The Eleventh Plague

NINE

We headed west for the rest of that day, tumbling through the yellow grass just below a heavily cratered highway. A thin sheet of clouds, like dirty cotton, was smeared across the sky.

They had me wear a bandanna over my eyes all morning so I wouldn’t know the path they were taking, but they let me take it off by the time the sun was halfway into the sky. Not that it mattered much. I had never been so far west in my life and had no clue where I was.

Marcus led the way with Jackson bringing up the rear. I was with Dad in their wood-slat wagon, sitting behind Sam and Will. Lying across from us was a buck Marcus said he’d shot earlier that morning. I tried not to look at it. Its stillness and empty, glasslike eyes caused something inside me to quake.

I scanned the area around us for salvage, eager for something familiar, but there was nothing useful on the path, just blowing trash and a few distant billboards and road signs.

I huddled down behind the front bench of the wagon and tended to Dad. He was lashed to a driftwood stretcher that Sam had improvised to get him out of the gorge. I raised his head into my lap and poured some water over his lips to wet them, careful that none of it went down his throat. I made sure Sam and Will were focused on the road, then took his arm in my hand and squeezed, praying that if some part of him was still awake he’d feel it and know I was there.

Jackson had abandoned his position as rear guard and was trailing along behind the wagon, his rifle too big for him and cradled awkwardly in his hands.

“You know, my mom’s real good,” he said. “Last year she fixed my friend Derrick’s broken arm.”

He waited for a response, but I ignored him, turning my attention back to Dad. I was relieved when Jackson finally let the wagon pull away. I couldn’t seem to look at him without seeing his face framed in my scope the night before. The memory of my finger tensing on the trigger felt cold and dark inside me, like a stone at the bottom of a well.

“Hey, look at that!” Will called out, his golden hair fluttering in the wind. We were rolling past an island of gas stations and fast-food restaurants off the highway north of us. An Applebee’s sat in the center of it all like a faded king, its red, white, and green striped awning in tatters. A pack of dogs, razor thin and rabid, was in the parking lot, snarling as they fought over bits of trash. “Looks like some friends of yours!”

“Will,” Sam warned.

“No, seriously. Bet they even smell the same, like a mix of dead horse and an outhouse.”

Will had raised holy hell when Marcus and Sam had told him I was coming, yelling about outsiders and spies and how I’d tell everyone where their town was.

“Guess they don’t have bathtubs in Fort Leonard, huh, spy?”

I gritted my teeth. I didn’t know what Fort Leonard was, or why he thought I was some sort of spy for them. I knew I should ignore him like I’d ignored Jackson, but I found my fingers curling around the handle of Dad’s knife instead.

Will was about to start up again when the wagon slammed to a halt, tossing him back into his place at the front. “Ow! Sam!”

“Oh gee, sorry, Will.”

Sam turned and gave me a mischievous little grin as Will righted himself, cussing and spitting.

Marcus came striding back from his place at the head of the group, wiping sweat off his bald head with his sleeve. I hid the knife under my coat before he could see.

“It’s time,” Marcus said, and dropped a red bandanna on the wood rail at my shoulder — we must have been getting close. The whole thing seemed pretty ridiculous, but Marcus was nice enough about it, so I went along.

As I was about to tie on the bandanna again, I caught Jackson staring at me. He held his rifle tight to his chest, his arms straining, his finger along the trigger guard. His face had gone stony. Confused, I followed his eyes down to my lap and saw that my coat had brushed open, exposing the weapon in my hand. Our eyes met before his darted away, but in that second I saw that he was afraid. I eased the knife back into its sheath before tying the blindfold around my eyes, feeling strangely satisfied to be the one causing fear instead of the one feeling it.

The air grew steadily cooler and twilight settled around us. After a while, we came to a halt, and Sam and Will piled out of the wagon. There were shuffling footsteps and low voices up ahead, then the sound of something large brushing against the ground. I slipped the bandanna up over my eyes while their backs were turned and caught the four of them moving aside a group of small trees and brush to expose a rough path cutting into the woods ahead of us. Clever. I raced to pull the bandanna back down before they returned.

It was colder and darker in the woods. We were surrounded on all sides by creaking branches and animal calls. It was another hour or more of bouncing travel before we moved out onto open ground, where we flew downhill before coming to a stop.

There was a pause, then Sam loosened the knot of my blindfold so it fell to my shoulders.

We were at the bottom of a grass-covered valley, surrounded on all sides by deep forest. Ahead of us was a white stone wall that cut across the entire valley like a bright line of snow, with a heavy double iron gate at its center. Two words were engraved in deep letters on the white wall: SETTLER’S LANDING.

After Marcus opened the gates, Sam shook the reins and we rolled through. The gates made a rusty clank and then a deep final boom as they closed, hemming us in. A nervous flare bit through me. For a panicked moment, I wanted to leap out of the wagon and run. I took Dad’s arm tight in my fist.

What have I gotten us into?

On the other side of the gates, the grass turned into black asphalt, not at all the cracked, bomb-ravaged stuff most highways had become, but smooth and neat, snaking away down the hill. The horses’ hooves clicked as we followed it. The trees on either side of the road filtered the dying rays of sunlight so that they fell on us in shifting patterns of small shadows. It was achingly quiet. As we got farther in, I caught flashes of black and white and bright, unnatural colors peeking out through the trees.

I was about to ask what they were but before the breath could leave my lungs the first house emerged from the trees. It was set back about a hundred feet from the road, two stories, with bright yellow on top and brick on the bottom, the whole thing circled by a wide porch the color of beach sand. Glass glittered in the window frames and there were brass fixtures on the doors and casements. In front of the house, a man in a sweater and jeans was raking up leaves from the lawn. He waved as we passed.

“Better close your mouth before a bug flies in,” Sam said to me as he waved back.

Will snickered. “It’s like the spy’s never seen a house before.”

It was true. I hadn’t. Not like this anyway. Grandpa said that in the days of P11, people tried to escape the disease by barricading themselves in their homes, praying it would pass them by like an ill wind but it rarely worked. Somehow the plague always slipped in, under the doorways or through the windows like a mist, and killed them as they lay in their beds or sat at their dinner tables. Grandpa said that people used to think their home was their castle, but the Eleventh Plague made them all tombs. Every house I had ever known stank of rot, desperation, and fear. I didn’t go anywhere near them.

But these… They were like a nest full of bird’s eggs, painted pale pink or blue or a green that was like the color of sun-bleached moss. Some even flew crisp-looking flags from their porches that fluttered and snapped in the breeze. I tried to find some flaw, some sign that this place had been through the same history that the rest of the country had, but I found, unbelievably, nothing. Part of me wondered if I was actually still lying with Dad at the bottom of that gorge, starved and delirious, imagining all of it.

“You all right back there, son?” Sam asked.

I nodded dumbly as he turned the wagon onto a side road where a green and white street sign said SETTLER’S LANDING TERRACE. The road led downhill to a two-pronged fork. Where the roads diverged was an open area like a park. It was grassy, with a few trees and low bushes scattered here and there. In the center were two large swing sets, a slide, and a big jungle gym made of multicolored lengths of steel tubing.

Sam pulled on the reins and brought the wagon to a halt in front of a white house north of the park. He looked around at the other houses and cleared his throat — nervously, I thought. Sam had agreed to bring me here, but he was worried about it, not as sure as Marcus that it was a good idea. It made me wonder again what I had gotten myself into.

“Okay,” he said. “Here we are.”

As soon as we stopped, Will jumped off the bench and leaned over the side of the wagon. “Don’t get too comfortable, spy,” he hissed. “They may be fooled, but I’m not. This is our town. I’ll make sure you’re not here long.” He laughed, a self-satisfied little chuckle, then took off down the road.

“Will, you should let Violet look at that leg,” Sam called, but Will didn’t even turn back. His grievously wounded leg seemed to be causing him no trouble at all. Sam shook his head. “You ready?”

Sam offered me his hand but I ignored it and dropped onto the asphalt. Marcus had gone ahead into the house, so Sam and I lifted Dad out of the wagon before Jackson led the horses away. Dread settled over me as I followed Sam up the white house’s stairs. The door seemed like a great set of jaws, ready to swallow me whole.

“You okay?” Sam asked.

“Fine,” I said, sucking back the fear so he wouldn’t see. “Let’s go.”

I held my breath as we stepped inside. I had never seen anything like the room we were in. It had clean white walls, a brick fireplace with an only slightly cracked marble mantel, and scuffed wood floors. All of it was lit with candles and small oil lamps that cast a dim amber glow. It smelled of sweet wood smoke and somewhere, faintly, what I thought was baking bread.

“Set him here.”

Sam pointed to a cot just under a window beside the front door. We got Dad off the pallet and onto it just as Marcus hurried into the room from another part of the house, a small woman with curly black hair following him.

“This is Violet,” Marcus said.

The woman pushed through us, snapping on a pair of latex gloves as she came. “What happened?” Her voice was sharp and flat as a shot.

“He fell,” I said.

Violet dropped down by Dad’s side. “How far?” When I didn’t answer, she turned back. “How far?”

“I don’t know. Ten, twenty feet? He was in the water and hit his head.”

Violet gently slid her fingers behind Dad’s head and closed her eyes, concentrating. “More like thirty feet, I think. He lost consciousness immediately?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

Violet went to a wooden cabinet along the wall and pulled open one of about ten narrow drawers. Inside I saw rows of small glass bottles with white labels. Gleaming silver instruments lay beside them. I tried to get a better look, but Violet selected a few instruments, then snapped the drawer closed and came back to Dad’s side.

She worked quietly, listening to Dad’s heart, checking his temperature, pulling back his eyelids to stare into his eyes. Her movements were quick and precise but never rushed, as though she was moving methodically through some checklist in her head. Even when she unwrapped his head and the blood began to flow again, she didn’t panic. Instead, she grabbed some clean bandages and went to work.

I couldn’t watch. The way she poked and prodded at him made me feel sick and hot. I turned away; outside the window, I could see a group gathering in the park, a small assembly of women and children in old jeans and flannels. Some were tending the beginnings of a bonfire, while others set a collection of torches into the ground and opened up a large plastic folding table.

“It’s Thanksgiving.”

I turned to Marcus and Sam, standing behind me. “What?”

“Today,” Marcus said. “At least we think it is. Anyway, that’s what we got the deer for. Couldn’t find a turkey. We’re putting together a barbecue tonight out in the park. Why don’t we all go? Violet will come get us when she’s done.”

I shook my head and turned back to Dad. If they thought I’d leave him alone so easily, they were crazy.

“Look, there’s really nothing you can do here. Why don’t we—”

“Marc, maybe it’s better if he stays inside for the time being. Right?” Sam said it gently, but there was a trace of warning there.

“Why don’t you go on ahead, Marcus?” Violet said. “You too, Sam. We’ll be okay here.”

“Vi —” Marcus started, then pulled back. “You sure?”

Violet examined me over her shoulder. Her lips lifted into a thin smile beneath her blue eyes and pink freckles.

“You’re not going to be any trouble, are you?” she asked.

The way she was leaning over my father — was it a threat? His life was in her hands. I shook my head slowly but didn’t speak.

“Okay,” Marcus said, backing away from me. “Come on out if you get hungry.”

Violet waved Marcus off over her shoulder, then the front door opened and shut again.

“Sit down if you like,” she said.

I didn’t move.

In the stillness of the room, I was aware every time Violet’s instruments clanked together. I looked over to the mantel, where there were two rows of framed pictures. The frames were whole, but the pictures inside them were discolored, torn in places, and repaired. One showed a family, tanned and smiling and trim, posing on some tropical beach in front of a huge white boat, while another was of a mother and father sitting in lawn chairs out in front of a dilapidated trailer, a baby in an old stroller beside them.

“Those are our folks,” Violet said as she worked. “The poor rednecks are mine. Marcus’s are the ones with the yacht. I think they actually owned that island.”

Looking at the faded pictures of their long-dead families, a chill moved through me.

“What’s your name?” Violet asked, but I glared at the floor. “There’s no harm in telling me your name. Unless you’re Rumpelstiltskin, I guess. Are you Rumpelstiltskin?”

“Is he going to be okay?”

“Why don’t you sit down? We can—”

“Just tell me when we can leave.” My voice echoed in the small room, but Violet acted like she barely even heard me. Her flat expression never changed.

“Your dad’s right arm and leg are broken in multiple places; so are a few ribs. He’s dehydrated. He has what I think are infected cuts in various places. The worst of it is he took a pretty good blow to the head, enough to crack his skull. That put him in what people call a coma. That’s when—”

“I know what a coma is. When will he wake up?”

Violet’s eyes never wavered from mine.

“It could be five minutes from now,” she said. “Or it could be five years. Or it could be never. I won’t lie to you. In the old days there’d be more we could do. More tests so I could be sure. But now… it’s serious. The head injury is bad, but those breaks could cause trouble too.”

It was like she wasn’t even speaking English, just voicing a twisted jumble of sounds. A dark weight settled on my chest, pressing down on my lungs. I felt sick. My head swam.

Violet took a breath, about to say more, but was interrupted by a pounding at the front door. She set her hand on my back as she passed by me and went to answer it. When the door opened, I caught a glimpse of an older man standing outside, tall and craggy looking with shining white hair.

“What were you two thinking?” he demanded as he tried to push his way in.

“Caleb, I don’t have time to—”

“Where’s Marcus?”

“He’s getting the barbecue ready. I’m with a patient.”

“That’s exactly what I want to talk about. Will—”

The man started to force himself inside, but Violet planted her hand in the center of his chest and pushed him out onto the porch. “If you want to talk, we talk outside.”

Violet slammed the door behind her. The two of them were just outside the window, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying. The man towered over her, beginning to shout, trying to intimidate her, but Violet didn’t give an inch. She argued him down the stairs and out into their front yard.

I looked from the window down to Dad, and that’s when what Violet said hit me. It was like I was in the middle of the ocean and my hands had slipped off the side of a lifeboat. I sucked in a deep breath. I had to be calm, like Grandpa. Strong, like Grandpa. This was reality, and I had to deal with it. How I felt wasn’t important. My fingernails dug into my raw palm.

I stuffed my hand into my pocket as the door opened again. Violet swept in and went directly to the wooden cabinet. She drew something out that I couldn’t see, then returned to Dad’s side.

“That was Caleb,” I said. “Will’s father.”

“That’s right,” she said.

“He doesn’t want us here.”

“I think that’s putting it mildly.”

“He’s why Sam wasn’t sure I should come here.”

Violet looked at me steadily but said nothing.

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him that if my family wanted to share our home and food with you, it was our business.” I watched as Violet lifted a needle into the candlelight and filled it with liquid from a small bottle. “But that I definitely, without a doubt, wouldn’t use any of our medicines.”

Once the needle was full, Violet flicked it with her finger, then slid it into Dad’s arm and pushed the plunger. When she was done she turned back to me.

“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” she said with a wink. “These are antibiotics, in case there are infections and to protect against pneumonia.” Her brow furrowed. “He needs blood thinners because of the breaks but… we ran out months ago.”

“Why are you helping us?”

“When I was in med school,” she explained, “one of my teachers told me that my only job was to treat the patient in front of me. He said I couldn’t change the world, I could just treat what’s in front of me.”

Over the next hour or so, Violet fed Dad with a plastic tube threaded down his throat and then made some plaster and set his arm and leg in a cast, struggling to make the shattered bits of bone line up and lock into place.

I fell into a chair behind her, sinking into its deep cushions, while outside it slowly grew dark. A bright orange glow rose from the park. Maybe fifty men, women, and children converged around the bonfire. It had a large roasting spit built over it that Marcus and Sam were tending, turning the big deer around and around over the flame.

A string of about twenty small torches was set in the ground around the perimeter of the group, making flickering islands of light. The people milled around, laughing and talking, swimming in the glow.

“Who are you people?” My voice sounded strange and distant, like pieces of wreckage bobbing along on dark water. “What is this place?”

Violet smoothed a length of plaster-covered cloth across Dad’s knee, then gave me a kind and soft smile over her shoulder.

“There’ll be time for explanations later,” she said. “I’ll be done soon. When I am, we’ll get you cleaned up, and then I should get you something to eat.”

I shook my head. Violet persisted, but I didn’t move. I wasn’t being taken away from Dad.

Outside the window, people moved dreamily around the playground. Groups came together and apart, only to re-form again like beads of oil on water. All of them talking, hugging, throwing their heads back to laugh. All of it an eerie dumb show, silent to me in the house.

Violet continued working and I closed my eyes, surprised to find sleep overtaking me. I fought it for a moment, but it was too strong, too long in coming. I just prayed my dreams would find me back out on the trail with Dad, crashing through the grass with Paolo behind us, Dad talking a mile a minute, me bringing up the rear.

When I finally did sleep, though, I dreamed I was walking through the woods alone, late at night, my every step mirrored by an immense shadow with claws that lumbered by my side.

TEN

When I woke up, Violet was gone and there was a gnawing emptiness in my stomach. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had eaten. As I sat up, I saw a note sitting on a table near Dad.

We’re all at the barbecue. Come out and have something to eat when you get up. — Violet

Outside, the party had gotten smaller, but a group of twenty or so still milled around the fire.

There was some jerky in my pack, and maybe a few crumbs of hardtack had made it through. That would do. I looked around the room, but then remembered with a jolt that in my hurry to get Dad inside, I had left the pack outside. I could see it peeking over the lip of the wagon. Grandpa’s rifle leaned against it. The realization that I had left them both sitting out there in the open made me forget my hunger for a moment. I could feel the sting of the beating Grandpa would have given me if he had seen. Stupid. I wished I could just make my bed on the floor next to Dad and go to sleep, but I couldn’t leave my gear out there for anyone to take.

I struggled out of the chair, kneeling at Dad’s bed on my way to the door. The dirt and splashes of blood that had lingered on his face were gone and his skin wasn’t quite the waxy mask it had been. I tried to tell myself that he didn’t look any different than he ordinarily did when he was asleep, but there was a stillness there, an absence that seemed vast. I squeezed his arm and leaned down next to his ear.

“I’ll be right back,” I whispered before stepping outside.

The hairs on my arm lifted in the cool air, and the spicy smell of wood smoke and roasted meat made my stomach roar, pushing the last remnants of sleep out of my head. I crept down the stairs and across the yard, easing up to the wagon, hoping not to be seen. When I got close enough, I drew my bag toward me. Unfortunately I forgot that Grandpa’s rifle was leaning against it, so as soon as I pulled the pack away, the rifle fell with a clatter. My insides jumped.

“Hey.”

I looked down. Jackson and two others were sitting near the wagon’s tires, a litter of plates and half-eaten dinner all around them. There was a skinny kid with big glasses and another larger kid with thick curly hair. All of them were staring at me, three pairs of eyes burning in the dark.

“You get something to eat?” Jackson asked. I clutched my pack to my chest. “I have food.”

“We’ve got venison,” Jackson said. “And some potatoes Derrick’s mom made.”

“They suck,” the big kid, Derrick, said.

The kid with the glasses was sitting on the other side of Jackson. “My mom brought her blueberry pie,” he said, which for some reason caused the big kid with curls to shoot him a leering grin.

“Oh, I bet she did, Martin,” he said.

“Shut up, Derrick! That doesn’t even make sense!”

“Oh yeah? You want to know what makes sense?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Martin said. “My mom?” Jackson pushed Derrick away and stood up by the wagon. “Ignore Derrick. He’s obnoxious. You should stay and have some food.”

“I’m fine.”

I shouldered my pack and reached for the rifle, but before I could get away, Derrick leapt in front of me and started doing a spastic shuffle, jumping up and down and throwing his arms around at his sides like he was having a fit. I took a step backward.

“Uh… Derrick?” Jackson said, stepping up to my side. “What are you doing?”

“Well,” Derrick said, panting, “I figured, uh, maybe the problem was that he didn’t feel entirely at home yet, so I thought I’d perform the Settler’s Landing Dance of Welcoming.”

“You look like you’re having a seizure,” Martin said drily.

Derrick cackled and threw himself into the air, which I guessed was his big finish, since when he landed he swept his arms out in front of him and took a deep bow. Martin clapped sarcastically and Jackson laughed. When Derrick stood up again, he somehow had a plate of venison and potatoes in his hand. Where it came from, I had no idea, but when he held it out to me, the smell of it almost made me faint.

“Eat,” he said. “Eat, my new and tiny little friend.”

“What do you care if I eat or not?”

Derrick’s grin froze.

“Just being friendly, man, that’s all. You want it or not?”

I was about to turn and run back up the stairs into the Greens’ house, but my hands moved before the rest of me could. Before I knew it, I had snatched the plate from him and dug my fingers into the pile of meat. It was rich and gamey and seeped into every part of my body.

I gulped it down, and when it was gone, I scooped up the potatoes and devoured those too, sucking the remains from my fingers. When I was done, I had to gasp for air. Jackson and the others stood there, jaws wide.

“Uh… you want us to go kill you something else?” Martin asked. “I think we have a horse that’s lame.”

Embarrassed, I pushed the plate at Derrick and grabbed the rifle out of the wagon. “Thanks,” I mumbled.

“Hey, it’s no problem, man. I’d do anything for the guy who shot Will Henry.”

I turned, glaring at Jackson. “They know about that?” Jackson flinched. “I—”

“Relax,” Derrick said. “We just wish your aim had been a little better.”

“Hey, you coming to school with us tomorrow?” Martin asked. I looked at him, blank faced, sure I hadn’t heard him correctly. “School. You know. Teachers. Books.” Derrick whacked Martin in the stomach. “Girls in tight sweaters.”

“You all go to school?”

“Sure! How else are we going to get into a good college?”

The three of them laughed, but I didn’t get it. The way they talked, like they were tossing a ball around in a game of keep-away, was confusing.

“So you wanna come?” Jackson asked.

I looked over my shoulder at Dad’s window and shivered at the thought of him lying in that tomblike quiet. What if he woke up and I wasn’t there? I shouldered the rifle and backed away from the three of them without a word.

Derrick called after me. “Okay! Take it easy. Come back anytime!” Jackson pushed Derrick hard on the shoulder, knocking him off balance.

“What? I was being nice!”

“You were being a spaz.”

I left them bickering, getting halfway across the road, when Marcus spoke up from behind me.

“Everyone? Everyone, can I have your attention please?”

Marcus was standing by the fire with Violet at his side, waving everyone closer together. Caleb Henry loomed in the background.

“Just for a second. Thanks, everybody. Um. I just wanted to say it’s great that we could all be here like this tonight. It’s Thanksgiving today, uh, we think, and I’m sure most of us remember that from back when we were kids. Every year we’d gather the whole family and spend the day together, eating and watching football and arguing.”

“Was this back on the yacht, Green?” someone called, and a laugh rose up from the group.

Marcus chuckled. “Well, wherever it was, I don’t remember ever feeling closer to my family than I did right then. And I don’t think I’ve ever felt closer to all of you. We’ve done great work in the past year, haven’t we?”

There was a general murmur of agreement from the assembled, a scattering of applause.

“New wells were dug, the crops came in a bit better than expected, and everybody’s house is ready for the winter. But most of all, another summer has gone by and we’re all still here, together and safe. We’re lucky. Damn lucky, I think.”

Just then Caleb edged Marcus out of the way and came forward. His face looked even rougher in the firelight, creased like an old map. As soon as he stepped up, everyone went quiet. Caleb looked from person to person grimly, then began a prayer. Everyone lowered their heads as he spoke. His voice was dark and sharp.

“Lord, after the flood, many of us believed it would be the fire next time. All of us here saw that fire, and thanks to your grace we were among the few who found their way through it. As we struggle to please you, we are beset on all sides by those that would tear down all that we have built.”

As Caleb spoke, his blue eyes searched the crowd. I wondered if he was looking for me.

“Today we give thanks and reaffirm that the price of your gift is vigilance and obedience to your will. Amen.”

The crowd murmured “Amen” and then someone at the back of the group began singing a song that I didn’t recognize at first. “Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light…”

Even Jackson and his friends joined in. Some of the adults laid their hands over their hearts. I remembered it then from the few times Grandpa had sung it when he was drunk. The American national anthem. What were they singing that for?

“What so proudly we hail—”

“Leave me alone!” someone shouted.

The singing stopped and the group turned as one body to a mass of shadows that was swirling at the edge of the park. “Oh no,” Jackson said from behind me.

Derrick barked with laughter. “Here comes the show, ladies and gentlemen!”

As the group turned more into the light, I could make out a kid standing in the center of a circulating mob of five or six others, all of whom were jutting in and out at him like crows after a scattering of seed. The kid in the center was thrashing hard and had already put two kids on the ground, one clutching his knee to his chest, the other cradling his jaw. A third boy got up his courage and went in, only to get a kick between his legs that put him down howling. “Nice one!” Derrick shouted.

“Stop it!” Marcus hollered as he rushed toward the scene. “Stop this right now! Jennifer!”

Jennifer?

Marcus grabbed the arm of the kid in the middle to pull him out of the melee. To my surprise, it wasn’t a boy at all, but a black-haired girl of about sixteen, dressed in dirty jeans and a loose blue-and-red flannel shirt. As she stumbled closer to the firelight, her tan skin glowed like bronze. Marcus pulled her back just as she was going after one of the boys who was stupid enough to have gotten up off the ground.

“What have I told you?” Marcus yelled as he pulled her away. “What have I told you about fighting?”

The girl didn’t argue with him, and instead took the time to kick one of the remaining boys firmly in the calf.

The group of adults broke up as Marcus came charging through with her in tow. Some of them went to pull their wounded sons off the ground and others gathered in a tight knot around Caleb Henry, sternly watching the proceedings and whispering among themselves.

As Marcus and the girl came closer, I got a better look at her. She had broad shoulders for a girl, inky black hair, and dark, almond-shaped eyes.

Chinese, I thought, gripping the stock of Grandpa’s rifle. They were all supposed to be west of the Rockies. What is she doing here? With them?

“You could have walked away,” Marcus said. “And let them call me a murderer and a spy? Let them call me a Chink?”

“They’re just words.”

“They’re just words to you!” she screamed, yanking her arm out of Marcus’s grasp and stalking away. “I didn’t start any damn war!” I tensed up as she came toward me.

“Jenny!” Marcus called. “We’ll say something. I’ll talk to their parents!”

“Forget it. Just forget it!” Jenny stomped toward the wagon, her face screwed up in rage.

“Hey, Jenny, how’s it goin’?”

“Shut up, Derrick!” she said, then whipped her head my way. “And what the hell are you looking at?!” she snapped as she shot past me.

Jenny tore across the park and into the Greens’ house and returned several moments later with a big bag slung over her shoulder.

“Jenny!” Marcus barked. “Don’t you just walk away! Jennifer Marie Green!”

She whirled around to face him. “It’s Tan! My name is Jenny Tan!”

Jenny ran up the road, disappearing into the darkness. It was quiet then, like the aftermath of a storm. Most of the other parents had drifted off, injured sons in tow, leaving Caleb Henry and his grim circle.

“Beset on all sides,” Caleb intoned, looking from the Greens to me. His blue eyes reflected the twisting fire. “Even from within.”

Marcus was about to say something back, but Violet appeared at his shoulder and he swallowed whatever it was. Caleb grinned wolfishly, satisfied, and drifted out of the group, his followers trailing behind him like smoke.

Marcus stood in the middle of the road, his shoulders slumped, his hand clasped on the back of his neck. Violet rested her hand on his arm. He looked up wearily and nodded.

Jackson was sitting against the wagon. His knees were drawn up to his chest, head back, staring blankly up at the stars. I would have thought he was praying, except for how his hands were curled into bone-white fists. He saw me and forced a smile.

“Welcome to Settler’s Landing.”

Soon the park emptied and I followed the Greens inside.

“Jackets on the rack, everyone,” Violet announced as we entered. Jackson and Marcus dutifully obeyed, stripping off their coats and hanging them just inside the door.

“If I don’t keep at them, they’re pigs,” she said. Once Violet got me settled in the room with Dad, she disappeared into the kitchen with Marcus.

I stood by Dad’s bed, pulling my thin blanket out of my backpack.

“Sorry for all that tonight,” Jackson said from the doorway behind me. “You can pretty much bet that if Jenny sees calm water, she’ll throw in the biggest rock she can.”

“She’s your… sister?” I asked, still amazed that a Chinese girl lived with them.

“Adopted, yeah. I was little, so I don’t really remember, but Mom said we went through this town the day after some big fight and there she was, wrapped in this old Chinese army jacket she always wears. She was all cut up and bloody. Mom figured whoever her parents were must have left her, thinking she was a goner, or maybe they got killed themselves. Anyway, Mom fixed her up and took her along with us.”

“So how does she know her real name is Tan?”

Jackson laughed. “She doesn’t,” he said. “That’s the thing — she just made it up. Guess that’s how much she didn’t want to be one of us. Anyway, she’ll go sleep it off in this old barn she goes to, out north of town. She’ll be well rested and ready to embarrass us again soon enough.”

I rolled my sweatshirt up into a pillow and laid it out on the blanket. Jackson stood behind me a little while longer, then stepped back into the hallway.

“Well… anyway, good night,” he said.

Soon I heard the creaking of stairs and the soft shutting of a door. I blew out the candles scattered around the room and the house settled into darkness.

Even in the dark, Dad’s skin was powdery and pale against his beard. His cheeks were sunken and there were hollows around his eyes. He looked like a stranger. An aching homesickness shot through me. There was so much that was new: these people, this place. I wished we could be back on the trail, just the two of us.

I closed my eyes, praying I’d drift off immediately, but of course I didn’t. In fifteen years I had spent the night in tents and caves and abandoned buildings but never once in a house. I couldn’t breathe. I wrestled the window over Dad’s bed open, letting in the rhythmic chirp of crickets and the blow of the wind rustling through the trees.

Across the park, the other houses loomed in the moonlight, their unlit windows like blank, staring eyes. Looking at it all made me feel the whole Earth tilting underneath me. Every other time in my life when I felt like this, I would go to Dad and it seemed, with just a wave of his hand, he could make things right again.

Before I went to sleep, I leaned over his chest, straining to hear the soft pat of a heartbeat, but what was there was too soft and too far away to grasp.

I was on my own.

ELEVEN

I woke with a start before dawn, disoriented. But soon the memories of the day before fell into place and everything began to clear. The house was quiet. Dad hadn’t moved.

I pulled my blanket aside and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, wondering what I was supposed to do next. No salvage to secure, no trail to start down. I felt like some great wheel was spinning inside me, but it had nowhere to go.

I slipped into my jeans and moved through the downstairs rooms, exploring. I found a sharpened stub of a pencil and an old nickel lying in a dusty corner and pocketed them. Other than that, there wasn’t much I hadn’t seen the night before. A few pieces of furniture. The pictures. The big wooden cabinet.

I froze, remembering the glass and shining metal, and how Violet had shut the drawer so quickly, like she didn’t want me to see inside. I closed my eyes and listened to the house. Nothing. I slipped over to the cabinet and opened the top drawer. Inside there were gleaming rows of silver instruments: razors and scissors, picks and tweezers. I lifted out a large saw with brutal teeth. I set it down and moved to the next drawer.

There, lying on strips of green felt, were the rows of frosted glass bottles. They all had white labels, with words like Morphine and Penicillin written on them in precise black letters. Marcus said Violet had been an army doctor. I guessed maybe she had done a bit of salvaging too before the military broke up. Whatever the case, it was a gold mine. For a fraction of what was in that cabinet, we could get a new wagon and mule, maybe even a horse, and enough supplies to get us trading again.

A spring squeaked upstairs, followed by the sound of feet hitting the floor. I scrambled to make sure everything was in its place and then shut the drawers. When the Greens came downstairs, I was sitting innocently at Dad’s side.

“How we doing this morning, Aloysius?” Marcus asked. He was standing in the doorway that led back to the kitchen, munching on a hard-boiled egg. He had a bowl of them in his hands.

“Who’s Aloysius?”

“You are,” Marcus said. “Well, at least until you tell us your real name.” Marcus held the bowl out to me. “Egg?”

I hesitated for a second, but then the hunger took over.

“It’s Stephen,” I said as I plucked an egg from the bowl.

“You think about what you’d like to do today, Stephen?”

I glanced out the window. It was a bright fall morning, crisp. A full moon still hung in the sky, fading as the sun rose. Every part of me yearned to be out of the stifling closeness of the house.

“I should just stay here,” I said. “With my dad.”

“You sure?” Marcus asked. He gave me a moment, then turned back toward the kitchen. “Okay. Suit yourself.” His boots echoed down the short hallway.

“Wait,” I called before he could disappear. “Maybe…” My mind spun in place. Wouldn’t Grandpa have given me a pounding if he knew I was in a place like this and didn’t take the time to do a little recon? I mean, who knew what else I’d find? “For all you’ve done for us… I can’t pay you, but maybe I could work.”

“I told you, there’s no reason to—”

I turned my eyes from the window and set them on Marcus, unmoving. It was a look that, when Grandpa used it, said there would be no compromise, no discussion. To my surprise, it actually worked.

“Well, there’s a little of the fall harvest left,” Marcus conceded. “It’s not much but—”

“It’s fine,” I said. A buzz of excitement lit through me. Just the idea of being out in the open air was a weight lifted off my shoulders.

“Vi!” Marcus called into the kitchen. “Gonna take Stephen out with me to the harvest.”

“Who’s Stephen?”

“Aloysius.”

“Oh! He should rest!” she yelled back.

“Can’t! Says he has to be our indentured servant.”

“Okay, well, have him clean the gutters while you’re out.”

Marcus laughed. “Come on. I promise you, though, you’ll regret this.”

I pulled on my boots and coat and tucked a piece of jerky into my pocket for later. I started to follow Marcus but stopped at the foot of Dad’s bed. Violet had removed the feeding tube from the night before, so he almost looked like he was just sleeping, his hands resting atop the clean white sheet. Could I really leave him here with these strangers? Then I remembered how Violet had cared for him, even defying Caleb to do it. I leaned down by Dad’s ear quickly, so Marcus wouldn’t see. “I’ll be back,” I whispered.

Marcus grabbed his coat off the rack by the door and then I followed him outside.

The second I stepped out the door I felt like I could breathe again. As we made our way deeper into the neighborhood, kids of all ages blew past us carrying salvaged backpacks and carpetbags. Groups of girls would meet up on the road and separate into age groups, the younger ones squealing and hugging, the older ones trying their best to seem unimpressed. The boys pushed one another, braying laughter loud as donkeys. I flinched as they thundered by and disappeared down a hill that dipped into the trees a few houses from Marcus’s.

“Heading to school,” Marcus said. “Welcome to join them, you know.”

I shook my head at the thought of being shut up inside some room with the screeching horde. I could only imagine what Grandpa would say about running off to school when there was work to be done.

I cracked the egg Marcus had given me and ate it as I scanned the roadside and the yards along the way, looking for treasures like the ones in the Greens’ house, but found little. The place was amazingly neat; only a few scattered toys lay about here and there, abandoned as kids raced to school. The houses, though… what was in all of these houses?

“Listen,” Marcus said, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Sorry about Will and all. What are ya gonna do? Last month he accused Winona Lee of being a Fort Leonard spy. She’s eighty-three.”

“What is Fort Leonard anyway?” I asked. “Another town?”

“Barely. It’s a little settlement that popped up to the north. The map says it’s near a place called Fort Leonard. People have a bee in their bonnet since somebody saw a scout poking around east of here the other day. That’s who we were out looking for when we spotted you and your dad.”

I nodded, but didn’t really get it. They brought me and Dad in, two complete strangers, when they were supposed to be out looking for a spy?

The houses thinned out and then the land opened up into five large fields that stretched out about as far as I could see. Most were barren at this point, but the closest one was still full of rows of thick green sprouts. A dozen or so adults circulated around them.

“Well, here we are,” Marcus announced. “The land of plenty! Whole thing used to be the town golf course. Took us almost the whole first year to clear the ground. ‘Bout killed us all, but it was worth it. We bring in a decent amount of wheat and corn and beans now. People mostly raise vegetables in their backyard gardens. Hey, Sam!”

Sam waved from where he was kneeling down in the rows of plants.

“We owe it all to Sam, actually. His people were farmers way back. He told us what was what.”

Sam tipped his hat at the compliment. Marcus held out a handful of thin plastic bags to me. They said SAFEWAY in big red letters.

“Okay,” he said. “You asked for it.”

I took the bags and we picked two rows alongside Sam’s. We were harvesting carrots and onions. I stripped off my coat and sweatshirt and got down on my knees. At first I worked just enough to cover my inspection of the area around me. There wasn’t much to see though. A few farming implements, hoes and shovels mostly, sat nearby. I made a mental note of them.

I ranged out toward a fence that ran along the length of the fields. The branches of the brown-leaved trees squeezed through its narrow openings or surged over top like an advancing army. The fence was warped in places, bent inward from years of trying to hold the forest back. Farther east, the fence disappeared — torn down, I guessed, when they’d cleared the land.

“It used to be a gated community.”

Sam was kneeling in the rows behind me, pushing his hands through the carrot leaves, picking and choosing. Marcus joined us from a few rows down.

“What’s that?”

“Before the Collapse,” Sam continued, “rich people like Marcus here’s family liked to build these self-contained neighborhoods, surround them with fences and security and whatnot. You know, keep out the riffraff. Anyway, this whole place was built right before everything went bad. After that, the people living here closed themselves up. Cut access to the roads, let some of the forest grow back in. With so much going on, they were just forgotten.”

I stopped my digging and sat back on my heels. “What happened to them?” I asked.

“P Eleven,” Marcus said. “Sickness took all but the Henrys. You know? Your buddy Will? His family. They have this big house on the north side. They were here when all of us arrived. Had a hand in building the place, I think.”

“Yeah,” Sam said with a chuckle. “And they still think it’s theirs.”

The sun was out now in full. A flock of birds cut across the sky and landed on the field, pecking briefly at the earth before swarming away again. I looked around at the ten or fifteen people moving through the rows, pulling in a harvest like it was the most natural thing in the world.

It was sad in a way, standing there in the fields, watching them. They’d been lucky, incredibly lucky, but sooner or later I knew their luck would run out, just like it had for Dad and me. Just like it had for everybody. All it would take was one little mistake and they would be found and wiped out.

How could they not know how useless it all was?

“Lunch,” Marcus announced a couple hours later, stretching his back. “You ready, Stephen? I bet Vi has something good for us.”

“Maybe I’ll keep going,” I said, thinking of the house’s awful stillness. “Is that okay?”

“You should come and eat.”

“I’m fine, really. It’s just… it’s good to be doing something. You know?”

Marcus looked over at Sam, who just shrugged. “Kid wants to work.”

“All right,” Marcus said. “But not too much longer.”

I handed Marcus my bags of carrots and he and Sam followed the others back toward the house. Once they were gone, I clapped the dirt off my hands, cut through the fields, and wound through the neighborhood’s unfamiliar streets.

I ended up at the spur of a road leading down a hill, the same one the kids had streamed down earlier on their way to school. I looked over my shoulder: No one was around. I pulled the scrap of jerky from my pocket and chewed on it as I followed the road. Down at the bottom of the hill, there was a black parking lot, cut up into little slips with fading yellow paint. A low building, surrounded by a neatly trimmed yard that stretched behind it, was backed by a hill dotted with one large sycamore. Just behind a sidewalk that ringed the building there was an old sign that said in large black letters: SETTLER’S LANDING HIGH SCHOOL.

I kept close to the school’s beige walls as I passed. Like all the buildings in the neighborhood, it was neat and well maintained, the brick foundation without a crack. The grass around it was short and free of weeds, and I found discarded kids’ things here and there on the ground. A jump rope. A broken colored pencil. I took what I could and kept going.

I walked around the school, looking in the windows as I went. Inside there were empty classrooms filled with abandoned desks and chairs. I made it around to the back of the school, found a lone window, and peeked inside.

Desks and chairs sat in six neat rows far below. There was a kid at each desk, pencil in hand, leaning over a stack of papers and writing intently. The rows were broken up by age, the youngest in the front, oldest in the back. Jackson and his friends sat together toward the rear. Will Henry sat on the opposite side of the room behind them, dozing, surrounded by twins, two pale, greasy boys who reminded me of slugs, and a giant redheaded boy with a grove of acne covering his face.

All the rows faced a black chalkboard and a long wooden desk to my right. Sitting at the desk was a tall, thin man with steel-rimmed glasses, wearing a black suit that was a bit too tight and made him look like a scarecrow. He scanned the room, watching the quietly writing students.

“Freaky, huh?”

I whirled around, dropping my hand to the hilt of Dad’s knife.

Jenny Tan lounged against the big sycamore behind me, wearing a green army jacket with a red star on the sleeve. She had a large pad of paper spread on her lap and a line of colored pencils in the grass next to her.

“You gonna stab me with that thing, or what?”

Suddenly feeling foolish, I jerked my hand away from the knife.

“So,” she said. “You’re the spy.”

“I’m no spy,” I said. “We’re salvagers.”

“Salvagers,” she said, tilting her head against the tree trunk and studying me. “Never actually met one of you before. You travel around, right?” She nodded her head out toward the trees and the edge of town. “Out in the great beyond?”

I nodded. Jenny watched me a moment longer, then took a pencil off the ground and started drawing. She looked past me into the window of the school and then down again. I watched as she erased a line and redrew it, then smudged it with her thumb. Her eyebrows knitted together in concentration. Her hair, loose and tangled, framed her face like a deep shadow. I kept thinking of the hurricane she had been the night before, amazed at how she seemed like someone completely different now.

“How come you don’t go to school with the rest of them?” I asked.

“And listen to Tuttle go blah-blah-blah-blah about history and math and the poetry of English guys who have been dead for a thousand years? No thanks. Only reason anybody goes is because it’s what their parents remember doing when they were kids, so they’re doomed to repeat it.” Jenny looked up at me. Her eyes were deep brown and seemingly flecked with gold, like a hawk’s. “Sounds kind of dumb, huh?”

I shrugged. “Guess so.”

Jenny glanced down at my hand. “No dumber than reaching for a weapon every time you see a Chinese girl.”

She sprang it like a bear trap. I scrambled for something to say, but when I opened my mouth, no words came.

“What? Your folks tell you to expect horns and a tail or something?”

“No. I—”

Jenny’s grin grew wider, about to burst into a laugh. “Relax,” she said. “I’m just messing with you. Hey, I’d probably reach for a knife if I saw me too.”

A rumble came from inside the school. I turned to the window and saw the students were pushing back from their desks and stampeding toward the double doors at the back of the classroom.

“Uh-oh. Here comes the flood.” Jenny tore the drawing out of her pad, crumpled it up, and tossed it to the ground. As she stood up and stretched, her Red Army jacket lifted, revealing a scar that was thick as a trench and curled across her middle and around her back.

“I don’t know. Maybe I will go back to school on Monday,” she said, letting the statement hang in the air for a moment before turning and giving me a quick look. “It’s been a while since I annoyed Tuttle. Maybe I’ll see ya around, tough guy.”

Jenny gathered her things, then strode away on bare feet down the hill, just missing the torrent of bodies that roared into the playground outside the school. I turned to escape before they could reach me, stopping only to snatch Jenny’s crumpled drawing off the ground, then dashing into the forest.

I tromped through the brush, not looking where I was going, simply trying to escape the strangeness of the day. She was right — I had never actually seen a Chinese person up close before, let alone talked to one. These were the people the United States had been at war with? The people who’d released P11 and killed millions? After the plague had passed and the Chinese troops had invaded, there’d been years of vicious fights between them and the survivors. My family had fled San Diego a year before I was born, though, so we mostly kept out of it. Still, we couldn’t help but see the spreading aftermath.

Grandpa said the Chinese were subhuman. Savage, ugly, and vicious. But if that’s true, I wondered, how come when I look at Jenny, that’s not what I see?

I skimmed the edges of backyards as I went deeper into the woods. The neat lines of the houses were just visible through the trees, which were hanging over thick grass and vegetable patches. I thought again of the treasures Violet had laid out in that cabinet of hers. Drugs. Priceless medical instruments.

I wondered: How is it possible that while we had nothing, these people are here with all of this?

A twist of anger made me stop to catch my breath. The forest shifted around me in the wind. Something small skittered through dry leaves. Grandpa had told me a hundred times that life wasn’t fair and that expecting it to be was for fools.

These people got lucky. That’s all. It can’t last. All that matters is that I have to be ready when Dad gets better so we can get on track again. We need supplies and things to trade.

But what?

I searched and searched for an answer, only to return to the same place each time.

There was only one thing to do.

I didn’t like it, but the truth was we had never been in anywhere near this much trouble before and I was the only one who could save us.

A blackbird cawed loudly, startling me. The sun had dropped a couple degrees in the sky. I thought of Dad lying there all alone and started to go, but then I remembered Jenny’s drawing still clenched in my hand. I turned the crumpled ball over, and before I knew it, my fingers were pulling it open. The paper crackled as I spread it open on the ground in front of me.

It wasn’t what I expected at all. Inside was a nearly perfect sketch of the back of the school with the sky and drifting clouds in the background. The scrub and grass leading up to the brick wall were textured and deep. It all looked unbelievably real, like a photograph, except that on the other side of the window, instead of a class full of students, desks, and a teacher, there stood a lone, riderless horse.

Its head was bowed almost to the floor. It had no saddle or bridle, and its dark mane was long and tangled. The strangeness of it was overwhelming, but not in the same way that the town was. Looking at it made my pulse slow and my breathing run shallow and quiet for the first time since I’d arrived, like it was speaking to me in a language I could almost, but not quite, understand.

I traced the lines of the drawing with the tip of my finger, looping and slashing across the paper like Jenny had, trying to imagine what was in her head as she did it.

The blackbird cawed again, pulling me back into the world. Waste of time, I thought, and folded the paper up and shoved it in my pocket. I had no time to be looking at pictures.

I had work to do.

TWELVE

Late that night, once everyone had gone to sleep, I sat up in the darkness. I dressed as silently as I could, then gathered everything I needed — moving achingly slow to avoid making any sound — and crept out of town.

I followed the road up toward the white stone wall that seemed to glow in the moonlight. Luckily the gates had been left slightly open so I was able to slip past, avoiding the rusty creak that I was sure would have carried across the entire town. Once through, I headed for the woods on the other side of the grass plain.

It took me more than an hour to cross through the forest. When I stepped down onto the cracked remnant of the highway on the other side, my boots were caked in mud and my arms were raked with scratches from the thornbushes woven through the trees.

The land across the road was dark as slate. It seemed to stretch westward nearly forever, dotted with scattered families of trees, until it ran up against low mountains that loomed far off in the distance. Off to the north there were the remains of a casino called the Golden Acorn and a Starbucks. Their billboards stretched into the sky.

I made my way up the hill until I found an old lightning-struck tree. It was split down the middle with the very first showings of sprouts growing out of its charred interior. I stepped back into the cover of the woods behind it before I pulled the gauze-wrapped package from my coat pocket and opened it.

Two glass medicine bottles and a few stainless steel instruments, priceless at any trade gathering, glittered in my hand. A sharp stitch of guilt knotted in my chest. I’m no thief, I thought again. But the fact was that we were broke. No wagon. No supplies. Nothing to trade. I couldn’t let that happen. With no one else around, it was my responsibility and mine alone.

I found a sharp, flat rock, pushed aside the leaves, and started digging into the soft ground until I had a wide hole cut about two feet deep into the earth. I set the gauze-wrapped medicines, along with the pencil and old nickel, carefully into the bottom. The way the gauze lay over the medicine bottles made them look like two bodies wrapped in a shroud.

I pushed the dirt over them quickly and sat back on the hill, leaning on my elbows, pulling in the cool air that tasted of wood smoke and decaying leaves. That pang of guilt hit me again. My hand moved around to my pocket and I laid Mom’s picture out in a patch of moonlight.

Hours after we’d taken the picture and made it back to camp, I’d slipped into Mom and Dad’s tent, squirming in between them. Mom lit a candle, opened one of our few books, and laid her arm across my back while Dad turned the pages. Mom would read a passage out loud and then I would read the next one, both of us quiet as could be, so as not to wake Grandpa.

I’d liked how, when I stumbled on words I didn’t know or couldn’t pronounce, Mom would reach for our battered dictionary and we’d go over the definition and sound it out, over and over until I had it down. It always felt to me like trudging up a tough and rocky hill, sweating and pushing until finally I made it up over the top to land that was flat and bright.

We made it through Sounder, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Great Expectations that way, the words rolling from Mom’s mouth in her high, clear voice that was like a bird’s or a bell’s. We’d read until my eyes drooped and the steady in and out of Mom’s and Dad’s breathing on either side would rock me to sleep.

Grandpa thought the idea of my learning to read was a waste of time, and in a way I’d agreed with him. I was going to be a trader like him and my dad — what use would reading really be?

Mom had said that maybe the world wouldn’t always be like it was now. But even if it was, she said, sometimes it was important to do things there was no real use for. Like reading books and taking pictures.

She’d said we had to be more than what the world would make us.

A branch snapped and leaves rustled down to my left. I scanned the woods with my hand on the hilt of the knife, but everything was blurry, swirling like the forest was underwater. I reached my hand up to my eyes and it came back wet. I had been crying and didn’t even realize it.

Stupid baby. I wiped the tears away with my dirty coat sleeve but still didn’t see anything. Probably nothing anyway. A deer. Maybe a stray dog.

I swept leaves over the disturbed ground so it blended into the hillside, then marked the place by half burying the rock at the head of the hole. It didn’t matter what Mom would have thought. Like Grandpa, she was gone, and I was here.

I surveyed the highway and the land beyond, all flat plains of black and gray. The stars, straining through the thick canopy above my head, shone like bits of broken glass.

As soon as Dad was better, all we’d have to do is stop here on the way out of town. Then we could trade for whatever supplies we needed. Everything would be back the way it was.

The only question was, what would I do until then?

THIRTEEN

“So what do they do down there?”

I was lingering by the window over Dad’s bed a few days later, full from a breakfast of eggs and bacon and bread that Marcus had cooked and insisted I join them for. The sun was spread across the asphalt where it dipped into the woods a few houses down. Soon that road would be stocked with kids jostling and laughing on their way down to the school.

“Usual stuff. Math. English. Why? You want to—”

“No,” I said quickly. “I was curious. I’ll help you and Sam in the fields again.”

“I bet we could do without you for a day or two.”

Violet had changed Dad into a pair of Marcus’s old pajamas that had white and blue stripes and a neat little collar. His face and beard were clean. There were shadows all along the white sheet that covered him. Dips and peaks. It was like he was buried under a drift of snow.

“What are you two talking about?” Violet appeared in the doorway behind us, drying her hands after doing the dishes in a wash bucket out on the porch.

“Stephen going to school this morning.”

Violet glanced down at Dad and then fixed me with a no-nonsense gaze, her hands on her hips. “There’s nothing you can do for your dad that I can’t. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. I’m sure he would want you to go to school if you could. Don’t you think?”

“I—”

“Jackson,” she called back into the kitchen. “You have some notebooks and things to give Stephen if he wanted to come to school with you?”

“On my desk!”

“Upstairs to the left,” Violet said to me, turning back toward the kitchen. “Better get moving. Don’t want you two to be late.”

I was about to argue, to insist that I would stay behind with Dad, but there was something about the swift sureness of Violet’s command that had me falling into place behind her and following her through the kitchen. Besides, I had to admit I was curious.

The kitchen was wide and open with tall windows all along the back looking out onto a porch. Jackson was sitting at the end of the long table with a big book that said AMERICAN HISTORY on the spine. He peeked over it as I came in, then away again as soon as I caught him.

“Next to the bed,” he said. “Take a couple pencils too.”

I nodded and looked up the length of the dark staircase that sat behind him. I took the rail and climbed slowly, feeling a strange leg-shaking vertigo. Once I reached the landing at the top of the stairs I saw his open door, went through, and was instantly struck dumb. To my left there was a bed, an actual bed, neatly situated under a curtained window with a little nightstand next to it. The bed was crisply made with a bright red blanket and two pillows.

Standing there, I felt the same eerie sense as when I saw the pictures of their long-gone families. Everything they had was left over from the last inhabitants of the town. After they had died, the Greens and the others swept in, tidied up, and took their places. Slept in their beds. Cooked in their kitchens. Started their lives all over again.

I stepped farther in. Next to the bed was a shelf that, incredibly, held at least thirty paperback and hardcover books. I stepped closer and ran my finger along each book’s cracked spine. The same hunger I felt when Marcus laid down that first plate of eggs and bacon that morning twisted inside of me. I felt a stab of jealousy again — How could they have so much? — so I made myself look away. That’s when I noticed that there was a second room across the hall. From where I stood, I could just see the corner of a bed and a bureau with its drawers hanging open. Clothes, bits of paper, and nubs of pencils littered the floor.

Jenny’s room?

I scooped up a notebook and a couple pencils from Jackson’s desk and crossed the hall, lingering at Jenny’s door and listening. Glass clinked together as Violet put the dishes away. Jackson talked low to Marcus downstairs. I slipped inside.

Light flooded in from the one bare window, harsh and glaring on the bone-white walls. Where Jackson’s was clean and orderly and spare, hers was a junkyard. There was a bed stripped of its blanket with a couple coverless pillows and a balled-up sheet. Old clothes lay among dishes that were covered in congealed candle wax. A big hardback book was spread-eagled on the floor. It said CHEMISTRY in black letters.

Her mattress was small with thin blue pinstripes. I could imagine Jenny lying there, her hair spread out like a thick black cloud, staring up at the ceiling and waiting (like me?) for sleep that wouldn’t come.

I remembered Jenny’s body stretching in the sun, her heavy scar glowing white like a vein in marble, a sketch of a smile on her lips.

Violet’s voice drifted up the stairs. “Stephen?”

As I pulled myself out of the room, I caught sight of a spot to one side of the door where the wall had been crushed inward. I stepped up for a closer look. The hole was in the shape of a small fist. Smeared traces of blood lay where knuckles would have bit into the plaster. I opened my own hand and looked at it.

In the center of my palm were the four half-moon slashes I had made the morning after Dad’s accident. I reached my hand out, laid it over the hole in the wall, and closed my eyes.

“Stephen? You okay?”

It sounded like Violet was at the foot of the stairs now. Any second she’d come up to check on me.

“Coming!” I called, feeling strangely drained as I ran down the stairs to where Violet was waiting with two metal pails. I scrambled for an explanation for what I had been doing, but she handed one pail to Jackson and one to me. Puzzled, I peered inside and found a few big lumps wrapped in cloth.

“Your lunch,” she said helpfully.

“Oh,” I said and stood there awkwardly for a moment. Just over her shoulder I could almost see the edge of her big medicine cabinet. “Well… thanks.”

Violet pulled at my collar, fussing with my clothes to get them straight. “If I had known you were going, I would have heated up enough water for a bath. Marcus, I don’t know….”

“He’ll be fine.”

Jackson was hovering by the door, impatient.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. As I started to go, Violet turned me around and pulled me into a warm hug. Close up, she smelled like baked bread and dried flowers.

She said nothing, just held on, her breath rising and falling, matching the swell of my own. The feeling was familiar, nice at first, but as it lingered it was like being embraced by a ghost and I had to push myself away.

“We better… we should go. Right, Jackson?” I blew past him, not waiting for a response, and threw myself into the front door, relieved to feel the blast of fresh air that hit me as soon as I was outside.

“God!” Jackson said when he caught up to me. “She’s always doing stuff like that!”

I had my head down, watching my old boots slap against the asphalt, trying to swallow the thick lump in my throat and shake the warm feeling of Violet’s arms around me.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Moms are like that, I guess.”

Jackson and I fell in with a torrent of kids that pushed us faster toward the turn in the road that led to school. Jackson tried to explain the school day to me as we went, but I only caught bits of it. Six class periods broken up by lunch. Something about math. A buzzing nervousness had come over me. I craned my head toward the safety of the Greens’ house, wondering if I could turn back before it was too late.

“Hey, look, there’s Derrick and Martin!”

Martin looked half asleep. He stared blankly at the road in front of him, glasses slightly askew and shirt untucked, his chopped-up crew cut glistening wet. Derrick, on the other hand, reminded me of corn popping in a skillet. He bounced from toe to toe as though he could barely contain himself.

“Guys!” Derrick shouted. “Compadres! Mis amigos! Como estás?”

“Hey, Derrick,” Jackson said.

“Well, if it isn’t my little friend with the big appetite,” Derrick said to me. “What’s up, my man?”

Head cottony with nerves, I didn’t know what to say. I hitched my shoulders noncommittally.

“Awesome. We all ready for a big day of learning?”

The double doors to the school loomed ahead of us, and the crowd swept us right toward them. Derrick knocked a few little ones out of the way. I took a deep breath, and in we went.

We were herded into a narrow hallway lined with metal lockers and doors to other rooms. I had never seen so many people my own age in one place before. I marveled at their clean clothes and the way they coursed through the hall, full of purpose. As with the houses the day I came to town, I searched for any sign that these people had grown up in the same world I did, but found nothing.

As I studied them, I was being watched too. When I caught them looking, they’d wrinkle their noses before turning away to whisper to their friends. A girl in a gray skirt pointed out my ratty old coat and giggled. I faked like I was cold and pulled it tight around me, hoping to hide the rest of my clothes.

Once we were inside the classroom, Jackson, Martin, and Derrick took desks about halfway back. Jackson pointed to an empty chair in front of him.

“Sit here,” he said.

All around me, kids were writing in their notebooks, desperately trying to finish their homework, I guessed, like Jackson had done that morning. The ones who weren’t working were talking. The roar of it came in waves, building and building until the entire room was shouting at once. It sounded to me like glass grinding against glass. Why does everyone talk so much here? I wondered. What is there to say? I almost put my head down on the desk and covered my ears, but the last thing I needed was to stand out even more. I looked up to my right. Above a set of tall bookshelves I could see the blue sky and the waving branches of the sycamore tree out of the window. “What are you doing here?”

At first I didn’t realize anyone was talking to me, but then someone’s knee bumped roughly into my side. “Hey! Spy! I’m talking to you.”

I looked up. Will Henry. He was wearing a black T-shirt and a pair of jeans that bulged a bit around the thigh where I guessed a bandage was. He was with his three friends, the two sluggy twins and zit-covered mountain of a redhead.

“I said, what are you doing here?” Somehow Will’s eyes glittered but were utterly blank at the same time. My hand fell beneath my coat and closed around the handle of my knife. When I didn’t say anything, Will snatched the notebook out of my hands and held it up to Jackson.

“You give him this, Greeny? You and your folks? How many of these you think we have left? And you give one to some spy?”

Will planted his fists on my desk and leaned over me.

“These things are for us,” he said. “Not you.”

“Leave him alone, Will!”

I turned and was surprised to see that Jackson was up out of his seat. Derrick and Martin rose tentatively to join him.

“What are you going to do?” Will continued, leaning toward him. Even though he was a whole row of desks away, Jackson took one nervous step back, which clearly delighted Will. “You and your folks gonna save this stray too? What? Was the first one not pathetic enough for you?”

Every part of me tensed, desperate to shoot up out of my chair and knock Will into the wall behind him. I struggled to stay calm even as he leaned over me, his face inches from mine.

“How about you, spy? You gonna do something?”

My cheeks burned and the wounds on my hand throbbed as I gripped the rough leather of the knife’s hilt.

The doors at the back of the classroom flew open and slammed against the wall.

“Class, settle down! Settle down, everyone!” the teacher called as he rushed in past us to the front of the room. “Mr. Henry, take your friends and sit.”

“Mr. Tuttle —” Will began, pointing at me.

“No time, Mr. Henry,” Tuttle said, distracted with papers at his desk. “Sit or find yourself in detention.”

Will glanced at Tuttle. “You’re lucky, spy,” he said as he tossed the notebook over his shoulder to one of his friends. “Come on, guys. Kid’s stinking up this side of the room anyway.”

The redhead gave me a vacant, moist-eyed glare while one of the slug twins nudged my desk so my pencils fell to the ground with a clatter. I waited until they were back at their seats before bending to pick them up, but when I did, Jackson was already holding them out to me.

“Here you go.”

“Thanks.” I turned away from him and rearranged my things. It was odd how Jackson and the others had stood up for me the way they had. Getting backed up like that by people who weren’t family didn’t make sense. It felt good, but I couldn’t afford to be careless. Nobody did anything for free.

“Class, I will need your attention… now.”

Tuttle smacked his ruler across the desk and there was a rustle of bodies as everyone dropped into their seats and shot to attention. He surveyed the room, moving from face to face and making little marks on a sheet of paper until his eyes fell on me.

“And who is this?”

“Stephen,” Jackson piped up from behind me. “Stephen, uh…” Jackson tapped my shoulder.

“Quinn,” I said.

“Stephen Quinn. He’s new.”

Tuttle glanced at Jackson. “Yes, I can see that he’s new, Mr. Green. If he wasn’t, I would not have expressed surprise upon seeing him, would I?”

“Um—”

“Rhetorical question, Mr. Green. Now. Quinn. Stephen. I am Mr. Tuttle. Have you been in school before?”

I cleared my throat and tried to sit up straighter. “No sir.”

“Can you read? Do you know your numbers?”

“Yes sir.”

“The Pledge of Allegiance?”

“The pledge of allegiance to what?”

The class laughed all around me. I felt my cheeks go red and hot.

“Well, you’ll have a lot of catching up to do, but I can’t afford to slow down.” Tuttle went back to marking his paper, then nodded toward Jackson and Martin. “Mr. Green and Mr. Stantz will help you.”

“Hey, what about me?”

Tuttle glared at Derrick. “I think Mr. Quinn would do well to pay as little attention to you as possible on educational matters. Don’t you agree, Mr. Waverly?”

“Yes! Absolutely!” Derrick said. “Good call, sir.”

Tuttle gave him a withering look, then stepped back to the blackboard behind him. It was covered by some kind of pull-down screen. The class groaned as he reached for it.

“Yes, class,” Tuttle said. “That’s right. If you were able to better control yourselves, these little tests wouldn’t be necessary. So take out your—”

Before Tuttle could finish, the doors behind us burst open again, smacking against the walls. The class turned as one body toward the sound as Jenny Tan strode barefoot into the classroom. She carried a tattered notebook. A nub of pencil was stuck behind one ear.

“Well, well, well, this is quite an honor,” Tuttle deadpanned. “We haven’t been graced with your presence in weeks. So nice of you to join us today, Miss Green.”

“It’s Tan,” Jenny said as she plopped down into an open seat toward the back of the class and put her bare feet up on the chair in front of her. “And you’re welcome.”

A ripple of laughter went through the classroom. Jackson had his eyes closed tight and his head in his hands. Irritation pulsed off him in waves. Tuttle slapped his ruler down on the corner of his desk.

“I won’t have any more disruptions.”

Jenny raised her hands, palms up, as if to say he wouldn’t get any from her. Tuttle considered her a moment, made a notation on his sheet, then stepped back to pull on the screen in front of the blackboard. It shot up toward the ceiling, revealing a long list of questions written in chalk. Jenny bent over her desk, laying her chin in the palm of one hand while she dug into the wood of her desk with her fingernail.

Jackson handed me a sheet of paper from his notebook as the rest of the class picked up their pencils and began writing. Jenny flicked her hair out of her face, turning just enough to catch me staring at her. It was like being stuck out in the open as lightning flashed all around me. I knew I should look away, and quickly, but I froze.

Jenny raised one eyebrow, and when I still didn’t look away, she jutted her face out at me, bugging her big brown eyes and making a show of staring back. I looked away immediately, up at the test questions, trying to calm the thrill of nerves in my stomach.

I was surprised to find that the test was on Great Expectations, a book I had actually read and more or less remembered. I made a stab at the questions, but it was hard to concentrate. I could feel Jenny across the room. It was like her body had this gravity all its own and it was pulling at me, trying to make me turn. I thought of her drawing spread across that rumpled paper. The riderless horse, motionless but somehow pulsing with movement and life.

Jackson nudged the back of my shoulder. “Ten minutes, Steve,” he whispered. “Come on.”

I shook thoughts of Jenny out of my head and forced myself to focus. The test was a fill-in-the-blank thing and time was ticking down, but I rushed to fill in the last answer just as Tuttle pulled the screen back down in front of the questions.

“Now, class,” Tuttle said as he collected papers. “We will continue our discussion of algebra. Turn to page two twenty-three….”

Jackson nudged me again. When I turned, he was holding a folded piece of paper. He jerked his thumb over toward Jenny, who was bent over her notebook, drawing in the margins. I took the paper and unfolded it.

It was a short note, just two lines long, but when I was done reading, it felt like something had sucked every last wisp of breath out of my lungs.

Across the room, Jenny was smiling in a way that reminded me of a wolf.

The note said, in a jagged scrawl:

I saw what you buried in the woods Friday night.

You are a naughty naughty boy.

FOURTEEN

As soon as Tuttle dismissed us for the day, I jumped out of my seat and ran for the door.

“Hey!” Jackson cried. “Where are you going? We’ve got a game!”

I ignored him. Jenny had started to leave before “Class dismissed” had even left Tuttle’s mouth. I raced down the hallway behind her, but by the time I made it through the school’s front doors and outside she was gone.

The doors behind me opened again and someone rammed into my shoulder, pitching me forward. I turned around just in time to see a golden flash of blond and Will’s grinning face.

“You oughta watch where you stand. I think some people are trying to walk this way.”

Will and his friends laughed.

That’s it.

I grabbed two handfuls of Will’s shirt and spun him around, slamming him into the wall. An icy thrill went through me as his eyes bulged with surprise and fear. I was about to cock my fist when someone grabbed my elbow.

“Stephen, don’t,” a voice said. “Tuttle.”

As soon as he said it, Tuttle appeared behind us like a pillar of black smoke. “Mr. Green, Mr. Quinn, Mr. Henry. What’s going on here?”

“Nothing, sir,” Jackson said quickly. “Right, Stephen?”

Jackson gave me a nudge and I managed to back away from Will and agree through gritted teeth that everything was fine.

“Good,” Tuttle said. “Mr. Henry?”

Will jumped forward with barely disguised glee. “He’s got a knife, sir,” he said, pointing at my waist. “He keeps threatening us with it and it’s making all of us feel really unsafe.”

“That’s not true! I didn’t—”

Before I could say anything else, Tuttle pulled aside my coat and yanked the knife straight out of its sheath.

“I see,” Tuttle said, turning the dark blade over in his hands. “Mr. Henry, you and your friends are dismissed.”

“But—”

“You’re dismissed.”

Will’s glare bloomed into a wide smile. He held up one finger and mouthed the words strike one behind Tuttle’s back before he and his friends glided lazily up the hill and away from the school.

“You three may go as well,” Tuttle said to Jackson, Martin, and Derrick. As they left, I caught Jackson’s eye. He had a strange, worried look on his face but motioned that I should follow them toward the field east of the school when I was done.

“It’s old,” Tuttle said as he turned the leather-wrapped handle of the knife over in his hands. “Older than you. Your father’s?”

I nodded.

“I thought as much,” he said quietly. “He’s hurt, I understand.” I nodded, struggling to swallow something bitter that had risen in my throat.

“I see,” Tuttle said. He ran his finger gently along the knife’s blade. “I will not have chaos in this place, Mr. Quinn. There’s enough of that on the outside. To discourage it, there are a range of punishments I have for my students. Would you like to know what they are?”

I stood my ground, saying nothing.

“There is detention. There is extra homework and cleaning of the schoolhouse. If that doesn’t work, there is brief but vigorous corporal punishment. Now, for someone such as yourself, someone who has no ties to this town, I believe there is another option, the one I hear that Caleb Henry and a few others are already eager to exercise. Expulsion. From school and, if needed, from the town. I believe that would be something you or your father could ill afford, would it not?”

Tuttle waited for an answer. An ember burned down in the pit of my stomach. My fingernails stabbed into my palms. For this man who I didn’t know, had never met, to have that kind of power over me and my dad… it took every ounce of my strength to shake my head.

“I thought not. Luckily for you, there is another option.”

Tuttle turned the knife’s hilt back toward me.

“The stern warning. Take it home and do not bring it to my class again. Do you understand?”

I paused, expecting some sort of trick, then took the knife from him. Tuttle clasped his hands behind his back and stepped down to the concrete sidewalk.

“I’ll be watching you, Mr. Quinn,” he said over his shoulder. Then he was gone.

I fell against the brick wall behind me and clamped my eyes shut, grimacing from the spiky seed of a headache that was sprouting in the back of my skull. What was I thinking? First Jenny sees me burying that stuff in the woods and now this? Will said he’d make sure Dad and I weren’t here long, and now it was pretty clear how he intended to make that happen. In coming to school, I couldn’t have helped him any more if I had tried. I should have seen it. I let my head fall hard onto the brick behind me, relishing the dull shock of the pain.

“Well, that was kind of awesome.”

I opened my eyes. Derrick was grinning madly and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Martin and Jackson were behind him.

“Just what we all needed before a little baseball game, right? Excitement!”

His voice was like broken glass in my head. I pushed off the brick wall and blew past the three of them without a word.

“Hey! Where you going?” Derrick cried as he jogged alongside me, trailed by the others. “We need you! You can even play second base!”

“Leave me alone, Derrick.”

“But—”

“I don’t want to play some stupid game, okay?”

“Stupid — are you kidding me? Have you ever played baseball before? I mean, what the hell have you been doing all these years?”

“Gee, Derrick, maybe he’s been spending all his time looking for food and shelter and stuff.”

“Valid point, Green!” Derrick said, and darted in closer to me, sticking his face right in mine. “But you don’t have to look for food and shelter right now, do you?”

I glared at him, but he kept going.

“Okay, I get it. Crappy day for you. No question,” Derrick went on. “And I know that most people would back off at this point and let you go and gather your thoughts or whatever, but I can’t. My mom says it’s ‘cause I’ve got, like, this thing in my head that makes it so once I get on something I can’t let it go, and I get kinda hyper about it. She said when she was a kid they’d have doped me to the gills on this stuff called Ritalin, but now — ha! — everyone has to just put up with me!”

“It’s true,” Jackson said. “He won’t stop bothering you until you play or one of you dies.”

“Ha! Nice one, Green. Steve, look, seriously—”

“I said leave me ALONE!” I planted my palms on Derrick’s chest and pushed him so hard he stumbled and fell back into the grass.

Everything went quiet except the sound of blood pounding in my ears.

Derrick looked up at me with huge eyes. Jackson and Martin were motionless, just behind me, waiting.

“Steve,” Jackson said, his voice tremulous. “Hey, come on, we were just trying to—”

I turned and shot him a hard glare. He staggered backward as I tore past Derrick and up the road.

The Greens were both gone when I got back to the house. I slammed the door behind me and threw my coat in a heap by Dad’s bed, fuming.

How could I have been so stupid? School. What was I thinking?

My fingernails found the scabs on my palm and sank in. I gritted my teeth. I wanted to break something. The chair by the fireplace. The frames on the mantel filled with pictures of idiotic smiling boaters, tanned and lying about in the sun, with no idea that their world was about to come crashing down around them.

I wondered how it would feel if I put my hand through the window above Dad. The glass would tear through my skin and scrape along the bones, maybe shattering them. I flinched at the idea of it, but still my hand collapsed into a fist and drew back. Just then, there was a rattle next to me as Dad’s chest rose slightly and then fell again.

My fist fell open. Will wanted me kicked out of here, and hadn’t I helped him enough already?

I break something, maybe Marcus gets mad, maybe that’s strike two….

I sucked in an angry breath, and slowly the redness that clouded my vision flowed out of me, replaced by something cold and dark, something empty.

“You okay?”

Startled, I turned to see Violet standing in the doorway, a big medical book tucked under her arm. I found a nearby chair and pulled it up to Dad’s bedside. I sat with my back to her as a tidal surge of guilt rocked through me. This is where I should have been the whole time. I took Dad’s hand in mine. It was light as a handful of grass.

“I imagine they’re getting a game started over there. I’m surprised you didn’t join them.”

I glanced over my shoulder. Violet was sitting in a chair just behind me. She had grabbed an old ball cap off a nearby table and had pulled it down over her hair. The book lay open in her lap.

“It is the national sport, you know.”

“It was the national sport,” I said. “I don’t understand why you people talk about America like it still exists. My grandfather would say it was” — I searched for the phrase. I had heard it a thousand times growing up, generally whenever one of us suggested a slightly shorter hike or a little more sleep — “like square dancing on the Titanic.”

Violet’s book closed softly behind me. I didn’t move. My eyelids felt heavy watching Dad’s shallow breathing rise and fall.

Outside, the remaining leaves of fall swayed in the fading sun. Two kids, a boy and a girl with wide, bright faces, were playing out in the park. I looked away and my eye fell on Violet’s cabinet, the cabinet that only I knew was lighter a few bottles.

“Why are you people helping us?”

“Why wouldn’t we?”

“You don’t know us,” I said, surprised at the wave of disgust rising in me. “You’re giving us medicine, food, your home, and you’re just getting in trouble for it. It’s stupid.”

“You’re what was put in front of us,” she said.

“That’s not an answer.”

Violet crossed her arms and looked out the window over my shoulder. “Because there was a time when people helped each other,” she said. “And that made the world a little bit better. Not perfect, but better. We’d like to think we can have that time back.”

“But what if you’re wrong?” I asked.

Violet shrugged. “Maybe we are on the deck of the Titanic,” she said. “Maybe the Collapse isn’t over and this will all be gone tomorrow. I don’t know. What I do know is what it’s like out there, we all do, and even if I can only have a little break from it, if I can be the kind of person I was before all this happened, then I’m going to take it. Even if it’s just for a day.”

Violet tossed the baseball cap into my lap.

“You know what I mean?”

She left without another word, entering the kitchen and leaving me alone.

I shifted in my chair. Outside, leaves swayed across the blue sky. Dad lay before me, as still as ever. I turned Violet’s threadbare cap over and over in my hands.

There was a squeal of laughter and the two kids flew by the window. They were maybe six or seven years old, the girl with a long stream of golden hair. The boy was taller and thin as a sapling. They were both holding sticks that had colored streamers attached to the ends so as they went by they were a streak of red and purple and blond, like a flight of brightly colored birds. I pulled the cap down over my head and watched as they banked into the sunshine and disappeared into the park.

FIFTEEN

I skipped school the next day and spent it searching for Jenny but had no luck finding her. I ended up standing in the field east of the school, watching Jackson and the rest gather for their daily baseball game, choosing sides, lining up, swinging their bats through the crisp air.

I had never played baseball, but with how much Dad talked about it I almost felt like I had. He pitched throughout high school and was a passionate Padres fan. Sometimes to keep us entertained on the road, he’d recount major games he had seen in painstaking detail. I stuffed my hands in my pockets and let myself drift closer to the game, finally finding a spot to sit in the grass.

No harm in watching, I thought. Just for a few minutes.

Derrick and Jackson’s team was lining up for the first at bat. Martin threw a battered plastic helmet to a broad-shouldered girl, and she took a few practice swings before making her way to the plate. She hunkered down, eyeing the tall pitcher sharply, and let the bat hover over her shoulder. She was ice-cold and didn’t move an inch on his first two pitches but unloaded completely on his third and sent the ball rocketing into the blue sky. She made it to second, then stopped, cheating out toward third.

“Carrie V.”

Jackson had strayed from the game and was standing just a few feet in front of me. I half expected him to tell me to beat it, given how I’d acted after school the previous day. But he just stood there and watched the game, his hands in the pockets of a worn pair of khaki pants. Soon he eased down next to me. I set my palms in the grass, ready to get up and walk away, but for some reason I didn’t. I just sat there, watching.

“She’s one of our best. The pitcher is her boyfriend, John Carter. She knows him inside and out. Almost always gets a hit off him.” Jackson turned to face me over his shoulder. “You can play, you know. If you want.”

“I gotta get back to my dad.”

A shrimpy kid with long hair made his way nervously to home plate with the encouragement of his teammates. “Stan,” Jackson said. “Not our best player. Hey, where were you today?”

“I was out,” I said, quickly. “Just… looking around.”

“So what did it say?” Jackson asked.

“What?”

“The note. The one Jenny made me give you that got you tearing out of school.”

“Oh. Nothing. She was” — I scrambled for a lie that might sound even slightly convincing — “messing with me.”

It sounded weak. Jackson gave me a little sideways look, then returned to watching the game. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s Jenny, all right. She can’t leave well enough alone.”

It was silent for a moment as Stan took a couple practice swings. I felt another twinge of guilt. Jackson didn’t have to come over and talk to me, not after how much of a jerk I had been.

“I was looking at your books,” I said. “The other day. It’s a really good collection.”

Jackson turned back. “Thanks. I do chores for people and they give me books in return. You like to read? You can borrow them anytime if you want.”

“Thanks,” I said. “That’d be great.”

Jackson nodded and turned back as Stan took a couple practice swings, then lifted the bat over his shoulder. The ball came streaking toward him. For some reason Stan stepped closer to the base as he swung, bringing his right leg into the path of the oncoming ball. Jackson saw it just as I did.

“Oh, this is not going to be good.”

The ball slammed into Stan’s thigh and he went down cursing.

“Every other time,” Jackson said. “I swear, the kid gets hit by the ball more than he hits it. Aw, man, now we’re one man down. I better go. See ya, Steve.”

Jackson hopped up and ran to his team, stopping to check in on Stan, who was sitting on the sidelines. I stripped off my coat and lay in the grass, watching as Jackson and Derrick conferred. They seemed to be having some kind of argument. Derrick was waving his arms and refusing some request of Jackson’s, but Jackson kept at him until Derrick finally relented. He turned away and began waving to someone behind me to join the game. I looked back, but no one was there.

Oh no.

“Hey! Steve! Hey! Over here! Yoo-hoo!”

I tried to ignore him, but Derrick made it nearly impossible. Soon he was jumping up and down on his toes and calling in a high-pitched squeal. The whole team was watching now, and a rush of embarrassment hit me. I started to retreat back to the Greens’, but something made me stop and look around.

The grass, holding on despite the coming of fall, was thick and green. There was the slightest chill and the smell of wood smoke in the air. Where was I going? Back inside the tomb? To my dad, who, no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t help? It was true that soon all of this would be gone and we would rejoin the trail, but I was here now. This was my world. Would it really hurt to live in it, just for a day?

Before I knew it, the grass seemed to be moving under my feet. I trotted, head down, toward the game.

“It’s okay, everybody!” Derrick shouted as I reached the edge of the field, hanging back from the team. “Our savior is here! Steve will fill in for Stan.”

“Can he even play?” someone shouted from back in the lineup.

“Can he play?” Derrick repeated, dumbstruck. “He’s a heckuva lot better than any of us. His dad was an actual New York Yankee before the Collapse. Taught him everything he knew.”

The flash of embarrassment hit again as the team erupted into a chorus of oohs and aahs.

Derrick leaned in. “You, uh, do know how to play, right?” he whispered.

“In theory.”

“Well, you’re still one up on Stan,” Derrick said. “Anyway, you’re at bat!”

“Oh wait, maybe someone else should—”

But Derrick was already pushing the bat into my hand. He and the others were cheering me from behind the fence to home plate. I felt like I was being pushed onstage to star in a play I didn’t know any of the words to.

“Hit and run!” Derrick shouted. “Just hit and run!”

“Tear the cover off it, Steve!” Jackson yelled.

“Don’t suck,” Stan called from the bench.

My stomach quivered, but I found myself raising the bat to my shoulder, readying myself for a fresh disaster. I took a deep breath and got into a slight crouch, eyes on the pitcher. He nodded at the catcher behind me, then started his windup. Before I could move an inch, the ball slapped into the catcher’s glove.

“Well done,” he said, smirking as he tossed the ball to the pitcher. “I think you’re a natural.”

“It’s okay, Steve!” Jackson shouted. “That one wasn’t yours!”

The pitcher turned back, a big grin on his face. I raised the bat and crouched, scowling. He wound up and threw, but this time it was like everything slowed down. I could see the white ball tumbling toward me. The voices behind me elongated. I brought the bat around in a quick arc, and as it connected with the ball there was a sweet, sharp crack. The ball sailed out into the field, over the head of the pitcher, into the outfield.

Dopey and amazed, I watched as the ball lifted into the sky and over the trees whose top branches moved in the wind like hands waving good-bye. I turned back to my team, bat dangling from my hand, eager to share this incredible triumph, but they were all standing on the tips of their toes, looks of terrified anticipation on their faces.

“Don’t just stand there, you moron!” Carrie screamed from second, shattering the moment. “Run!”

Oh! Right! Now I run!

The bat clattered at my feet as I took off. I passed first base easily, then skidded in to second. The baseman there was pivoting toward the outfield and raising his glove, his eyes squinting to track the ball headed his way. In a second he’d have me, so as I got closer I threw my shoulder out and it connected with his right arm. It knocked him off balance enough to make him miss the throw. The ball bounced off his glove and bobbled into the outfield. While he was scrambling for it, I was leaving him behind and making for third base in a cloud of dust.

Carrie waved her hands wildly to get me to stop, but it was like there was this engine in me that was running nearly out of control and there was no way I could stop it even if I wanted to. It felt too good: my feet ripping into the soft dirt, my lungs and legs pumping madly, the distant sound of cheering. Finally Carrie was forced to abandon her base and run for home. Following her, I rounded third, digging in and pushing myself faster. I was halfway there when I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye — an arm reeling back to throw a ball.

“Dive!” Jackson shouted.

I threw my arms out in front of me without thinking, as though I was diving into a huge, clear lake, and I sailed across the next few feet, weightless, stretching for home. When the ground leapt up to meet me, it was like jumping headfirst into concrete. The impact rang through me and I got a face full of dirt, grass, and bits of rock. When I could move again, I rolled painfully to my side and saw the catcher standing there with the ball in his hand.

He dropped his arm to tag me, but stopped when he saw my outstretched fingers, straining, but definitely, without a doubt, touching the flat gray rock that was home.

We played until the sun sank behind the trees and cast gold-streaked shadows across the field, then we gathered up our equipment and started the walk back to town. I trailed behind the main pack with Jackson, Derrick, and the other side’s pitcher, John Carter.

“You did good, Steve,” Derrick said. “I mean, you kind of tanked after that first run, but—”

I surprised myself by giving Derrick a playful shove, knocking him into Jackson. He was right — after that first run, I had struck out three times in a row. When it was time for us to play defense, I was stuck safely way out in right field.

“So you really never played before?” John asked.

“No. Never.”

“Not anything?”

I scooped up a pebble from the road and skipped it down the asphalt. “Dad found this old football once, out behind a Walmart. We’d play catch with that sometimes.”

Up ahead, Carrie drifted toward the four of us, falling in next to John and taking his hand. “You guys up for going to the quarry?”

John said sure, but Derrick hedged. “I don’t know. I really have to do my homework and then get right to bed.”

“Shut up, Derrick,” Carrie said. “What about you, Steve? It’s just this place out to the east, like a manmade pond. We go there after games sometimes.”

I looked over my shoulder, back to where Dad lay in a deep coma at the Greens’ house, but the tug I felt toward him seemed fainter than it had before. I knew he was safe since Violet was with him. And hadn’t she said he would have wanted me to go to school if I could? Well, maybe he would want this too. Me playing baseball. Me with people my own age. Having a life a little bit like he must have had back before the Collapse.

“Yo!” Carrie called out. “Everybody! Quarry!”

We continued up the hill and then moved out to the east of town, past the fields and into the trees as night began to settle around us. After a while the path opened up into a circular clearing, the ground at the center of it falling away in rocky steps, leading down to a pool of water that was dotted with the reflections of stars that were just beginning to appear.

Everyone scattered when we got there, breaking up into smaller groups of two or three or four and finding places around the pool. One kid, the third baseman from the other team, dipped his hand into the water and pulled out a net that was filled with mason jars. He unscrewed the top off one, took a long drink of whatever was inside, then passed it around the circle.

When it came to me I dipped my nose in and caught the smell of rotten fruit and a nose-singeing tang of alcohol. Home brew. Grandpa used to trade for it sometimes when we had some salvage to spare, and he would get blisteringly drunk on it after dinner. Mom would generally lead me into the tent for a reading lesson whenever he got going.

I took a small sip, then winced. “So, how did all of you end up here?” I asked.

“We were coming north from Georgia,” Martin said from his place behind me. “And we ran into, like, this entire ex-US army regiment. Dad decided we’d go through these caves he found to get around them. Took us five days. Five days with no food. My brother” — Martin’s voice hitched, then he continued — “he was really freaking out. Cried the whole time until we found our way out. We had no idea where we were, but a few weeks later, we found Derrick and his folks. And then Jackson and his. Now here we are.”

As soon as he stopped talking, Martin stared down into the dark water, his face cloudy and distant. I knew why, of course, could tell from the millisecond stumble after he said “my brother.” It was the same one I always made after saying “my mother.” Somehow between that story and now, his brother was lost. I nudged Martin with the edge of the jar and held it out to him.

“Thanks,” he said.

Others told their stories and as they did I looked around the group, noticing things I hadn’t seen before. A long jagged scar along the forearm of the blond kid who played right field. A deep smudgelike burn mark peeking out from under the sweater of the redheaded girl sitting on the other side of me. The more I looked, the more I saw them, those telltale marks of lives lived after the Collapse. How had I not noticed them before? Was it possible that they all had lives like mine at some point until they came here?

What would have happened, I wondered, if Dad had stood up to Grandpa when I was little and insisted we leave the trail? Could we have ended up here? Would we be living in houses and going to school and cookouts and baseball games?

Would Mom still be alive?

The redheaded girl tapped my arm with a second jar of home brew that had made its way around the circle. I shook my head and she passed it along down the line.

“I’m Wendy, by the way,” she said quietly, her small fingers grazing my arm. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m—”

“Cann-on-ball!”

There was a gigantic splash that soaked all of us. When I looked up, Derrick was shooting to the surface of the churning water, in his underwear, a dopey smile on his face. Two of the mason jars sat empty where he had been sitting. Jeers came from every corner of the quarry, but they were all mixed with laughter.

“Derrick!”

“Derrick, you jerk!”

“You got us all wet!”

Derrick laughed a deep stuttering laugh and floated lazily on his back.

Wendy shook her great head full of curls and chuckled. “Love, hate. Love, hate. That’s all it ever is with him.”

“Okay!” Carrie said, rising unsteadily from John’s lap. “I think that’s our cue, babe.”

John offered me his hand. “Hey, man, good job today.”

“Thanks. You too.” Carrie dragged John up and the two of them said their good-byes and headed down the path to town with their arms around each other’s waists. Soon, other couples emerged from the woods and drifted home.

“Well,” Jackson said, “I guess we should go pull him out.”

Martin and Jackson and I stripped off our shoes, rolled our pant legs up high, and went in after Derrick. Luckily by that time he was pretty tired, so it wasn’t too hard to catch him. The trick was getting his bulk out of there and to shore while he mumbled over and over how much he loved us.

“Really, honestly, totally, you dudes are awesome. Just awesome,” he said, struggling with his pants.

After we finally got Derrick up and dressed, but before we could get him moving down the path, he lurched forward and grabbed me up into a soggy bear hug, pushing us away from the others.

“This is what it’s like, Steve,” he whispered intently only inches from my ear. His breath was heavy with the sweet cherry smell of the home brew.

“What what’s like, Derrick?”

He pulled back slightly and for a moment didn’t seem drunk at all. His eyes were clear and focused.

“This is what it’s like to have friends,” he whispered.

I stood there in the silence as a grin grew across Derrick’s face and then he fell into Wendy’s and Martin’s arms. “Home, friends! Take me to my home! And you! Wendy! Off with your pants! You too, Marty!”

He giggled as Wendy and Martin led him down the path back to town. I stood there motionless, surrounded in the rhythmic chatter of the grasshoppers and cicadas and the gentle lapping of the quarry’s water. Everything seemed to hang in perfect balance, all of it strange and welcome at the same time.

This is what it’s like to have friends.

“You okay?”

Jackson was standing in the shadows, waiting.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

We left the quarry and made our way through the woods to Jackson’s house. Before we got there, though, we slowed without a word and stopped in the park across the street. Jackson sat on one of the swings and I climbed up onto the jungle gym next to him.

To our left, the road wound out of town and away like a ribbon. The pinpricks of candlelight in the windows around us gave the neighborhood the look of a constellation come to Earth.

“So how’d you guys end up here?” I asked. “You never said.”

Jackson twisted the toe of his sneaker into the dirt. For a second I thought he hadn’t heard me. “We were in, I don’t know, Kentucky, I think, with some other families in a little tent city. Mom and Dad were out doing some hunting, and Jenny and I were by this stream downhill from the camp playing Go Fish with some cards she had made. The sun had just gone down and it was all orange and gold.” Jackson’s fingers curled tight around the swing’s chain. “That’s when we heard them coming. There were maybe fifteen of them. Twenty. They looked just like us. Maybe a little better off. They came into camp, all smiles, asking if they could have some water from the stream. Nice as could be.

“The man who I guess was their leader was walking with Mr. Simms. Mr. Simms was a friend of my dad’s and was in charge of us when Mom and Dad were away. He was older than my folks and lost his whole family to P Eleven and kind of adopted all of us.

“Anyway, the new group’s leader, this big hulk of a guy, put his arm around Mr. Simms’s shoulder as they walked. After a few steps he pulled Mr. Simms close and said, ‘Knock, knock,’ which is the start to this old joke. When Mr. Simms said, ‘Who’s there?’ the man reached into his jacket, pulled out a gun, and pressed the barrel right into Mr. Simms’s temple.”

Jackson’s voice caught in his throat. His eyes were far away, remembering. “I saw him do it and I thought, ‘Oh, this is a joke. It’s a joke.’ But then the man pulled the trigger and there was this explosion and Mr. Simms… dropped.”

Jackson’s Adam’s apple rose and fell and his lips pressed into a tight line.

“Everyone froze. All of us. There wasn’t a sound, just Mr. Simms hitting the ground. Jenny and I stood there watching this fan of blood spread out around his head. Then someone screamed and then everyone was screaming and rushing to their tents for their guns or to escape, but it was too late. The man and his people were everywhere, shooting anyone they could, laughing like it was all this big game, like the rest of us weren’t even real.

“There were about twenty-five, maybe thirty, of us in all. Men and women. Some kids me and Jenny’s age. The leader and his group killed all but us and a couple others. Then they put their guns away, took whatever supplies we had, and strolled back out of town.”

A cold wind blew across the playground and made the trees around us moan. Jackson dug his hands into his jacket pockets.

“Whole thing didn’t take but five minutes. When Mom and Dad came back, we took our things and ran as fast as we could, but no matter how far away we got, I thought they were right around the corner, ready to pop out again, just… smiling and shooting.”

By now the dark of night was settling in. Everything around us — the trees, the houses, the curves of the land — was looming shapes, like animals prowling beneath dark water.

Jackson looked back at me, but I didn’t know what to say to him. If we were friends, like Derrick had said, what did friends do? What did they say?

“Guess somebody like you has never felt like that,” Jackson said quietly, turning away from me. “Afraid.”

Shadows of leaves played over Jackson’s drawn, pale face. I stared down at my lap. Something ached deep in my chest. The idea that I had never been afraid was ridiculous but I knew what Grandpa would have said. Never admit fear. Never admit weakness.

“I’m afraid all the time,” I said. “After my mom died, I couldn’t sleep. Not for months. I’d lie awake at night and think about Dad or Grandpa getting sick. One of them dying. Dad told me we’d be fine. He said nothing would ever change again, but then Grandpa died and he…”

I shut my mouth tight and closed my eyes. Saying all of that, thinking it, even, made the whole ugly mess real all over again. It was like this darkness that I could keep at bay most of the time, but if I got too close, if I touched it, it would seize up and have me.

“Hey.”

I opened my eyes with a start. Jackson had left the swing and was standing right beside me.

“You’re here now,” he said. “We both are, right? No matter what happens. Me and my folks, all of us, we won’t let anything happen to you.”

I looked away from him, along the houses and up the street. How could I tell him that it would only be a matter of time before all of this was gone and we were scattered to the wind? Did a friend say that?

“Probably time for dinner, isn’t it?” I said, slipping off the jungle gym.

Jackson lagged behind as I crossed the park and went up the stairs and into the house. The fireplace smelled smoky and warm. Timbers creaked above me. I stood by Dad’s bed, looking down at him. His chest rose and fell weakly as he breathed.

“We’ve been here five years now,” Jackson said from behind me in the hallway that led to the kitchen, half in and half out of the light. “I don’t know if it’ll be forever, but we’ve almost been wiped out by storms and droughts and bad crops and a hundred other things, and we’ve always made it. We just stuck together and never gave up.”

Later that night, when I closed my eyes and headed to sleep, it was as though I could feel all of them: Marcus and Violet and Dad and Jackson and, somewhere outside in places of their own, Derrick and Martin and Wendy and Carrie and Jenny too. I felt each of them like blooms of heat pulsing out in the night, separate but connected.

Instead of the tomblike stillness of the previous nights, the house felt warm around me, like all of us were settled underneath a thick blanket with the cold winds and the world safely outside.

Was Jackson right? Was it real? Could it last?

I didn’t know. But right then, lying there in that quiet and warmth, I hoped. For the first time, I hoped.

SIXTEEN

The next morning before school I helped Violet carry tin buckets of hot water from the fire out back to a white tub in the bathroom upstairs. She said she figured I must be dying for a bath — meaning she was dying for me to take a bath but wanted to save my feelings. It was a good effort. And a few whiffs of myself confirmed that it was probably past due.

Once we were done and she was gone, I stripped and lowered myself into the tub. The homemade lye soap Violet gave me felt like it was taking a layer of skin off with the dirt. As I scrubbed, I thought how easy it must have been when she and my dad were my age, back before the Collapse. Turn a faucet and out came hot water. Flick a switch and there was light. It must have seemed like magic.

When I was done, Violet came back in with a razor and a pair of scissors. She cut my hair and shaved the light fall of whiskers on my cheeks, then sent me off to Jenny’s room. There I found a pair of nearly new-looking jeans, a red button-up shirt, and a handmade black wool sweater. There was even a slightly scuffed pair of brown hiking boots. On the floor next to the bed were my old clothes: a dirty, heavily patched heap of greasy cloth I had been wearing almost daily for the last year or two. I knew every hole, every tear, every patch, wrinkle, and worn spot.

I lifted my old pants and turned them over. Sewn on the right knee was a rectangular scrap of red cloth with gold ducks on it. Dad had put the patch on when I’d worn through the knee a few months ago. The square of cloth had come from one of Mom’s old dresses, her favorite one. After she died, Grandpa had insisted we trade her clothes away, but Dad had kept that one dress, hiding it like I hid my books.

Standing there, I didn’t think I could do it — throw aside these old things for the new. I told myself I was being crazy. If I’d come across these new clothes on the trail, I’d have taken them. And if I’d come across my old clothes, I would’ve walked right on by.

“Stephen?” Violet called from downstairs. “You okay?”

I dressed quickly in the new clothes before heading out into the hall. When I turned to close the door, there were my old clothes, blue and black with a flash of red and gold. Dad’s knife lying on top in its sheath.

They’re just clothes, I told myself and shut the door. When I came downstairs, Violet was sitting at Dad’s side with a bowl of oatmeal in her lap. “Hey, Violet, I…”

When Violet turned back, I saw the feeding tube down Dad’s throat. He lay there, his mouth unnaturally wide, his teeth clamped down on the hard plastic. Something shuddered inside me, seeing him like that. Part of me wanted to run over and tear it out of him, to make her leave him alone, but I marshaled myself and crossed the floor slowly until I was just behind her.

“How’s he doing?”

Violet spooned the last bit of food down the tube.

“About the same,” she said. “I wish I could say more, but without tests…”

“I’ve been talking to him at night.”

“That’s good.” Violet looked back over her shoulder and smiled. “You look really great, Stephen.”

I pulled awkwardly at the new clothes. “Thanks.”

“You ready?”

Jackson had just come down the stairs and was standing behind me.

I moved to the bed and squeezed Dad’s hand tight. “Thanks,” I said again to Violet before leaving with Jackson.

“Mr. Waverly!” Jackson announced cheerily as Martin and an extremely bleary-looking Derrick joined us. Jackson clapped him on the back. “How’s it going, buddy?! Rough night last night?”

“Ugghhhh,” Derrick groaned and halfheartedly pushed Jackson away. He trudged along behind us, grumbling as we made our way to school.

“You playing today?” Martin asked me.

“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Stunk pretty badly at the end of the game yesterday.”

“Yeah,” Derrick said. “In fact, I think he was lying when he told me he was descended from a real New York Yankee. Don’t let him play, Martin.”

“We’re not letting you play,” Jackson said.

“Why not?”

“You’re a mess.”

“Quinn, buddy, I was just kidding about how much you suck. Defend me here. Am I a mess?”

I regarded Derrick carefully. His hair was a greasy tumbleweed. All his clothes were rumpled. “Definitely. A total mess.”

“Ha!” Martin laughed and punched me in the arm. “I liked you better when you didn’t talk,” Derrick grumbled.

Carrie and Wendy mixed in with us at the bottom of the hill as we all filed in behind the mass of little ones.

“Lookin’ awful snazzy there, Steve,” Carrie said with a grin.

“Oh,” I said, looking down at my new clothes, strangely embarrassed. “Thanks. Marcus’s old things.”

Wendy reached across and drew her finger across the hair that fell just above my eyebrows. “Your hair’s out of your face too,” she said. “I can see your eyes.”

I didn’t know what to say. She was wearing a pink and white sweater and jeans, her hair loose and flowing coppery over her shoulders. I was surprised to find myself nervous as she fell into place next to me.

Once we got to school we all split up and the rest of that morning was pretty uneventful. Tuttle lectured and while everyone else was struggling to stay awake I leaned over my paper and took careful notes. He talked about math and poetry and the Holy Roman Empire. I had no idea there was so much world out there to learn about. At noon he let us out for lunch.

It had grown colder in the past few hours and some clouds had begun to pile up, signs of fall moving headlong toward winter. All of us spilled out onto the yard, pulling our lunches out of bags and buckets. The little ones immediately swarmed around the slide and swing sets, fighting over who got to do what first.

“Okay!” Martin announced as he pulled a wrinkled sheet of paper out of his back pocket. “Time to make the lineup! Waverly is benched!”

“What? No way!”

“Quinn is taking your place.”

“You know,” Derrick said. “You people don’t appreciate me. I’m gonna start hanging out with Will Henry.”

“Oh go take a bath, Derrick,” Wendy said.

I laughed and the lineup talk went on. They all seemed so comfortable with each other, laughing and joking, trading mock punches. I looked around at everyone else in the school yard as they ate their lunches in their own small groups. The inside jokes and chatter of each one joined with the others into a low roar that somehow didn’t seem as grating as it had just a few days earlier.

I turned back to the negotiations, and when I did, I saw Jenny. She was sitting under the big sycamore, facing away from the school, in her torn-up jeans and Red Army jacket with her knees pulled up in front of her, sketching furiously in her sketch pad.

My body tensed immediately. The note. I had almost forgotten. I tried to stay calm, nibbling at my sandwich and keeping my eye on her, waiting for an opportunity. All the noise and movement below her — the laughing and yelling and flirting, the squeak of the old swing sets — didn’t seem to distract her in the least. She drew with great looping strokes and slashes, leaning down into the pad like she was wrestling with it and just barely winning.

When she was done, Jenny dropped the sketch pad on the grass and stretched out against the tree. She reached up and tucked a length of hair behind her ear, leaving the rest of it to blow over her face like smoke drifting over beach sand.

“I don’t know why she even bothers coming.”

Jackson had moved out of the lineup negotiations and was eyeing Jenny too.

“Does she always just sit up there drawing and stuff?”

“No, that one’s new,” he said. “She just started coming to school again the other day.”

Up the hill Jenny leaned over her sketch pad, erasing, drawing again. I thought of that lone horse, locked in the classroom.

“Sometimes I wish…” Jackson’s forehead wrinkled, his lips hardening into a tense slit as he watched her. Whatever he was going to say, he pulled it back before it could get loose.

“What?”

“Sometimes I wish she would go,” Jackson said, his voice a harsh whisper. “Just leave. Before she does something that gets us all thrown out of here.”

“Would they really do that?”

Jackson eyed me a moment like he was trying to make a decision.

“There was a family,” he said, “a few years back. The Krycheks. Had a little girl, like nine, I think. Mr. Krychek used to be a soldier, but all he did was drink by the time he got here. He hid it pretty well for a while, but it got worse. One night he was drinking out in the woods and tried to build a fire. It went out of control and got within a few feet of spreading to the houses. Caleb called a meeting about it the next day. Mom and Dad tried to speak up for them, but Caleb had more than half the town ready to vote against them and anyone willing to stand up for them. In the end it was pretty much unanimous.”

“Your parents…?”

“Dad voted to send them away. He didn’t want to but… I mean, the guy was dangerous, right? What choice did he have? Let the whole town get destroyed? Get us thrown out too?”

“What about your mom?”

Jackson’s eyes went unfocused as he drew his fingertip aimlessly through the dirt. “She was… sick, I think. Didn’t make the vote that day.”

“What happened to them? The Krycheks?”

Jackson didn’t look up. He shrugged. “Dad and some others insisted they at least give them some supplies but… it was the middle of January.”

He didn’t need to say any more. Middle of the winter and the dad a drunk and dragging along a nine-year-old. Only one thing could have happened. I looked down at the remains of my sandwich but wasn’t hungry anymore. I could see that family clear as anything, huddled together and snow-blind, making their slow way out of town. A sick shudder went right through me.

I jumped as the bell rang and everyone started packing up their lunch things and heading inside.

“Let’s go!” Derrick shouted, throwing up his arms. “It’s time to learn, people!”

Jackson lingered by the door. “You coming?” he asked. “Yeah,” I said. “Sure. Just a second. I’ll catch up.” The doors slammed behind them and the yard was quiet and empty.

Just me and Jenny.

Jackson’s story hung with me. Now more than ever I had to be careful. If Jenny was going to be a threat to me, I needed to deal with it. I looked around, making sure I was alone before stalking up the hill. Jenny didn’t notice me as I drew near, too busy sketching the landscape in front of her. The trees looked almost alive on her paper, caught in mid-sway against the gray clouds, the horizon ominous in the distance.

“You’re different,” she said without turning. “Your clothes and hair and stuff.”

I froze. Jenny looked me up and down over her shoulder. Her dark eyes made me feel like I was a fish wriggling on the end of a spear.

“It was, uh… Violet. She gave me some clothes.”

“Figures,” Jenny smirked. “You look like one of them now. You come up here for a reason?”

I cleared my throat and tried to force myself back to business. “The note.”

“Which note?” she asked innocently. “A? B? C major?”

“Your note.”

“Oh, my note!”

“Jenny, whatever you think you saw—”

“Oh please,” Jenny said with a flirtatious lilt. “Let’s not play games that aren’t any fun.”

I felt my legs go weak. My mind was wiped clear like Tuttle’s blackboard. Jenny chuckled.

“I need to know what you want,” I said, trying to find the steel in my voice that was always in Grandpa’s, but only managed what sounded like a strained squeak. For a second I thought Jenny would laugh, but she didn’t. She dropped her pencil and shifted around, looking up at me like she was awaiting a lecture.

“Have you always been a scavenger?” she asked.

“I’m not—”

“Salvager. Whatever. You go north to south, right? To those trade gatherings?”

“Jenny, the note. I—”

“Do you take the same route every time or do you mix it up?”

One time Dad told me about how when they were building the railroads way back when, there would sometimes be a mountain in their way and they’d have to decide whether to load it up with dynamite and blow it up or just go around. I had the feeling that this was one of those times and I was pretty sure I didn’t have anywhere near enough dynamite for the first option. If I wanted the information, it looked like I was going to have to play along.

“It changes.”

“Why?”

“If you keep to one path, people can predict it. Set ambushes.”

“Smart. How close do you get to the coast?”

“Not close.”

“Why? Is it dangerous?”

“Some. Mostly it’s just rubble.”

“What about the West Coast? What have you heard about it?”

“Nobody goes there anymore,” I said.

“Why?”

I gave her a look like it was obvious.

“What? Because that’s where my scary Chinese brothers and sisters are?”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Jenny—”

“You ever seen them?”

“No.”

“So what are they doing out there?”

Jenny chewed on the end of her pencil, squinting a little in the sun.

“You like your life, Quinn?” she asked, throwing me off base with the sudden change in tack. “Wandering about this war-torn land of ours?”

No one had ever asked me anything like that before. Did I like my life? What kind of question was that? “It’s just… it’s my life.”

“Well, it’s not a rock. You can have an opinion about it.”

“You like yours?”

“I like parts of it.”

“Which ones?”

“The parts where I get to break things.”

“Why? Because that makes you feel like you’re in control of something?”

For the very first time, I stopped her cold. It took everything in me not to throw my arms into the air in celebration. Jenny looked up at me blank-eyed, wriggling on a spear of her own. Slowly a smile grew at the corners of her lips.

“Oh Stephen,” she said. “You are a pistol.”

“What do you want, Jenny?”

Jenny’s eyes glinted in the sunlight.

“I want a lot of things, Quinn. I’m just trying to decide which of them you can provide.” She flicked her eyes to our left. “Uh-oh. Feel like a tussle?”

“Huh?” I turned and there was Will Henry, the redheaded giant, and one of the slug twins barreling our way.

“Come on,” I said, backing away down the hill. “Let’s get out of here.”

“What? Are you kidding?”

“No, seriously, Jenny. They’re trying to get me thrown —” But Jenny wasn’t listening. She jumped up and ran right at them. Will stormed on ahead.

“This isn’t about you, Jenny,” he said.

“Is it about the uses of symbolism in Melville’s Moby-Dick?”

“What?”

As Will stopped to figure that one out, Jenny punched him in the face. A hard right, slamming into his jaw. It rocked him, but he came right back at her. Jenny laughed and danced away.

I edged back down the hill toward school. If Jenny wanted to fight, that was her business. I needed to play it safe, for me and Dad. For the Greens.

“This is my town,” Will spat. “People like you and the spy aren’t welcome, Chink.”

Will planted both hands on Jenny’s chest and shoved her to the ground. She landed with a dull thump.

I didn’t even think. I just launched myself at him, slipping a fist past him and landing it in his stomach. He made a satisfying oof sound but recovered fast, throwing a punch that connected squarely with my jaw and spun me around. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground with a mouth full of grass. My head was ringing. I rolled over and all I could see was a wide expanse of cloudy sky cut in half by the dark shadow of Will Henry towering over me.

“You. Don’t. Belong. Here,” he growled.

Something behind me roared and Jenny flew past me, throwing herself at Will, her fingers stretched out like claws. He tried to shrink out of the way, but she got her arms around his neck and forced him to the ground. My vision was still a little hazy, but I could make out the two guys who were behind Will stepping forward and reaching for Jenny. I forced myself up, taking a fistful of dirt and grass with me. I threw the clump in Big Red’s face and threw myself at the other one, using my body like a battering ram. I hit the slug twin full in the chest with my shoulder and he went down. Once we were on the ground, I brought my knee up between his legs. He howled, then curled up on his side, moaning.

I pulled myself on top of him, cocked my fist, and gave him a good one right on the nose. There was a sick crunch and blood spurted out between us. I reared back again, but someone’s hands were on my shoulders, pulling me up and away from him.

It was the big redhead. He was strong but slow. I wriggled out of his grasp and got to my feet, backing away and getting my hands up in front of my face. I could hear another fight going on to my left. I wanted to look and see how Jenny was doing, to see if she needed help, but I had troubles of my own. Big Red was sizing me up, deciding on his next move. It was probably the dumbest thing he could have done. While he was thinking, I was moving.

I threw myself at him headfirst, right into his stomach. Even though I was pretty sure I knocked the wind out of him, he didn’t go down. I kept pushing forward, hoping to get him off balance, but he grabbed my shoulders and used my momentum to toss me down instead. I hit with a thud, my head slamming into the dirt. I reeled again and a wave of nausea hit me. I reached for my knife, realizing too late that it was sitting on Jenny’s floor guarding a pile of old clothes.

I tried to get up, but my arms felt like jelly, and before I could do anything else, Big Red was down on one knee beside me. He pulled his fist back, blocking out everything else in my vision. It was a pale comet hurtling toward me.

But then a look of surprise came over his face and his whole body shot back away from me, like he’d been grabbed up by an angel. There was shouting and a commotion, but my head was too swimmy to make it all out.

Someone grabbed my shoulder and tried to push me up, but it was no use. I was like a rag doll filled with lead.

There was a voice in my ear, close and rushed. “Come on, get up. We have to get out of here.”

The world snapped into focus. Jenny was leaning over me. Her bottom lip was split and trailing blood down her chin and neck, soaking the top of her T-shirt. Her right eye was surrounded by a red and black bruise and nearly swollen shut.

“Did we win?”

“Ha! You are a pistol, Stephen,” she said as she pulled me up. “Now let’s get out of here.”

“Jenny Tan!”

“Oh crap.”

Tuttle stormed up the hill toward us, clutching his wooden ruler like a sword. He was being led by the second of the slug twins. I saw the plan immediately: Will starts a fight, then sends one of them to get Tuttle, no doubt blaming it on me and Jenny. Idiot, I cursed myself.

He was followed by a group of students, all excited to see what was going on. In the middle of the pack were Derrick, Martin, and, finally, Jackson. As soon as Jackson saw Jenny and me together, he stopped cold. The group broke around him, but he didn’t move.

He was staring at my hands.

They were covered in dirt and bruises and blood. The new clothes Violet had given me just that morning were torn and stained. Jackson looked from me to Jenny and back again, his body rigid with anger, his hands knotted into fists. I knew what was going through his head. The last straw. A calm day was smashed to pieces and maybe this time it would lead to a vote that would turn his world upside down. I wanted to say something, tell Jackson it wasn’t my fault, that it was Jenny, that it was Will, that everything would be okay, but before I could do anything, Tuttle barked, “Enough. Detention for both of you.”

“But what about them?” Jenny asked.

Tuttle ignored her. He whirled around, sending the mass of kids behind him scurrying back toward the school. Jackson didn’t move at first, but then Martin tapped him on the shoulder, whispered something, and pulled him away.

“You’re done,” Will said as he passed me, flashing that easy wolfish grin. He and his friends strolled down the hill in Tuttle’s wake.

My hand curled into a fist so tight I nearly broke a bone.

“Easy, tiger,” Jenny said. She laid her hand on my shoulder, but I jerked away.

“Get away from me.”

“Oh come on. We’ll get ours.”

“Our what?”

Jenny’s lips brushed my ear as she whispered, “Revenge, Stephen. We’ll get our revenge.”

“I don’t want revenge,” I said, pushing away from her down the hill. “I just want you to leave me alone.”

SEVENTEEN

When the classroom was empty except for me and Jenny, Tuttle regarded us over the rim of his steel glasses. “American History,” he said. “Chapters one through three.”

“Read them?” I asked.

“Copy them.”

I opened the book and flipped through the pages. Chapters one through three were about twenty densely worded pages. My bruised knuckles ached at the thought of it. Tuttle leaned over a stack of papers, making quick little check and X marks down the length of them. I couldn’t concentrate. Every time I tried, I saw Jackson’s face growing more and more angry as he looked from me to Jenny after the fight. I had tried to explain, tried to pass him a note even, but he’d ignored me, that hard fury like a wall between us. Stupid, I thought, over and over. Why didn’t I just walk away?

What made it worse was Jenny, twirling a pencil in her bruised fingers, totally unconcerned.

Tuttle cleared his throat and I leaned over my paper. I swallowed the anger as best I could and started to write. I only had two pages done before something bumped against the side of my boot. When I looked down there was a folded piece of paper lying on the floor. I checked on Tuttle, then leaned down and picked it up, unfolding it onto my notebook.

How are the war wounds, tough guy?

Jenny had her head down in her book, copying away, the slightest shadow of a smile on her bruised face. I refolded the paper and went back to work, ignoring her. Minutes later another piece of paper knocked against my foot.

Awww, what’s wrong, pal? Mad at me?

Leave me alone, I scrawled across the paper in heavy black letters before kicking it back to her.

Oh come on, Stephen, she wrote back. You’ve been dying to hit somebody since the night you got here.

Well, thanks, I wrote. Now I’m in detention. Everybody hates me, and your whole family, my dad, and I are all one step closer to getting thrown out of here.

She answered: The sky’s not going to fall because of one little fight! No one’s going to throw you out. Jackson and his band of doofuses will get over it.

I made sure Tuttle was still busy grading before writing back, And if they don’t?

I could feel Jenny shaking her head as she read it. When the paper returned it was nearly torn through.

Food for thought. If someone can’t handle seeing who you are — are they really your friends?

She was wrong, of course. Jackson and the others were my friends, and fighting those guys was not who I was. Jenny hadn’t been there at the game or the quarry. She didn’t know.

What would you know about who I really am? I wrote back.

Jenny wrote something immediately, then quickly erased it. Almost an hour passed before she kicked the paper back.

Sometimes I can’t sleep, she wrote, her messy scrawl replaced by small deliberate letters. Because it’s like I can feel the whole world spinning so fast beneath me, and I’m thinking, what am I doing here? Is this where I belong? Do I belong anywhere? Some nights it gets so loud in my head that I want to break something, anything, everything, just to make it stop.

I didn’t move for several minutes. I just stared down at the words, the letters so tight, so precise and dark, they looked like they might rupture at any moment and tear the page to pieces. My pencil was near my fingers, and in one strange moment I thought, Did I write that, or did she?

I checked on Tuttle, then looked back at Jenny, but she was slipping out of her chair and heading toward the door.

“Miss Green,” Tuttle called out, but she ignored him, didn’t even correct him. “Miss Green, come back here!”

I wanted to stop her too, but the double doors behind me flew open and slammed shut. Tuttle settled into his chair, and I was surprised to see a strange look on his face, almost concerned. Maybe even a little bit sad.

“This does not mean that you are excused, Mr. Quinn,” he said when he caught me looking at him. “Get back to work.”

I read Jenny’s note twice more before I did, lingering over each word. Tuttle cleared his throat pointedly, and I folded the piece of paper and put it in my pocket so I could finish my work. About an hour later, I finished the assignment and, my hand cramped into a claw, I set it on Tuttle’s desk before turning to leave.

“A moment, Mr. Quinn.”

I returned to my desk and slumped down while Tuttle took his time making a neat stack of graded papers and sliding it into a leather folder. The waiting was driving me crazy.

“Mr. Tuttle, we were just defending our—”

Tuttle held up his hand to silence me. He slipped a paper out of his folder, then crossed the room and dropped it on my desk. It was my Great Expectations quiz. Down one side of the paper was a long column of check marks and a single X. A large A was written at the top of the page.

“The question you must ask yourself, Mr. Quinn,” Tuttle intoned, towering above me, “is this: Are you a boy or a man? Human being or savage?”

Tuttle’s cool blue eyes were on me, unwavering.

“Obviously you’ve never had to make that choice before. Running around the ruins of this world as your sort of people do, you acted on instinct and self-preservation — an animal — no doubt quivering before rainstorms and amazed by fire and shiny objects. But you’re here now, Mr. Quinn, and this is civilization, so now you do have a choice. So, what do you want to be?”

Tuttle waited for an answer.

“The fact that you pause does not fill me with confidence.”

“Look, as soon as my dad is better, we’re leaving, so you don’t have to bother.”

Tuttle surprised me by folding his long body down into the cramped desk in front of me. He twisted around to face me, his knees nearly pressing into his chest. “Do you like to learn?” he asked.

“I like to read.”

Tuttle’s thin lips curled into a tight smile. “Yes. So do I. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like the world has much use for people like us, does it? No, most of the world only has time for people who can build or break things. It won’t always be that way, I think. A time will come when society, as it always has, will turn for its salvation to the learned. Now, to my surprise, you appear to be intellectually capable, but the question remains: Do you want to be one of them?”

It was a ridiculous question. Did I want to be one of the learned? I tried to think of an answer that would satisfy him, but he might as well have been asking me if I wanted to be an astronaut.

“The times we live in, Mr. Quinn, are teetering between the chaos behind us — an infancy made up of smoke and terror and withering plague — and what adulthood lies ahead for us. Wisdom? Peace? Oblivion? Whatever it is, to get there we must let go of the past. It is dead and gone. It will never return and it cannot be changed. All we have now is one another and whatever new thing we make together.”

Tuttle unfolded himself from the desk and strode to a shelf along the wall. He pulled down a small stack of books, then laid it on my desk. Mechanical Engineering. Chinese History. World Political Systems.

“If you have a desire to be more than what you are, if you want the world to be more than it is, study these in addition to your regular work. If not, please feel free to escape to a warm cocoon of petty violence and team sports.”

With that, Tuttle turned his back on me and planted himself at his desk to begin grading a new stack of papers. The books sat in front of me; I ran my fingers across their glossy covers.

This is how we got here in the first place, Grandpa would have said, sneering at the books. But then there was Dad’s voice, whispering to me that night in the plane as we watched a doomed woman and boy.

Grandpa is gone.

In my head, it sounded like a fallen leaf blowing across a grave.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a thin smile grow on Tuttle’s lips as I scooped the books up into my arms, and dashed into the twilight.

EIGHTEEN

I crossed the park, balancing the stack of books in my aching hands, strangely excited to start reading them, when the Greens’ front door flew open and out walked Caleb Henry.

It was like I hit a wall.

Caleb was masked by the shadows of the porch at first, so all I could see was his tall frame in jeans, a flannel shirt, and boots. As he descended the stairs and stepped out into the yard, though, it was clear that he was smiling. He didn’t acknowledge me or make a sound as he glided up the street.

My arms went weak underneath the pile of books. My stomach churned. Of course. Where else would Will have gone after the fight?

The Greens’ door hung open. No candles had been lit yet, even though it was edging past twilight and into early evening. Inside it was gray and hushed. I set the books down by my bedroll and the neat bundle Violet had made of my old clothes and Dad’s knife while I was away. Then, once I’d checked on Dad, I crossed the room and entered the short hallway that led into the kitchen.

Marcus and Violet were sitting next to each other in the gloom at the kitchen table. Marcus was hunched over a mug, his hands clamped around it, while Violet sat back in her chair, one hand covering her mouth and chin. The shadows of the room deepened the lines on their ashen faces. I kept to the darkness of the hall and listened. “What choice do we have, Vi?”

“They can vote if they want to vote,” Violet said. “We’re not giving him up. We’re not like that, Marcus. You’re not like that.”

“But what if we fight them again and Caleb decides to come after us this time?”

Violet had no answer. Her silence hung heavy as stone.

I backed away from the door. Whatever the people of the town thought of Jenny, she was family to the Greens and maybe that protected her. It wouldn’t be the same with me or Dad. We were outsiders. Little better than vagrants, no matter how Violet tried to dress me up.

I eased back to the front room, then dropped to my knees alongside Dad’s bed. I ripped my bedroll up off the floor and began shoving it along with the rest of my supplies into my backpack. I had put that pack together a million times, but my hands were clumsy now, rushed. I reached for the rifle’s cleaning kit, but my knuckles slammed into one of the bed’s legs and a jolt of fresh pain rocketed up my arm. Finally I just stuffed everything inside and yanked the flap closed.

There on my knees, I was eye level with the stack of books Tuttle had given me. Politics. History. Science. Little pieces of a larger world.

Useless, Grandpa’s voice said deep inside me, disgusted, stronger than ever. I yanked my bag off the floor and stood up over Dad. A wave of sadness reared up. I told myself that Violet would take care of him, that if I didn’t protect them, they couldn’t protect him, but it was no use. The wave was too big and coming too fast.

How many days had it been now since Grandpa was gone? Eight? Nine? How was it possible that everything could have fallen apart so quickly? That our lives could turn over, again and again, in such a tiny packet of time? I longed for my old life, following Dad and Grandpa without question. Pack the wagon. Scan for salvage. Then make our way from landmark to landmark, a slumping mall and its rusted attendees, a parking lot cracked with yellow flowers.

I wondered if this was what it was like when the end of the world came. A sudden overturning that made every day like stepping alone into an empty room — everything you longed for, every handhold you used to pull yourself along, vanished.

My pack was heavy as I lifted it up onto my back and cinched the straps tight around my arms and middle. I threaded Dad’s knife onto my belt and checked that the rifle was loaded before hanging it over my shoulder and walking toward the door.

“Stephen.”

I stopped where I was. Violet was standing in the hallway, with Marcus in the dimness behind her.

“You’re not leaving. We won’t let you. We’ll—”

Violet leaned forward, but Marcus’s hand shot out from the dark and clamped around her wrist.

My eyes locked on Marcus’s hand, rough and tan. It seemed to glow in the low light as he held her back.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Just take care of my dad.”

I took the doorknob, but something stopped me before I could turn it. Dad was lying there in his bed, pale and still as always. There was a twist deep in my chest, a hand wrenching at my heart. There was something I still had to do.

“The second night I was here,” I said, “I stole two bottles of medicine and some instruments. There’s a lightning-struck tree overlooking the highway a couple miles to the west. You’ll find them buried just behind it.” I looked back at Violet and Marcus. Neither of them had moved. “Thanks,” I said. “For everything.”

Before either of them could say anything, I forced myself out the door and closed it softly behind me.

When I reached the foot of the steps, I turned and looked up at the house. Jackson’s window glowed with a candle’s flame. I hoped he was there, reading quietly in the calm of his room with no idea how close he’d come to another overturning, this one far worse than the last. I wished I could have said good-bye. I wished I could have explained.

I went out past the houses and driveways and neglected mailboxes until I came to the town’s iron gates and let myself through with a rusty squeak. I stood on the other side, facing the long plain and the wall of the forest.

Where to now?

I put my hands in my pockets to warm them and skimmed the edge of a piece of folded paper I had forgotten was there. Jenny’s note.

I pulled it out and opened it. The dark letters shone in the moonlight.

…it’s like I can feel the whole world spinning so fast beneath me, and I’m thinking, what am I doing here? Is this where I belong?

I folded the piece of paper, returned it to my pocket, and got moving.

NINETEEN

The trees grew thicker as I went, choked with deadfall and thornbushes. I pulled myself over the fence that marked the northern edge of town. All around me were the night sounds of the woods: owls hooting and lizards skittering through the underbrush. Farther out were the heavier steps of larger things — deer or wolves or bears — making their own way through the dark.

I leapt over a fast-running stream and then stepped out into a clearing, caught in the silvery wash of the moon. On the far side were the remains of a barn. Its arid wood slats were pockmarked with nail holes and overgrown with moss and creeping vines. There was a large ragged hole in the roof.

The whole place was surrounded by rusting farm implements, hoes and shovels and pitchforks, and what I thought was an old tractor that was covered in vines and weeds.

This old barn, Jackson had said. North of town.

I crept up to the barn and slipped in through half-opened doors. The inside was lit with a few flickering candles that sat near an old mattress in one corner. I looked around but there was no one there, just piles of hay bound into moldering blocks against the walls, and rakes and a long rusty scythe hanging on pegs. Something rustled in the loft above me. “Jenny?”

An owl exploded out through the hole in the ceiling, startling me enough that I almost cried out. I steadied myself and crossed the barn to the mattress. It was covered with a quilt and a couple thin pillows. Scattered around it were scraps of paper, clothes and stubs of old candles, another dog-eared chemistry book. Near the head of the bed was Jenny’s sketch pad.

I peered into the dark corners of the barn to make sure I was alone, then set the rifle to the side and knelt down. I opened the sketch pad, tipping its face into the candlelight. The drawings at the beginning were mostly of people. Tuttle glowered from one page, surrounded by a dark halo, his ruler in hand. Sam sat in soft candlelight holding a pipe, a half smile on his face and a book draped over one knee. As I got toward the end, the people began to disappear and were replaced by trees, the barn, the school building, empty fields. If there were any people at all, they were seen from far away, their backs turned — dark, faceless walls.

“What are you doing here?”

I twisted around so fast I lost my balance and fell in a heap onto the bed, scrambling backward away from the voice. When I looked up, Jenny was standing over me in a bloodstained T-shirt, with a cat’s grin and a black eye.

“Nice squeal, tough guy.”

“I didn’t—”

“Whatever.” Jenny snatched the sketch pad off the floor next to me. “What are you doing here?”

I stood up warily, awkward in my backpack and coat. I searched the ground for an explanation. “I was… walking.”

Jenny turned and peered into the dark outside the doors. “There’s no one else here,” I said. “It’s just me.”

“I thought you were pissed at me.”

I shrugged. Jenny set the sketch pad on a pile behind the bed. “How’s your hand?”

I raised my right hand into the light and flexed my fingers. The bleeding had stopped, leaving my knuckles crusted with dirt and blood. The joints ground together when I moved them.

“We should clean it up,” Jenny said. She retrieved a plastic box from her bedside and stood in front of me. I just looked at her. “What? You want gangrene? Sit down.”

I slipped out of my coat and pack and did as she said, sitting down on the edge of her bed. Jenny grabbed my hand, examined it, then started scrubbing away with a rag. I hissed and tried to pull back but Jenny held my wrist tight.

“Take it easy, you big baby. If it’s not clean, I’ll have to amputate.”

I held my breath as she worked the dirt out of my wounds. Once my hand was clean, she spread some ointment from a small tube on it.

“How come Violet’s not doing this for you?”

“Caleb was there when I got back after detention.”

Jenny looked up with one arched eyebrow.

“They were going to have a vote tomorrow,” I said. “I left before they could.”

Jenny stopped what she was doing. Her dark eyes smoldered and she cursed under her breath. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“You didn’t make me do anything.”

“Your dad, is he —?”

“He’s with Violet.”

“Good,” Jenny said. “They won’t mess with her about a patient. Wouldn’t dare.”

Jenny tossed the tube of ointment back in the kit and took out a roll of gauze. She began carefully winding the bandage around my hand.

“Well, at least we denied them the pleasure of tossing us out,” she said. “That’s something, right?”

“Yeah, that’ll show ‘em.”

Jenny smiled and her breathing slowed as she looped the bandage around my fingers and across my palm. It was strange to see her hard surface swept away. Before, she seemed like a giant. A hurricane. Here she was just a girl. The air around her felt still.

“So you’re not going back?” she asked.

“No. You?”

Jenny glanced up at the rafters. “And leave all of this? It’s easier for everybody if I don’t. No place for me in their American fantasy camp.” She shook her head with a dark laugh. “I mean, it’s hilarious, right? Baseball games. Thanksgiving. American flags. They’re the ones responsible for blowing all that stuff up in the first place, and now they love it so much and want it all back? They even took Fort Leonard and built themselves a little nemesis.”

“Marcus and Violet aren’t like that.”

Jenny looked up from under her black hair. “No?”

“They took me in,” I said. “Took you in too. They didn’t have to do that.”

“I know,” she said quietly. “They mean well, I know they do, it’s just… they only go so far. You know? They get right up to the edge and then back off.”

I thought of Marcus’s hand on Violet’s wrist, holding her back. Violet yielding.

“Like with the Krycheks.”

“Jackson told you about that? I’m surprised. It doesn’t exactly paint Mommy and Daddy in the best light. I don’t know. Maybe it’s as far as they can go. Maybe it’s safer to just keep things as they are.”

Jenny secured the bandage with a pin, then put the rest of the gauze away and snapped the med kit closed.

“Well, I think you’re all set. Should heal up in a few days.”

“So no amputation, then.”

“I’ll keep my eye on it.”

I took my hand back, a little sorry to see it leave the cradle of her palm. We sat there, silently, on the edge of her bed. I needed to go find a camp for the night, needed to search for supplies, but I didn’t move. An owl hooted outside. The candlelight flickered.

“How is he?” Jenny asked. “Your dad?”

Her question brought a wave that reared up over me again. My throat constricted and there was a burning in my eyes that I had to fight back. But then Jenny drew closer and laid the flat of her palm against my back. Every curve of it, warm and rough, spread across my ribs and spine. There was maybe an inch between my leg and the calloused plain of her bare foot. A pulse of heat came off her, carrying along with it the scent of pine and spicy earth.

Everything in me calmed. The heat and noise faded away.

“Ever since we got here, I’ve been saying, ‘when he wakes up,’ and ‘when he’s better.’ It’s like I’ve been trying to pretend that Violet didn’t say he might never wake up.”

“Violet can be wrong,” Jenny said. “She’s not perfect. I mean, there used to be, like, tests and instruments and things that told us what was going to happen to us, but not anymore. Right? Now we don’t know much of anything. The future just goes in whatever direction it wants.”

She was right. I thought of the churn of the river tearing through rock and dirt. Who knew where it would go? What it would wipe away? Who it would spare?

“Did you really mean that stuff you said in the note?” I asked. “The stuff about the world spinning?”

“Yeah,” Jenny said. “I did.”

“What do you do about it?”

Jenny stretched across the bed behind me, curling around my back, and dug into a bag on the other side. “What are you doing?”

When Jenny sat up, her hand was closed into a fist. “What I like to do in times like these. When the world’s got you down.”

“What?”

Jenny opened her hand into the candlelight. A pile of fat paper cylinders sat in her palm. There was a twisted white fuse attached to each one.

“If you thought punching people was good,” she said, “wait till you try blowing things up.”

Sitting there in the palm of her hand, the little explosives seemed distant, almost imaginary, but a tingling started through my whole body anyway, like that moment when my bat connected with the ball and I ran the bases.

“What did you have in mind?” I asked.

Jenny’s grin shone all the way to the corners of her lips.

TWENTY

Minutes later I was running through the woods behind Jenny. There was no path I could see, so I had to struggle to keep an eye on her as she ran, slick as a deer, in and out of the pools of moonlight that littered the forest floor.

She knew the woods better than I did and made a game out of staying ahead of me so that I could follow but never quite catch up. It wasn’t until we both had to slow down to scale the Settler’s Landing fence that I got anywhere near her. She dropped down into a crouch just behind a thick stand of trees. When I came up, Jenny put her finger to her lips and motioned for me to get down. Both of us were breathing heavily, pushing out thick plumes of white steam.

“Where are we?” I whispered.

Jenny motioned forward with her chin. “Take a look.”

In the clearing ahead was a house totally unlike all the others in Settler’s Landing. It was enormous, more of a mansion than a house, with towering white walls and columns flanking the front door like marble generals. Two windows in the upper stories glowed with yellow light and filled the yard with a flickering glow.

“Casa de Henry,” Jenny said. “What are we doing here?”

Just then the lights in the upper windows went out. “Come on. We have to go around back.”

Jenny took off deeper into the woods, heading to the rear of the house. As we moved around it, its size became even more overwhelming. The walls stretched back another hundred feet or so.

Behind the house there was a collection of fenced enclosures that looked recently built, homemade from scrap pieces of wood, split logs, and scavenged chicken wire. One held chickens, another pigs, and a third sheep.

“The horses and about twenty cows, mean suckers, are in different enclosures on the other side of the trees, but this’ll do,” Jenny told me.

“Do for what?”

Jenny wasn’t listening. She had started to dig around in her bag. “Take these.” She dropped a handful of the fused cylinders into my hand.

“You want me to blow up the sheep?”

Jenny slapped me on the side of the head. “No! We’re not gonna hurt them.”

“But—”

“Look, the word explosive, when applied to these things, is a little grand. They’re more like firecrackers.”

“Jenny, I don’t know. If we get caught—”

“What? We already tossed ourselves out of town. Right? Look, I swear to you, they’ll never know it’s us. Besides, what we are about to do is incredibly obnoxious but more or less harmless.”

“What are we about to do?”

She smiled a razory smile. “We are going to make sure Will Henry has a really, really crappy night. Now go around to the sheep pen, open the gates, and toss them in. Oh! Matches.”

Jenny shoved a cardboard box of matches in my hand and darted out from behind the tree to a spot between the pig and chicken enclosures. I made my way to the sheep’s pen, one eye always on the house in case a light came on. I ducked down by the gate. Most of the sheep were in a knot at the center of their pen and didn’t even raise their heads as I approached. I slipped the rope loop that held the gate closed up over a post. There was a sharp squeak from the hinge as I opened it that made my heart freeze. One sheep raised its head with mild curiosity but then lowered it again.

I shuffled the bundle of firecrackers in my palm. It was crazy. Utterly crazy. I peeked over the fence. Jenny was poised at the pig pen, firecrackers in hand. I swallowed hard and turned back to the sheep standing placidly in the mud. I saw Will Henry pushing Jenny to the ground. I saw his gold hair and his vicious smile.

I lit the fuse as Jenny struck hers, then tossed my bundle about five feet behind the biggest knot of sheep. One turned back toward the sparking pile of firecrackers.

“Baaaaa.”

The explosions were so much bigger than I thought they’d be — a fast procession of booms, sizzles, and cracks, followed by great showers of sparks, red and green and yellow, shooting up into the sky and exploding again, creating umbrellas of fire that lit up the yard like a new sun.

“Cool!” Jenny exclaimed as she slid into the dirt next to me. “I had no idea they were going to do that.”

The animals completely lost their minds. I had never heard anything like it — the clucking, the oinking, the… whatever it is that sheep do was deafening. In seconds they were on the move, pouring out of the gates of their pens. Most of them headed right for the Henrys’ huge and beautiful home. Candles flared throughout the house and I could imagine what was going on inside: a confused jumble of Henrys shouting over the squeals of the animals, trying to get dressed, reaching for guns.

“Um, Jenny, I think we better get out of here.”

Just then the back door opened and Will came running out in his underwear, a shotgun in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He was joined by a mix of relations, a group of much older brothers and a small girl with blond hair I guessed was his sister.

The animals made right for them, a tidal wave of flesh that curled around their legs, knocked them off balance, then scattered out in all directions. The smaller ones leapt onto the fine white porch and covered everything with a layer of mud and panicked excrement. A few even made it through the back door and into the house, eliciting a chorus of screams and smashing pots and pans. But the bulk of the animals tore right into the woods, crushing through the brush and disappearing. Caleb emerged from the house and shouted at the others to get after them. Will tried to comply but right then a particularly terrified sheep knocked him into the mud.

“Yes!” Jenny said. “Mission accomplished!”

“Hey! Who’s there?!”

The beam of a big flashlight was coming Jenny’s way. It would hit her any second.

I leapt up out of the brush. “Bow down to your new masters!” I yelled. “Fort Leonard forever!”

The flashlight jerked away and we took off into the woods, laughing just as a shotgun exploded behind us. We ran flat out, leaping over streams and dodging walls of thornbushes, pausing only long enough to fling ourselves up over the fence before racing on again. Even when the sounds of the stampeding livestock and the panicked Henrys were lost in the thicket behind us we kept running. Jenny was ahead of me when the barn appeared in front of us.

As we crossed the clearing, I gave a burst of speed and was right at her heels. I grabbed hold of her arm and tried to pull her back, but our momentum sent us both careening into the wall, landing hard enough to make the whole barn shudder. Jenny hit first and I piled into her, trapping her with my arms. She twisted around so her back was pressed up against the wall.

“I still won,” she panted.

Her cheeks were bright red from the cold and slashed with strands of black hair.

The next thing I knew, we were kissing. I don’t know if she started it or I did. My elbows collapsed, making a cage around her, pressing our bodies together so that when we fought for air our chests crashed together.

Her hands clasped around my back, pulling me in tight. My hand found her hip, then rose up until it touched the smooth fault line of her scar.

Her skin felt like it was on fire beneath my fingertips.

TWENTY-ONE

When I woke it was barely light out and freezing. Winter had finally arrived. Even in my sweater, flannel shirt, and jeans, I shivered as I pushed myself up on my elbows. Jenny was sitting on the floor of the barn, dressed in jeans and a black sweater, scribbling away on her sketch pad. “Aren’t you cold?”

She shrugged, focused on the paper in her lap, sketching, frowning, erasing, and starting over again. In the sunlight her black eye from the day before looked even worse, an oil slick spread of blue, black, and gray. I turned on my side and watched her, pulling the blanket up over my shoulder.

“What are you doing?”

“Drawing,” she said without looking up.

“What?”

“You.”

“Think you could make me taller?”

Jenny smiled. I turned on my back and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes.

“What do you do them for? The drawings. Do you sell them or trade them or something?”

“Oh yeah, I supply the entire town with moody line drawings.”

“Seriously.”

“I don’t know. Violet found this set of drawing pencils somewhere and gave them to me. Everything seems a little quieter when I draw. Nothing else manages it. If I didn’t, I think a lot more people around here would be sporting black eyes.”

I looked up and traced the dusty lines of the timbers stretching across the ceiling, wishing I had something like that, something that would still the nameless feeling that was growing inside of me like a storm cloud, like something just barely forgotten.

Dad.

It was the first night of my entire life that I had spent apart from him. And for what? I thought bitterly, memories of the night before swarming in. So I could run around having fun while he lay there alone in that house? What if our little prank made things even worse?

I closed my eyes and saw a glint of gold shining in the dark. My grandfather’s fist falling from the sky. Alive or dead, he was still there. His voice still in my ear. Our survival was all on me — and what was I doing about it?

I drew myself up out of the bed.

“What are you doing?” Jenny asked as I slipped one boot on and hunted for the other. “Uh, hello? Question here.”

“I should be out looking for supplies,” I said. “Making camp somewhere.”

“Funny, it seemed like you were making camp here.”

My fingers froze on the strap of my backpack. I stood there stupidly, unable to move. It was like all the bones had tumbled out of my body. How could I make her understand?

“Talk to me, Stephen,” Jenny said quietly. She was looking up at me over the edge of her pad. Her eyes, liquid and sharp at the same time. It was like she was always one step ahead of me. Grandpa had told me a hundred times to keep quiet. To keep things to myself. But I couldn’t anymore.

“I just… I keep thinking I’m going to be…”

“What?”

A white star, crowned in gold, fell, and I shook from its impact. “… punished,” I said.

“For what? Having fun? Being with me? Why would you think that?”

Jenny’s pencil clattered to the floor as she charged across the room and knocked me back onto the bed. She threw her legs over my chest, holding me down.

“Jenny…”

She took both my wrists in her calloused hands, pinning me. Her hair fell down around us like a curtain, blocking out the rest of the world.

“No one is going to be punished for something as dumb as stampeding some pigs or wrestling with me. Not by God, not by anybody.”

“Jenny, let me up.”

“The world is not all on you,” Jenny said, pushing me down, suddenly fierce. “I know it feels that way, but it’s not. Not anymore.” She dipped her head down and kissed me. “Not for either of us. Okay? Now say that the world isn’t going to end if Little Stevie Quinn has some fun.”

“Jenny—”

“Say it! I mean, you did have fun blowing things up and kissing me last night, right?”

Fun wasn’t the word. Not even close. Suddenly Grandpa and that flash of gold seemed far away.

“Say it,” Jenny repeated, a whisper, her face inches from mine. “The world isn’t going to end.”

I watched her lips move and matched them carefully, syllable for syllable. Something about it felt secret and shameful, but I said it anyway.

“The world isn’t going to end.”

Jenny’s lips fell onto mine, and then we lay there gazing dreamily up at the high ceiling for I don’t know how long. One of us would laugh and then the other, for no reason we could put a name to. Thoughts entered my mind and I said them and they all seemed to make sense to her.

The sun mounted steadily outside, filling the barn with an amber light.

“What time do you think it is?” I asked.

“Are you saying time doesn’t cease to have meaning when we’re together?”

“Seriously.”

“I don’t know,” she said sleepily. “A little after dawn, I guess? Why?”

I turned so our faces were just inches apart on separate pillows. “I want to go back over to the Greens’ for a second. Before everyone gets up.”

“For what?”

“To see Dad. And get some books.”

“Books?”

I paused. I had said it without thinking. I knew the mocking that I was in for, but what could I do? “Some, uh, books Tuttle gave me.”

Jenny chuckled. “He totally got to you with the save the world thing, didn’t he?”

“He did not!”

“He did! You’re going to help usher in a new golden age of mankind.”

“I am not!” I said, and then, when her laughter had faded, “I don’t know. I was mad when I left, so I didn’t take them. But now I guess… I’ve just never had anything like that before. School and stuff, I mean. It’s kind of cool knowing things other than how to avoid dying.”

“No, I get that,” she said, then added with a smirk, “you’re coming back though, right? This isn’t some clever little ploy?”

I laughed, struck for a second by the strange sound of it and how easy it felt when I was with her. Once I got myself together I stood there at the edge of the bed, hands stuffed in my pockets.

How does this work? Do I kiss her before I leave?

Over and over again I was falling into worlds I didn’t know the rules for.

“So… I’ll, uh, see ya later.”

Jenny rolled her eyes at my awkwardness. I took a last look at her lying there in the half-light, then turned toward the door, knowing that if I didn’t leave right away, I never would.

“I want to come with you when you go.”

I stopped in my tracks inches from the door.

“When your dad is better,” she said. “I want to come. I was going to be all subtle about it. At one point I was even going to blackmail you, since I spied on you burying all that stuff of Violet’s that night, but now I thought I’d just come out with it.”

Jenny rose up out of bed and moved toward me.

“Look, like you saw last night, I’m kind of a tactical genius, right? And I know where all the good stuff in this town is, so I could help you pick up some salvage before we go. What do you think?”

Jenny’s face was inches from mine, but I was too stunned to say anything.

“You don’t want me to,” she said flatly. “It’s not that.”

“What? You don’t think I can handle it?” Jenny teased. “I could destroy you in a heartbeat.”

“I know.”

“Don’t worry, Stephen — it’s not like I’m asking you to marry me or anything.”

“No, I didn’t — I just mean…” I struggled, trying to come up with a reason her offer was so confusing. “Why would you want to?”

“Why? Because I can’t live in this stupid twentieth-century museum anymore. I don’t belong here, and neither do you! I want to be out there in the real world. With you.”

“Jenny, it’s not—”

“What? Easy? Safe? Uh, yeah, no kidding. We were out there for ten years before we came here and we saw all the same things you did. Worse, maybe.”

I thought of that morning by the stream. She and Jackson playing cards and all the blood that followed. Who was I to tell her what the real world was?

“I know it will be dangerous,” she said. “I just think sitting here in this barn playing dumb pranks isn’t living. With or without you, I’m leaving. I’d rather it be with you. And I think that’s what you want too.”

She was right. I knew it as soon as she suggested it. I knew exactly what Grandpa would think, what he would say, but right then I didn’t care. The idea of walking out of town without her seemed impossible.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Ha!” she exclaimed. “Nice! It’ll be great, you’ll see. And your dad is totally gonna love me. Don’t you think?”

“Yeah, I kind of have a feeling he might.”

Jenny popped up on her toes and kissed me again, holding it longer this time, slipping her arms around my back so our bodies pressed tight together. “Still want to go get those books?”

I smiled. Our foreheads met, making a close little pyramid. “Yep.”

“Jerk.”

“I’ll come back as soon as I get them.”

By the time I got to the door, Jenny already had her sketch pad in her hands, drawing, lost in it. Her dark hair was a tangled mess, and in the growing light of the morning, her skin glowed. Her sweater slipped away from her shoulder, revealing a tiny island chain of freckles. I watched her for a second and then slipped out the door into the cold morning air.

I stood for a moment in the barnyard, then made for a path that cut like an arrow into the woods. Everything seemed golden and crisp around me and I felt I was close to touching something I had never seen, or even hoped for. The future.

TWENTY-TWO

I avoided the main road, following the decaying perimeter fence as it wound through the woods before jumping it and heading toward Settler’s Landing. My steps felt lighter than usual as I walked through the bare trees. It was funny trying to imagine Jenny out with me and Dad on the trail. Somehow I couldn’t see her trudging along, donkey in tow, picking up scrap.

Maybe we won’t even go back on the trail.

I stopped dead in the middle of the woods, surprised by the thought. I rolled it around in my head like it was a jewel I had just discovered.

Was it possible? After all, Dad had been talking about it before the accident, and now with Jenny along, maybe we really could make a new start. Settle somewhere. Go west and see what there was to see. There was a whole world out there.

I laughed a little to myself. The idea would have terrified me just weeks ago. How had that changed? Was it Jenny? Was it Settler’s Landing? Did it even matter? Hope was hope and I’d take it.

I clambered down a hill and leapt over a stream. The trees opened up above me. The sky was thick with looming gray clouds. The way the temperature was dropping, I wondered if I might actually see snow this year.

Usually we were down in Florida by this time of year, since real winter storms could sometimes last for weeks on end. The last time I’d seen snow was during a freak storm years before. We had just gotten to the Canadian camp in early April, when the day suddenly grew cold and snow began to fall. It had seemed like a miracle. The trading camp had buzzed around us, everyone rushing to celebrate before it was gone. There’d been a bonfire and food roasting on spits and a three-man band whose music had floated above the camp.

Mom and Dad and I had stayed behind while Grandpa went out looking for tobacco. We’d gathered around our campfire in a semicircle of folding chairs, cooking a skinny chicken on a spit, a plastic tarp angled over us to keep the snow off. We knew from experience that several hours from that moment we would have to take refuge to escape the drunkenness and the fights that inevitably broke out after a big party, but that was later. Right then the air was full of laughter and music and the clean-smelling snow that had painted the muddy camp around us a fresh, brilliant white. I had The Lord of the Rings on my lap but was listening to Dad talk about his days as a theater usher in San Diego while Mom talked of wild party after wild party and teased him for being a nerd.

“So how did you guys meet?” I’d asked that night.

Mom had glanced at Dad. I was maybe eight then and they’d only recently started talking to me about the Collapse and the war.

“P Eleven had just started up,” Dad said. “There were rumors about a quarantine in San Diego, so your grandparents and I piled into the car, using Grandpa’s military ID to get us through the roadblocks. We thought we’d head out east to this old army installation in the desert to wait things out. On our way out of town, we stopped for gas at the station your mom’s parents owned.”

“By then my whole family was gone,” Mom said. “My sister, Sarah, went first, then Dad, then Mom.”

Mom’s face had darkened, remembering it.

“I heard the bell ding as your dad and his folks pulled up. I came out from behind the station to meet them. I was filthy. It’s funny — I was such a prissy little thing when I was little, playing dolls and insisting everything I owned be as pink and frilly as possible. But by that point, I barely bothered to wipe the dirt off my face before going to fill up their gas.”

Dad had held out his hand, stretching it across the space between them, and Mom had taken it.

“I pumped it for your grandpa, and when I was done, he dug down into his pocket to pay, but all he had was a hundred. When I told him I didn’t have change for a hundred, he started yelling and screaming, claiming I was trying to cheat him! I laughed. I was like… the world is coming to an end, man! I mean, the sky is falling! I just buried my entire family out in the desert, and you’re having an aneurysm over your eleven dollars and fifty cents in change? Finally I just said forget it. Go with God, Ebenezer!

“So he took his hundred and jumped in the car, but by that point your father here had gotten out of the car and said he wasn’t getting in until his dad agreed to take me with them. Well, if you thought your grandfather had been impolite before, imagine the tidal wave of profanity that erupted when number one son decided to stage a little coup. Your grandpa screamed and hollered, he stamped his feet, even hit him! Can you believe that? Hitting something as adorable as your father? Didn’t matter, though. Your dad was a brick wall. He wouldn’t give an inch. Not one inch. I hadn’t said two words to him yet! And here he was… my noble man.”

“Why’d you do it, Dad?”

Dad had locked eyes with Mom over the orange flames. The snow swirled behind him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Didn’t really even think about doing it till then. It was just… the second I saw her, it was like a jigsaw puzzle. You know? You’ve got all these pieces and, on its own, each piece is a splotch of blue or a bit of green. But then a bunch of them click into place and you’ve got the sky or the grass and the whole thing just makes sense.”

I’d recognized the look that came over his face then. He got it a lot when looking at Mom. It was like he was seeing her as she was right then, bright and rosy in the fire’s glow, but at the same time seeing her as she was on the day they met, and when they’d first kissed, and when they’d snuck away from Grandpa to be married, and then as he imagined she might be ten years down the line, then twenty, then thirty, and finally as the old woman he had no idea she would never have the chance to become.

It was like he was looking at his whole life with her in that one moment.

I stepped out of the tree line and into the Greens’ backyard. There were no candles lit in the windows and I couldn’t hear any sign of movement from inside. Still, I skirted around the edge of their backyard garden toward the front door. I knew they wouldn’t mind my coming, but I thought it would be better if they didn’t see me. Hiding behind the corner of the house, I peeked out into the neighborhood.

It seemed strangely quiet, empty, almost as if everyone who lived there had picked up and moved on the night before. I told myself it was just my imagination.

I came out around the side of the house and went up the front steps, letting myself inside. Dad lay in his usual place, looking exactly as he had the night before. His face, more and more drawn as the days passed, was still framed with his great swirls of black hair, shot through with veins of white.

He had become a different person the day he met Mom, like a switch had been flipped inside him. He stood up to Grandpa in a way he never had before, and then they somehow managed to hold on to each other as the world tore itself to shreds around them. They even had me when the idea of bringing another person into that wreck of a world must have seemed crazy at best.

I thought maybe the man he was back in the plane, the one who rescued those two people, was the man Mom knew emerging again after being so long without her, the man who wouldn’t admit that the world was really over.

She would have been so proud of him.

I realized, maybe for the first time, that I was too.

“Jenny wants to come with us when we go,” I said quietly, my hand on his shoulder. “I think you’ll like her. I was thinking maybe we won’t even go back on the trail. You know? Like you said before we came here? Maybe we’ll find someplace to have a house. Maybe we’ll—”

I stopped myself short. It was fine when it was all in my head, but it felt foolish to imagine that life out loud.

Driving back the sadness I could feel swelling inside me, I knelt down by his bed and collected the books, piling them up in my arms.

“I’ll be back soon,” I said.

I reached for the doorknob, but as I did I noticed the coatrack that hung on the wall next to the door frame. Something about it struck me, but for a second I didn’t understand what or why. And then I got it.

It was empty.

Each time I had seen the Greens come inside, they would take off their jackets and hang them on the coatrack’s pegs. If Jackson or Marcus ever forgot, Violet would ride him until he took it from wherever he dropped it and hung it up.

The Greens should have been upstairs, maybe a half hour or so from getting up and starting their day. So why was the coatrack empty?

I set my books on the floor and stepped into the kitchen, listening intently for any sound coming from upstairs. Nothing. From the bottom of the stairs, I could see Jackson’s door hanging open into the hall. The stairs creaked as I made my way up, but there was no answering sound from any of the rooms. There were clothes scattered on Jackson’s floor and his bed was disheveled, like he had gotten up and dressed in a hurry. I made my way to the end of the hall, to Marcus and Violet’s room, and found it the same way.

So what? Something came up and they all decided to get an early start. It’s nothing.

It made sense, but I didn’t believe it. Maybe it was that weird abandoned feeling I’d noticed as soon as I’d gotten to town this morning. I went downstairs and peeked out the front door. Just as I did, a door opened and slammed shut somewhere across the park. A man ran from his house and then down the road that led to the school.

I closed the Greens’ door behind me and eased out onto the porch. I knew I should take my books and go back to Jenny. After all, what happened in this town was no longer my business but, curious, I went down the road toward the school.

I reached the edge of the parking lot just as the man threw open the school’s front doors and disappeared inside. I circled around the side of the building, looking in each window as I had that first day, but saw nothing until I came around to the back of the school and looked in the window above the main classroom.

The room was packed with what I was sure was every single resident of Settler’s Landing. A hundred people or more. The desks and chairs were pushed aside and everyone stood facing Tuttle’s empty desk in tight groups. A murmur rose and fell in waves. I eased the window open.

Violet and Jackson were at the front of the mob. Violet stood behind Jackson with her hands on his shoulders. His face was cast down and his arms were crossed tightly over his chest. He leaned into his mom the way a scared child would. That was how everyone looked, afraid and waiting.

The doors at the back of the classroom flew open and Tuttle came in, followed by Caleb and Will and, behind them, Marcus. They all looked tired and pale. Their clothes were dirty and in some places torn. Each one of them was armed. The crowd hushed instantly as Caleb swept in front of Tuttle’s desk. He bowed his head, his hands clasped tightly in front of him.

“Poison,” Caleb said simply, letting it hang in the air without explanation. “The people of Israel were beset on all sides by the godless. Animals, starving and hungry for destruction. Unable to stand against the people of God in the field, they conspired to come into their land in parties of two or three as spies.”

Caleb paused, searching the crowd. I pushed farther away from the window.

“The people of Israel took them to their heart. They dressed them in their clothes and gave them food and water and fellowship. After all, they thought, there were so few of them, what harm could there be? The people of God grew proud of their kindness and generosity, barely noticing the poison that had infected them, like a brackish stream pouring into a clear lake, until soon the water all around them was murky and foul. The people of God said to one another, ‘But where is our home? Where is the land of God that was?’ This is how the weak and the profane destroy the strong and the righteous.”

The crowd held its breath as he scanned its faces.

“Last night, our home was attacked.”

The crowd didn’t move, except for some parents who pulled their children tighter.

“Two or more raiders from Fort Leonard, perhaps guided here by former members of our own community, came for our livestock, firing their weapons into the air to start a stampede. Whether their goal was to steal them or to simply run them off in order to weaken us before a larger assault, we don’t know. My family gave chase but was unable to overcome them.”

My first instinct was to laugh, it was so ridiculous, but the reaction from the crowd made it clear that this was deadly serious.

“Like you all, I know the danger of the world around us,” Caleb continued, his voice softening, growing warm, “how it presses against us every day. For years now we have been safe in our anonymity, blessed by God in this place, but I fear, I fear deeply, that such a time may be coming to an end. These new times will demand not only vigilance but also action. It’s my opinion that we cannot sit idly, waiting to be attacked again. If we are to be truly safe, we must act now before the danger grows. It gives me no pleasure to say this, but I propose the only course of action I feel is responsible. We must gather a force and, as quickly as possible, move to end the threat of Fort Leonard once and for all.”

The people of Settler’s Landing didn’t hold back. Their agreement was absolute and automatic in a way that was frightening. Men yelled. Some stomped their feet and pounded on the walls. Down in the crowd, I saw Derrick and Martin and Wendy and the rest, all of them with their parents, and all of them shouting their approval.

Down at the front of the group, though, Jackson melted even farther into Violet’s body, his skin waxy and pale as he imagined, I was sure, what was to come.

Caleb soaked in their approval as Sam entered the room, a rifle slung over his shoulder. He looked haggard, his clothes in disarray and a salt-and-pepper growth of stubble on his ashen face. Marcus leaned in, nodding, as Sam whispered to him. The two then slipped out the doors together and I moved away from the window to follow them. I thought that if I had the chance to stop the madness, this was it.

By the time I made it around to the parking lot, Sam and Marcus were talking to a small group of armed men. They spoke briefly, then Sam took the men east over the hill and out of sight. Marcus quickened his pace across the lot and toward town.

“Marcus!” I cried out. “Marcus, wait!”

Marcus turned back. “What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here, Stephen—”

“It was us,” I said, catching my breath.

“What?”

“Me and Jenny. At the Henrys’ last night. We didn’t mean anything by it. It was just a stupid prank to get back at Will and them.”

Marcus checked behind us, then yanked me off the road toward the shelter of the trees. “Someone said they were from Fort Leonard.”

“That was me. It was dumb. I know. I’m sorry. Look, just tell Caleb. Tell him it was us. We’ll go, we’ll really leave this time. There’s no reason to do what he’s saying. Build an army? Marcus, that’s insane.”

“It’s too late, Stephen.”

“No it’s not. Go back in there and tell them.”

“No,” he barked, almost knocking me back. “Caleb came and got a group of us right after it happened last night and we went out to Fort Leonard.”

Something sunk inside me.

“What did you do?”

Marcus drew a shaky breath, then dropped his eyes to the ground between us.

“Marcus, what happened?”

“We found their settlement early this morning. Figured out one of the buildings was a food storehouse. Caleb had the idea we should raid it like we thought they’d done to us. It seemed simple; the whole town looked to be asleep, but… there were two guards. They fired at us. Caleb shot one. I got the other.”

I jumped as the school doors boomed open behind us and the crowd started pouring into the lot out front.

“Maybe we can talk to them,” I said. “Talk to Caleb, explain. Maybe—”

“The people at Fort Leonard were getting together before we even left,” he said. “It won’t be long before they come looking for us. Our only chance now is to get them before they can get us.”

The rumble of the crowd grew louder as it reached the road.

“You should go. Take Jenny and get out of here. Go to the old casino on the other side of the highway. We’ll come get you when things have calmed down.”

“But, Marcus—”

“Did you listen to that speech? He thinks you two were a part of it, Stephen. That you helped them. We tried to tell him you weren’t any harm, but I don’t know what he’s going to do. Just go, Stephen. Get back to Jenny. Now!”

Marcus left to join the mob as it swarmed up the hill. I slipped into the woods and ran as fast as I could, throwing myself over the fence and dashing off again. Jenny had been alone for more than an hour. The trees rushed by me as I ran leaping over rocks and brush.

I was little more than a mile out when I first smelled smoke.

The air thickened the closer I got. My eyes stung. My heart pounded and I ran until my legs burned, ran until I blew through the trees and came out into the clearing where I was faced with a wall of flame and gray smoke.

Jenny’s barn was on fire.

TWENTY-THREE

“Jenny!”

I threw myself into the doors of the barn, scorching my hands and choking on a lungful of smoke. “Jenny!”

Flames were spreading up the walls and tearing into the roof of the barn. I dropped low where the air was clearer and covered my mouth and nose with my sleeve. My eyes stung but I searched the barn, yelling her name as loud as I could. There was a flash of movement by the bed. I raced toward it, finding Jenny on the ground, coughing, her legs pinned under a pile of charred wood from the partially collapsed ceiling. She was trying to get out from under it but was weak and barely able to move. I grabbed her under her arms and pulled but she cried out.

There was a whoosh as the wall next to us caught fire, exploding into a curtain of red and orange. The smoke swelled and thickened.

I dropped to my knees at Jenny’s waist and thrust my hands into the smoldering pile of wood, ignoring the feel of my fingers searing as I threw the timbers off. I shook Jenny by the shoulders, but by then she was unconscious.

I looked all around me. The doors I’d come in had caught fire, as had the walls on every side. Fire flowed over the ceiling. I was trapped. The old wood of the barn, dry and weak from years of neglect, popped and hissed, burning as easily as paper.

I rolled Jenny onto her back, then muscled her up over my shoulder. The ceiling groaned louder. There was no time to waste.

I stood up, eyes watering and lungs aching, then dropped my head and shoulder and ran as fast as I could, straight at one of the burning walls. There was a panicked instant when it resisted, but then the wood cracked and flames gouged into my shoulder and cheek.

Our momentum carried us out of the barn and to the tree line, where I stumbled and Jenny went spilling out into the brush. I collapsed, coughing and heaving beside her. Jenny moaned. Her one good eye was open, but barely. She was breathing.

“You’re going to be okay,” I said. “We’re going to be fine.”

“I thought it was Will and them,” she rasped. “But it wasn’t. It was a group of men. They didn’t even say anything, they just—”

“It’s okay,” I said.

There was a crash behind us as part of another wall fell in. The relief of safety washed away, though, when I realized that everything we owned — my pack and supplies, Jenny’s clothes, Grandpa’s rifle — was all in the barn. We couldn’t go back to Settler’s Landing and without shelter or supplies, and with winter coming on fast, we were dead.

I could still make out the hole in the wall I had broken through, a splintering oval wreathed in flame. Fire had spread nearly everywhere, but the roof still hadn’t come down. I had seconds. If that.

“What are you doing?” Jenny said as I pushed away from her. “Stephen!”

I ran for the barn and took a deep breath before jumping through the gap, stumbling toward what was left of the bed. My lips were sealed tight and my fingers pinched my nose closed. If I tried to take a breath, I was dead. I tripped over a pile of timbers and landed hard. The smoke had dropped almost to the level of the floor. I felt around wildly, squinting into the gray clouds until my fingers hit the side of my pack. I pulled it to me and threw it over my shoulder. My knife was in its sheath next to it. I stuffed it into my back pocket.

There was a crack behind me and the sound of falling wood. I caught sight of the rifle lying next to Jenny’s sketch pad, its barrel pointed toward me. I reached for it but the red-hot metal singed my fingers and I had to yank them back.

There was a growl above me. The roof was coming down. I reached out again and my fingers closed around Jenny’s sketch pad. I scrambled to my feet and ran toward the opening in the wall. The growl above me turned into a long moan. There was a whoosh and the wall behind me collapsed. Then the ceiling started to come down, forcing the smoke and heat down on my shoulders like two giant hands. Burning wood fell at my heels, popping and hissing.

The way before me was closing off. All I could see was gray and livid yellow. I thought of Jenny, lying out there alone, and threw myself into the air.

TWENTY-FOUR

We stumbled through the woods, our arms clasped around each other, until we crossed the highway and came to the parking lot that surrounded the Golden Acorn casino.

When we got there, I eased Jenny down inside. The lobby was musty and cold. A jumble of gaming tables, chairs, and slot machines, most of which had been stripped of anything useful years ago, littered the main room. I followed a corridor that branched off to one side and was lined on either wall with rows of identical-looking doors. I pushed on each one until I found a door that gave. The room was empty except for a mattress that lay on the concrete floor, stripped of sheets and its metal frame, and the husk of what used to be a giant television set. It wasn’t much. I pulled the curtains back and saw that the big glass window on one wall was still intact. It would do.

I brought Jenny inside the room and we collapsed on the bed, both of us covered in small burns and soot. Jenny’s legs had gotten the worst of it. I pulled out my first-aid kit and carefully cleaned and dressed her wounds. We’d have to keep an eye on them, but for now they didn’t look serious.

Jenny patched me up and then we drank the rest of the water in my canteen. After that we were exhausted and lay down, our arms draped over each other.

Soon Jenny was asleep, but I lay awake for hours as the land outside and the hotel room around us dropped into deeper and deeper darkness.

For some reason I kept seeing the quarry. Me and Jackson surrounded by all his friends. My friends. I skipped back to earlier that day and felt the jolt as I connected with that ball and ran the bases. I felt the wind against my skin and heard the sound of those voices cheering me on.

But all of that was gone now, wasn’t it?

I looked over at Jenny, who was sleeping fitfully, burned and slashed, and my nails dug into my palm. I grimaced at the pain but welcomed it. Because it had been me, hadn’t it? I was the one who sent those people to Jenny’s with torches in hand. If they had killed Jenny, it would have been my fault. If there was a war, it would be my war. The people of Settler’s Landing were a bomb, but I was the one who lit the fuse.

I rolled out of bed and drew the curtains aside. I thought of Dad lying all alone at the Greens’ and felt low and sick. If the war came to Settler’s Landing, it would come for him too.

“They won’t come here.”

I turned away from the window. Jenny was sitting up on the mattress, watching me. “Who?”

“Will and his family. They won’t follow us here.”

“Why not?”

“The square pegs are out of the round holes. They can do what they want now.”

I leaned against the windowsill. “Do you think they’ll really do it? Start a war?”

Jenny winced as she drew her burned legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. Her face filled with moonlight as she peered out the window.

“I think they want the world to be like it was when they were our age. Maybe a war is just the last piece of the puzzle.”

I left the window and pulled out my old bedroll, spreading the small blanket as best I could over us both. We sat up, huddled close together. Jenny laid her head on my shoulder.

“I shouldn’t have gotten you involved,” she said. “In any of it. The fight with Will. The thing at the Henrys’. It was stupid of me.”

“You didn’t know what would happen.”

“I didn’t care,” Jenny said, a knife-edge of bitterness in her voice. She turned and stared out the window, her back to me. “Maybe I just wanted to get back at them and didn’t care who got hurt in the process.”

I reached out until my hand found hers and clasped it tight. She turned. Her cheek was silver in the moonlight.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

We left the casino and Jenny led me down to a billboard on the side of the road. It was the tallest one I had ever seen and dwarfed the trees around it. We climbed to the very top, up rusty and vine-covered handholds — past the smiling, tanned family that claimed AT&T cell phones would keep them connected forever — and sat looking out over the miles of empty land around us.

The night had turned cold with banks of heavy clouds rolling in. Jenny craned her long neck and looked up at a field of stars that glittered in the black. If you looked close, it was almost as though you could see the stars moving, a sparkling dome, turning and turning.

“Used to be you couldn’t even see them,” Jenny said. “With the cities and their lights and pollution and all. At least that’s what Violet said.”

Jenny picked a leaf off a nearby tree and let it drop, watching as it helicoptered down through the emptiness. Jenny leaned into me against the cold and we sat and watched the moon. Far off in the distance the barest wisp of smoke rose like a ribbon from someone’s campfire.

“Do you ever wonder what they’re doing out there?”

“Who?”

“All the other people,” Jenny said. “I mean, there’s a whole world out there, right? Whole other countries. Who knows, maybe there’s some place out there where the Collapse never even happened. Where people are just going about their lives.”

Was it possible? Since we shared a border, P11 hit Mexico and Canada as badly as it did us. But what about everyone else? Were there places that the Collapse never touched? I looked out into the night and wondered.

“If you could make it so it never happened,” Jenny said, “would you?”

I tried to imagine it. The Collapse. The horror of P11. What would this place be like if none of it ever happened? I imagined vast crowds of people packed shoulder to shoulder, scurrying about like ants, our silent world wiped away by electric lights and movie theaters and televisions and cars.

What would our lives be like? Jenny and I never would have met, for one thing. She would be thousands of miles away with a different name and a different family. And since my mom and dad only met because of the war, would I even have existed at all? I knew it was wrong not to wish all that death away; but how could I long for a life, a world, that I never even knew?

“I don’t know,” I said.

Jenny raised her lips to my ear.

“I wouldn’t,” she breathed.

Later, we walked back to the casino and slipped into bed. As Jenny slept, I laid my head on her chest and listened to the thrum of her heart. It sounded like a bird’s wings beating at the air.

I opened my eyes hours later, fully awake, and stared up into the darkness. Jenny was on her side, breathing low and steadily. I dressed quietly and felt my way out of the room and down the hall to the brighter gaming area, navigating toward the front door. The edges around it seemed curiously bright for the hour.

I stepped up to it. Outside, the whole world had changed.

As we slept, the first snow of the year had fallen with a vengeance. It covered everything with a coat of white that was already inches thick. The snow fell lightly now with a musical clink as one crystal stuck to another and settled. With the full moon just visible through some cracks in the clouds the whole place glowed almost as light as day. I buttoned up my coat and made my way across the parking lot, my steps crunching and my breath a white plume trailing behind me.

I had no destination in mind, but I felt this pull to keep going so I followed the highway south for a while, then veered off into the trees. There, I found a circle of land isolated from the snow by the heavy canopy of tree limbs.

I cleared a plot of ground, then knelt down and assembled a pile of brittle leaves and twigs for a fire. The movements Grandpa had showed me years before effortlessly flowed back to me. Soon a spark caught off the fire starter I had in my pocket and the leaves smoldered. I leaned in close and blew on it gently until smoke puffed up and a bit of flame peeked out. This was the most delicate time. Get excited, add too much wood too fast, and the whole thing would be suffocated. Go too slow and the flame would starve and die. I added thin twigs at first, until the flames grew and could sustain themselves, then layered on thicker branches. I watched it burn, the warmth and familiarity of it flowing over me.

“We’re better off now,” Grandpa had said one night as we sat together across a fire. He was shaping a tree branch into the trigger of a small game trap with his knife while Dad slept fitfully behind us. I was hugging my knees, my head down, my throat sore, exhausted from crying and wishing I could disappear.

I was ten. Two newly dug graves, one large and one small, throbbed in the darkness behind us.

For months I had watched Mom’s stomach grow, drunk with wonder. Dad had sat me down and patiently, if awkwardly, explained exactly what was going on, but it meant nothing to me. Clearly, this little person, this little world growing inside her, couldn’t be anything but a miracle. I tried to picture having a brother or a sister. Someone to talk to, to play with, to foist chores off on, to torture in more ways than I could imagine. It was too good to be true.

“What are we going to call it?” I asked Mom one day. “How about Frodo?”

“We’re not calling the baby Frodo.”

“Why not?”

“How about Agnes?” Mom suggested.

“Boring.”

Dad piped up. “Hildegard?”

“Blech.”

“Oh! Oh!” Dad hopped on his toes. “If it’s a boy? Elvis. Aaron. Presley.”

Grandpa, of course, was furious. It would be another mouth to feed. It would slow us down. He went on and on, but as tough as he was, Mom was tougher. She said if everybody thought like that, then the human race was going to disappear pretty fast.

We had planned on being at the Northern Gathering when the baby came — Dad said there were women there who knew about these things — but we were a month’s hike away at best when Mom grasped her stomach and announced that it was time.

“But can’t we stop it?” I’d asked. “Delay it or something?”

“Nope! When it comes, it comes!”

Dad was trying to seem unconcerned, dashing around to make Mom more comfortable, but I could tell he was worried. Mom too. Usually she joked through the worst of times — she always said that’s what joking was for — but as she lay there on the grass that morning, her face was cut with lines of tension and sweat as she strained and cried out and fought. It was as though she was drowning and trying, more and more desperately, to claw her way to the surface of the churning water. Dad tried to help and so did I, but it was no use. There was so much blood.

Three hours into her labor, Mom’s cries stopped.

Her face went slack.

“Bev?”

Dad knelt by her side.

“Bev?”

Her hand slipped from his, like a dove tumbling out of the sky.

Late that night, after the graves had been dug and Dad was finally asleep, I sat alone with Grandpa around that fire as he whittled at a piece of wood with his old hunting knife.

“Learn from this,” he croaked.

“Learn what?” My voice sounded far away, like it was floating somewhere far above my head.

Grandpa glanced over his shoulder where the skeleton frames of the roller coasters rose into the sky. He turned and spit thickly into the fire.

He wasn’t at all the stick figure he would become in just a few years. He was a twisted piece of metal, scarred and pitted and hard. His knife-edge crew cut was thick and gray. Even in the light of the fire his eyes were like pale blue marbles, small and cold.

“She’s better off now.”

Grandpa’s ring glinted as he carved a bloodless gash in the wood and looked at me across the flames.

“We made a mess of things before you were born,” he said. “P Eleven was just what we deserved. It was no plague. It was a blessing. Surviving it, that’s the real plague. But soon it’ll just be… silence.”

Now, as my own fire hissed and sputtered, I wondered: Was he right? Is this how we were meant to live — like animals? Living and dying and hoping for nothing until one day we all disappear?

If we were, then what? Should I just go? On my own? Right then? Violet probably hadn’t retrieved her medicines yet. I could take them, get my pack while Jenny slept, and disappear. Dad would be safe in Violet’s hands. Jenny would be fine on her own. Maybe if we all went our separate ways, if we stayed low to the ground, no towns, no family, no friends, this new end of the world would pass us by. Maybe then we’d all be safe. Maybe Grandpa’s only mistake was that in keeping us together he hadn’t taken things far enough.

The wind surged, blowing the drifts off the ground and the low-hanging tree branches, whiting out everything around me, erasing it. I thought of Jenny lying there in that dark room, curled around the spot where I had been, a warm place in all that cold. I knew that leaving right then might spare us pain later, but I also knew that I was fooling myself if I thought I could do it. There was this chain that ran from me to her. I didn’t know when or how it had come to be, but it was there. I could feel it. I didn’t want to imagine what she’d be like in five or ten or twenty years. I wanted to see it. I wanted to be there.

Besides, in the end, who had Grandpa’s rules ever saved? Not Mom. Not Dad. Not even himself. If it was true that all paths in our world led to only one place, then why not fill whatever path you chose with the best things you could find?

I wasn’t my grandfather. I never would be.

I turned to go back to the casino, but before I took a single step, a dark figure crossed the highway in front of me and moved quickly toward the building, leaning in against the wind. I couldn’t make out who it was, but it didn’t matter. Jenny was alone in there.

My boots crunched through the snow as I raced back, wishing Grandpa’s rifle hadn’t been lost in the fire. I gripped the hilt of Dad’s knife instead. It would have to do.

The figure, in a black coat with the hood turned up, was at the door when I got there, ready to go in.

“Stop!”

I gripped the knife’s handle tight, ready to use it. The figure in black turned to face me and lifted the hood. “Violet?”

She stepped into the white between us. “Stephen?” she said, moving toward me. “Thank God. Are you okay? Is Jenny? I didn’t know they were going to do what they did. When I found out—”

“We’re fine.”

Violet said nothing for a moment. The snow surged, making her body waver, ghostlike and gray.

“What is it, Violet?”

A plane of snow drifted between us as she looked back in the direction of Settler’s Landing.

“He’s gone,” she said. “I came to tell you he’s gone.”

“What? Who’s gone? Violet, what are you—”

But then I knew.

TWENTY-FIVE

I stepped out onto the Greens’ porch hours later. It was late and everyone was asleep. The snow had finally stopped.

I held a lantern I had found down in the Greens’ basement. The land around me glowed a dazzling white. The roads were gone. The playground had disintegrated into a few ice-covered bars and odd-shaped mounds of snow. The lines that divided one yard from the next had been wiped clean.

I descended the steps and started south. The houses to either side of me were little more than snow-covered cliff faces. Walking through them was like walking along the bottom of a deep canyon.

It wasn’t hard to carry him. As with Grandpa, death had taken Dad a bit at a time until there was almost nothing left. I passed the entrance to the town, the wall now just a long ridge, like a curving collarbone, bleached white in the sun. I crossed the lawn beyond the wall, then passed through the trees and out again until I came to the great empty plain on the other side.

The world had disappeared. There was nothing but white as far as I could see. The casino and the Starbucks were snowy hillocks. Even the towering billboards to the north had been nearly erased.

I walked out into the nothingness until my legs stopped moving. Then I set the lantern down and eased Dad onto a snowbank. As I did it, the sheet covering his face fell away. The crow black of his hair and beard was startling, lying in the middle of all that white. His mouth was slightly open and his skin was a bluish gray. He looked so small. Shrunken and old. People said that the dead looked like they were only sleeping, but it had never seemed that way to me. To me, there was nothing there at all. An empty house. An abandoned world.

I covered his face with the sheet and picked up the shovel.

Moving the snow aside was easy enough, but when the blade of the shovel hit the ground, it rang like a bell. My palms ached from the vibration. The ground was nearly frozen.

I had changed back into my old clothes before leaving the Greens’ so when I pulled off my coat, the icy wind tore through my sweater and patchwork pants. I wedged the shovel into a crack in the ground, then leaned my weight into it, pushing the blade an inch or two farther in to break the icy shell. Once I had done that across the entire breadth of the grave, I was able to dig the shovel in farther and remove the dark soil inches at a time. As I got lower, the dirt became looser. The blade of the shovel scraped across rock as it tore into the soil.

Hours later, my muscles were burning and my chest was heaving. Each time I drew breath, the frigid air tore at my lungs. I couldn’t feel my hands or feet. The skin of my ears stung. My body was slick with sweat despite the cold. I stopped digging. Hanging over the shovel’s handle, exhausted, I caught my breath and then checked my progress.

I was standing only about two feet deep in the ground. The shovel fell out of my hands. I dropped back into the snow like a rag doll.

The cold reached up into my back, spread throughout my chest, and curled its fingers around my heart.

“Stephen?”

Jenny stood behind me, our blanket wrapped around her shoulders. When I didn’t say anything she reached for the shovel, but I yanked it away from her and held it to my chest.

“I have to do this myself.”

Jenny stared at me, her hair whipping past her reddened cheeks.

“No you don’t.”

I ignored her. Using the shovel like a crutch, I got back to my feet. I raised the handle painfully over my head and dug down another foot before faltering again and collapsing into a heap. I forced myself up and began again.

When I was finally done, I sat at the foot of the open grave and pulled Dad to me, wrapping my arms around his thin chest.

I closed my eyes and could see his face as it was, lit from the inside as he held up that first slice of pear in the darkness of a dead plane, then the iron look that came over him when he decided he was going to be a hero for the first time since Mom left us.

I heard his booming laugh and his shuddering sobs as he sat by his father’s grave and Mom’s and the daughter’s he would never know. I felt his chest rise and fall alongside mine, his breath like the dry turning of pages in a book.

All of that had come to this.

Stillness.

A yawning silence.

Like none of those things had ever been.

Jenny helped me lower him down until the white glow of his shroud disappeared in the darkness at the bottom of the grave. He looked like a child, curled up and helpless. Alone. I reached into my back pocket and found the sharp edge of our family photograph. I raised it up into the dim moonlight, tracing the lines of me and Mom and Dad smiling together for one of the last times, before holding it over the grave and dropping it in. It fluttered like a leaf and settled onto his chest.

I stood there for some time, feeling the pull of the grave, like a cold arm wrapping itself around my shoulders and drawing me down with him.

I took up the shovel and filled the hole.

When it was done, I stumbled and fell back onto the ground. A new swirl of snow appeared out of the gray, lightening sky. It seemed like the body of a great white bear tumbling down onto me, its claws outstretched.

I shut my eyes, and let it have me.