He pulled one of the automatic weapons off his shoulder and dropped to one knee. A deafening burst of gunfire followed.

I realized I should help him. After all, I was the gunslinger who got us into this catastrophe. I stopped, pulled the pistol out of my belt, realized Cortez was in my line of fire and ran back toward him.

By then the men were gone. Cortez leaped up, looked surprised and somewhat annoyed to see me standing behind him. “I hit one,” he said, breathless. “The others carried him into the bamboo. Come on, I’m guessing they’ll be back.”

We caught up with the rest of the tribe.

“We should get off the tracks,” I said, pointing into the bamboo to the right, the opposite side of the tracks from where our pursuers had gone.

Cortez took one look back, then broke off the track and into the jungle. “Come on.”

We tore through the bamboo. If it hadn’t been so serious, it would have been comical: seven of us running single-file, at times hitting bamboo so thick we had to back up like a seven-car train and seek another way through. Eventually we slowed to a brisk walk, but we kept moving, and no one talked except to suggest a route through the tangle. Joel was crying now—he was probably hungry.

An hour into our flight, long after I’d decided we were safe, we heard a shout behind us, and then an answering shout.

“Shit,” Colin said.

We ran again.

“How can they know which way we went?” Colin asked.

“They must know how to track—broken branches, footprints,” Cortez answered. That was the last of the conversation. It was grueling; my lungs ached, my legs were rubber. Joel cried in earnest in Colin’s arms, his face red with outrage at being jostled so roughly for so long.

We kept running until the light began to wane, then slowed to a walk again.

I heard sniffing behind me, turned to see that Jeannie was crying. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “We lost everything. We’re out here with nothing.”

Nobody responded. I was true, and there was no sugar-coating it, no bright side.

“What now?” I asked.

“I guess we look for shelter,” Colin said.

We were heading in the wrong direction—northwest, away from Savannah.

We walked on, everyone in a black mood, until we came upon a neighborhood choked in bamboo and overgrown with kudzu. It wasn’t so much a neighborhood as a cul-de-sac set with half a dozen duplexes. Cortez kicked down the door of one and we took shelter inside.

“I don’t think we should stay until morning,” I said. “Let’s rest an hour, then keep moving.”

Nobody argued, although nobody agreed either. There were two bedrooms; Cortez suggested the two couples take them while the rest of us rested in the little living room.

We had no bedding, but we found some clothes in the closets and used that. It was growing dark. Phoebe lay along a wall, a half-dozen feet from me, hugging a pile of t-shirts.

“I’m sorry you lost your keepsakes,” I said.

She shrugged. “You can always buy me another postcard the next time we visit a Timesaver.”

“But Sir Francis Bacon…” I meant to strike a jovial tone, but it came out flat.

Phoebe smiled grimly. “Maybe one of the people chasing us will give it to his kid.” She closed her eyes, took a big, sighing breath. There was a ragged cut on her wrist, but it wasn’t too deep. Probably just some thorns.

Exhausted as I was, I couldn’t just drop off to sleep. I felt responsible for the mess we were in. I knew how Sophia felt about what I’d done, but I needed to know if the others thought I’d acted irresponsibly, or even criminally. I got up, knocked on Colin and Jeannie’s door.

Colin had pulled off his shirt and stretched it along the windowsill. Two rows of ribs ran down his back in sharp relief. He didn’t yet look like someone rescued from a concentration camp, but he was getting close.

“Was I wrong?” I asked.

They looked at each other, deciding who was going to tackle the question.

“No,” Colin said. “It was just so…” He struggled for the right words.

“Like I murdered them? Something like that?” I suggested. “But if I’d waited long enough to be sure, I probably wouldn’t have been able to catch them by surprise, and we’d all be dead.”

“No, I agree with you—” Colin said.

If you’d have told me when I was eighteen that one day I would debate whether or not I’d murdered people or shot them in self-defense, I’d have been spectacularly surprised.

“Japer, we’re not criticizing you,” Jeannie interrupted. “You saved us, and you saved our son, and we’d do anything to protect Joel. We were just surprised that you did it. If Cortez had done it, I don’t think we would have been shocked.”

“Exactly,” Colin said.

I nodded. “Fair enough.” I turned to go.

“Jasper?” Jeannie said. I turned back. “What happened to Ange?”

I sat on the edge of the bed and told them the truth. Cortez heard me telling the story, and came in. Phoebe hovered in the doorway. Difficult as it was, when it was over I was glad it was out. Secrets eat at you; they’re nothing but lies in drag.

“Hey, Jasper,” Colin said as I stood to go. “Thank you for saving my son.”

I nodded. That was all I needed.

The door to the other bedroom was partly open; Sophia stood holding a blanket she must have found in the closet. Our eyes met for a moment before she turned away.

Until last year, I’d carried my memories of Sophia as proof that true love was possible—but for her being married, we would have been together all these years, blissfully. I think Sophia had been doing the same, and now I had shattered her illusions, leaving her with nothing but cynical Jean Paul. My illusions had already been shattered, though not by her. I was sorry to take hers away, although maybe it was for the best in the long run. In any case, I was at peace trading those bullets for her illusions.

“Oh, crap,” Cortez hissed. He was peering out an open window. Hushed voices drifted through the window; a beam of light filtered through the bamboo.

I ran to get the others. We huddled in the living room, listening as the people outside went from door to door, searching.

Cortez handed me one of the automatic weapons. I took it, but shook my head. “If we get pinned in here, they can just wait us out, call a dozen more people on their walkies.”

Cortez nodded, motioned for us to follow him to the back door. Outside we heard rustling leaves and low voices no more than two dozen feet away.

“I’m going out there. Hopefully I can surprise them. Wait for my signal, then run.” Cortez turned the knob soundlessly, pushed the door open a foot. “If you need to shoot, aim lower than you think you should, and spray.” He showed me, sweeping his weapon left to right and back, then he handed his assault rifle to Phoebe, pulled a pistol from his pocket and squeezed out the door, immediately disappearing into black leaves.

We waited, squatting by the door, barely breathing. The assault rifle was heavy. I slid my finger over the trigger to make sure I could find it if I needed to. The safety was already off. Safety was a luxury.

There was a meaty thump, a shout of alarm that quickly morphed into a gargled choke, then three gunshots.

“Now,” Cortez shouted. I ran outside, stepped aside and covered the others while they passed, then ran like hell after them, my hands splayed in front of me, the automatic rifle bouncing wildly against my hip. Shouts erupted from the other side of the house. A bamboo stalk hit me in the forehead; I raised my hands higher. The bamboo leaves blocked most of the moonlight—all I could see were gray shapes on a black background, then, from behind me, a light. This was no good, I realized—if they had light and we didn’t, they’d be able to outrun us easily.

I stopped, dropped to one knee like I’d seen Cortez do. I pointed the automatic rifle lower than I wanted to, then pulled the trigger and sprayed blindly.

It was hard to hold the rifle in position—it bucked like I’d hooked a marlin. The staccato roar was like a Harley revving an inch from my ears. I released the trigger.

“Hold it. Stay,” a man’s voice said. “It’s too dangerous.” Relieved, I turned and ran.

“We’ll get you, you fuckers,” the same voice shouted after me. “Don’t you worry, we’re coming for you.”

Someone shouted my name. I followed her voice, caught up with Phoebe, grabbed her hand. Others were just ahead; we followed, weaving, blind. We moved as fast as we could, given the darkness, and Joel. I’d never been so thirsty, and hungry, and tired.

Soon the first hints of sunrise were blooming behind me. I could make out Phoebe’s sneakers, the tangle of her hair.

But it hadn’t been more than an hour since sundown! I glanced back, saw an orange glow on the horizon.

Then I smelled smoke.

I slowed. “Hold on.”

Phoebe slowed, called the others to a halt. We stared at the orange glow filtering through the forest. Now that it was quiet, I could hear the distant roar of the flames.

“Does anyone know what to do?” Cortez asked. “I don’t know anything about fires.”

Silence.

“If we hole up in a house, the fire will burn it down,” Colin said. There were no spaces anywhere—the bamboo touched everything, and so would the flames.

“Can we outrun it?” Jeannie asked.

“I guess we have to,” Colin said.

We ran. Within minutes the air was hazy, and smelled like roasting chestnuts. My back felt vaguely warm.

“This isn’t any good,” I said, maybe not loud enough for anyone but me to hear.

“Wait,” Colin said. I bumped into Phoebe, who had stopped. Colin pointed at a steel dome rising out of the bamboo. A grain silo. “What about that? That won’t burn.”

“Come on.” Cortez broke for it.

The door was locked with a fat padlock. Cortez pulled the pistol and shot it; it burst apart. He pulled off the remnant and threw open the door and we all hurried in.

It was a round, empty space, maybe ten feet across. It was too dark to see the domed ceiling maybe thirty feet above us. Cortez pulled the door closed. It was dark, and stiflingly hot. Joel began to wail.

The silo wasn’t airtight by any means, so there would be smoke. I wondered how much. I knew that most people who died in fires died from the smoke, not the fire. “When it comes, stay on the ground with your mouth as close to the floor as possible,” I said.

We waited in silence for a few minutes, and nothing happened—no roaring outside, no smoke.

“Maybe the wind shifted and it missed us?” Colin suggested.

“Why don’t I check?” Cortez said. “Everybody move away from the door.” A bright crack of light formed, then a big square. The light flooding into the silo was tinged orange, and thick with smoke. Cortez slammed the door. “It’s coming. Everyone down.”

I got on my stomach, cradled my face in my arms and closed my eyes.

Twice in my life I had been certain I was going to die. The first had been when the Jumpy-Jumps pulled me into that alley, the second when I was caught trying to steal from the farmers and Ange had saved my life. Now, as I lay in a silo hoping to ride out a forest fire, I suspected that this might really be it.

I crawled on hands and knees over to Phoebe, put a hand on her wrist. She turned her hand palm up, took mine in hers.

There was a squealing, like air leaking from an inner tube. The smell of roasting chestnuts grew heavier.

“How long will it last?” someone asked. No one answered. I didn’t think it would be too long. Didn’t forest fires travel fast? Off on the other side of the silo, Joel was crying. Poor Joel, with his fresh little lungs.

The squealing grew deeper, or maybe a deeper sound drowned out the squealing. It became that roar that could never be mistaken for anything but fire.

Someone coughed. I tried to press my face into the crook of my elbow to create a little pocket of oxygen, but I could already feel a tickle in my lungs. I coughed.

The roar became deafening. I took a breath, felt my lungs fill with hot smoke. I coughed uncontrollably, nearly gagged. Joel screamed—a piercing cry of outrage that was followed by frantic coughing. I hadn’t noticed that it was getting hotter, but suddenly my clothes were so hot they felt like they were burning my skin. I wanted to pull them off, but that would involve exertion, and then I would have to breathe. I didn’t want to inhale again. I lingered on the outbreath, expelling the smoke, willing the fire to pass.

When I finally did inhale, it was agony. The smoke was hot; it singed my throat, made me cough so hard it was more a full-body spasm. I was burning up—the heat both outside me and in. I heard Phoebe’s coughs in my ear, clutched her hand like a lifeline.

Around us others were coughing and gagging in the darkness. I tried to inhale, but it felt as if my lungs had collapsed, like I was trying to inhale with something clamped over my mouth. The sounds around me receded. I was losing consciousness. I was suffocating. My legs drew up of their own accord, putting me in a fetal position. Fetal, as in fetus, but not a cat fetus, which I once ate. I was fairly sure I was dying, receding into a swirling blackness punctuated by swirls of even darker blackness that popped into my vision with each cough. Although I knew my arms were up near my head, I had the sensation that they had drifted up behind my head and were twisting and stretching. Far off, someone was screaming. It may have been Ange.

I felt a squeeze on my hand. I coughed. It felt like I’d been gone. I coughed again. It hurt like hell. My throat was raw, like someone had peeled all of the skin out of there.

Phoebe’s coughs returned, or I returned to where I could hear them, then I could hear the others coughing as well.

There was a blinding light. I lifted my head, saw Cortez curled up by the door, which was now ajar. Red light filtered in, along with heavy black smoke. Cortez closed the door.

I coughed, and this time the cough felt more productive, making me feel slightly better instead of worse, so I let my spasming chest go, let myself cough.

Joel began to scream.

I gave Phoebe’s hand a final squeeze and let go, then sat up, tried to rub the smoke out of my eyes with fists that were just as smoky. I crawled over to the door.

“I guess we should wait until the worst of the smoke has cleared,” Cortez said.

We stepped out into a different, completely alien place. Instead of bamboo leaves right in front of your face no matter where you turned, the landscape was a vast black desert covered with charred spikes (the remnants of the bamboo) and black, naked trees. In the mix of starlight and the red glow radiating from the horizon, it was a chilling sight.

We stared off at the burned land. The assholes pursuing us had probably assumed we were dead, and had gone home, so there was probably no need to hurry. We had no supplies, no food or water, no tents, no clean clothes.

“Which way?” I asked. We’d come from the north, so that was out. The fire was moving south, so we’d only hit more devastation that way, so it was east or west. I crossed my arms, pointed toward the east and west simultaneously. “That way is a very nice way.”

It was a lame joke, but I got some laughs.

“Of course people do go both ways,” Colin said absently.

“Hey, Scarecrow, how about a little fire?” Phoebe said, doing a decent Wicked Witch of the West impression that got people giggling.

Cortez began to sing, “Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead,” and a few of us joined in. If we’d had more energy, maybe we would have tried to do that special skip that Dorothy and her companions used when traipsing down the yellow brick road, but our giddy relief didn’t extend that far. We left it at “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead,” then grew serious again. We weren’t nearly out of the woods yet.

“I guess the first priority is finding abandoned houses that are not burned, to salvage some clothes and whatever else we can use,”

I said.

“East or west?” Cortez asked.

“Colin and I vote west,” Jeannie said. She was bouncing Joel, who’d quieted down. His little head bobbed languidly as if nothing had happened.

But what was west? Athens, then Atlanta. Atlanta would likely be a bigger mess than Savannah, and we weren’t welcome in Athens.

“Why west?” Cortez asked.

“Because we’re going to join the Doctor Happy people in Athens,” Jeannie answered softly.

I dropped the rifle. I looked at Colin. He met my gaze for a second, then looked away. “It’s the only way to keep Joel safe.”

Cortez squatted on his haunches, his head hanging.

“What about the virus?” I asked. “You’re going to let them infect you? And Joel?”

Colin shrugged. “There are worse things. Like starving.”

I felt rising panic. I could barely imagine being separated from Colin and Jeannie. Yet I also couldn’t imagine infecting myself with Doctor Happy.

I stared off into the charred landscape, watched smoke rise off a blackened scarecrow of a tree.

“That’s where we’re going. We’d like it if you all came with us,” Colin said.

I looked at Phoebe, then Cortez. Cortez shook his head. “I’m going east.”

I looked back at Phoebe. She just stared at the rifle I’d dropped.

I’ve heard that you have to have a kid of your own before you truly get it, but, looking at Joel, tear streaks in stark relief with the dirt and soot covering his face, I understood why they had to go to Athens. He was probably going to die if they went anywhere but Athens, and it was unimaginable that such a small child should die. I guess Doctor Happy was a small price to pay for his life.

Infecting myself, on the other hand, filled me with a dread that went right to my bones.

I looked at Phoebe, gauging her reaction to this. Under my exhaustion and anxiety at talk of the tribe dividing, I found one sparkling bit of clarity: I wanted to go where Phoebe went. I didn’t have time to think too deeply about this, but it afforded me a mooring in the chaos.

“I hate the thought of splitting, but maybe that’s best at this point,” Cortez said.

“Hold on,” I said. “We’re going to split up, just like that?”

“It’s not ‘just like that,’” Cortez said. “Colin and Jeannie have clearly thought this through. I respect the choice they’re making, but it’s not for me. Period.” He gestured at the assault rifle slung over his shoulder. “I’ll take this for me and whoever else is going east. Whoever’s going west can take the other. Fair enough?”

We stood like rival gangs in a standoff, no one moving.

My guts tensed. “Hold on,” I said, buying time. “Let’s think this through.” We needed to stay together; I felt that with absolute certainty. “Colin and Jeannie can’t make it to Athens on their own. If this is what they want to do, we owe it to them to help them get Joel there safely.”

Phoebe bent and picked up the assault rifle. “I agree.” She looked at me, then at Jeannie. “I’ll help you.”

“Thank you, Phoebe,” Jeannie said.

Cortez put both hands over his mouth and sighed through his nose. He stared at the burnt ground, his eyes fixing on one charred spot, then flicking to another, and another. “Shit,” he finally said. “You’re right. I was only thinking about myself.” He nodded tightly. “Okay, if that’s what you want to do, I’ll go with you, but then I’m going to Savannah.”

“We won’t be joining you,” Jean Paul said. He seemed to be trying to sound regretful, but it came out sounding mostly angry. “We’re heading back to Savannah.”

There was an uproar of protests, entreaties that Sophia and Jean Paul stay with the tribe. Jeannie all but begged, which got Sophia crying but did not shift their resolve.

I’d noticed that Jean Paul and Sophia had been standing a few dozen paces away from the rest of the tribe, pointedly separating themselves as we deliberated. They hadn’t joined in on the Wizard of Oz antics, or done more than crack a smile. I suspected they were leaving to be rid of me, not because they’d rather go to Savannah than Athens.

Cortez held the assault rifle to Jean Paul, who waved it off. They said their goodbyes; Sophia hugged Colin and Jeannie. She nodded to me, mumbled goodbye. I mumbled goodbye back.

I caught Sophia glancing back once as they walked away; I winced at the pain in her swollen red eyes. I glanced back a few more times, watched her shrink into the distance, remembering how once, in another time on another planet, I’d kissed her in a movie theater, and my heart had nearly stopped.

I glanced at Phoebe walking beside me, and revisited the feeling I’d had a few moments before—a feeling that was very real and fresh. When I imagined Colin and Jeannie disappearing into crazy Athens, it was like pulling something out of me, some organ or some sense that would leave me permanently disabled. It was easier to imagine Cortez trotting into the brush, because that’s where Cortez belonged. He was a cat, he was meant for this life. When I imagined losing him, it felt like losing my big brother, the person I looked up to, the person who kept the monsters in the closet.

I couldn’t imagine Phoebe leaving at all. I couldn’t picture her disappearing into the bamboo, couldn’t envision her white sweater growing fainter until it merged with green stalks. Just couldn’t imagine it, and that shocked me.

Something broke open inside me. My eyes filled with tears; I looked off to my right so Phoebe wouldn’t see if she happened to look my way. It felt so good to walk beside her. I wanted to reach out and take her hand, but I wasn’t sure how she’d react.

As the rays of sunlight painted the burned landscape, the ground beneath us began to stir. Here and there little green nubs pushed up out of the earth. It would probably take weeks for the bamboo to reestablish completely, but it was already growing restless. Those jackass scientists had designed it well.

I glanced at Phoebe again, and this time she looked back at me. “What?” she asked.

I touched her elbow, motioned that I wanted to let the others get further ahead of us.

“I was just thinking about how much I enjoyed that afternoon at the carnival. It’d been so long since I had fun. When we get to a town, can we go hang out somewhere alone for a while? Just go for a walk, maybe find an abandoned movie theater and look at the posters, or an abandoned Dairy Queen and make fun of the names of the sundaes?”

“Sure,” she said. She had a puzzled look on her face, maybe mixed with a little whimsy.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Come on, what?”

She burst out laughing. “I’m sorry, it’s just that a few hours ago we were almost barbequed in a grain silo, and I’d swear you just asked me on a date. Am I right, are you asking me on a date?”

“I guess I am.” I nodded. “Yes, that’s what I’m doing. My timing may not be perfect, but if you think about it, when would be a good time to ask? When we’re not barbecuing in a grain silo, we’re in a shootout, or hacking our way through bamboo, or eating bugs. There really is no opportune time to ask someone on a date any more.”

Phoebe wiped laughter tears from under her eyes with the back of her hand, which was as sooty as the rest of her hand. “I see your point.”

“So, will you go?”

“I already said yes,” she said. “But don’t expect a kiss, because my toothbrush is lying on the railroad track next to Sir Francis Bacon.”

“Fair enough. Can we hold hands?”

“We can hold hands.”