The Living

I

HER BREATHS ARE SLOWING. Through the roar of the road, I hear their faint whistle. I feel each expansion of her body against my arm, the pressure pushing me deeper into the RV’s bristly cushions, so much like the couch in our house in a life that now feels like a dream. Her head grows heavier as she relaxes onto my shoulder, as the symbolic gesture becomes actual rest, and I savor this moment of peace, knowing we might not have many left.

I stretch it into months. Years. I live with her inside it.

Then something crunches under the tires and Julie jolts upright. Our bubble floods with conflict and purpose and the unknown horrors ahead. I stifle a groan.

“What was that?” Julie calls toward the front of the RV, rubbing her eyes.

“Roadkill,” Nora calls back.

“Sorry,” Tomsen adds. “Too big to avoid. Elk or deer or other ungulate.”

Julie leans back into the couch, but not onto me. She is wide awake now. I guess I’ll wake up too.

Behind us, New York City is dwindling. Manhattan has vanished from view except for its two tallest buildings: Freedom Tower and 432 Park Ave, clawing up from the horizon like pompous actors refusing to exit the stage. Here on the outskirts of Brooklyn, the buildings are humbler. Flat-roofed boxes, unlit and silent, glowing in the moonlight like a city of the ancient world. Egypt, Rome, mud huts and stone palaces sleeping under a sky full of mysteries.

Julie presses her face to the window as we pass an old military base. The moon’s dreamy light reveals its layers of history: colonial cannons, World War II fortifications, Terror War surveillance towers, and nonlethal riot-control turrets hastily converted into lethal ones.

“I used to play there when I was a kid,” Julie says with a wistful smile. “Waiting for Dad and Rosy to finish their meetings. Mom would lift me onto a cannon and I’d pretend it was a horse.”

A memory flutters through my head and I feel the old instinct to catch it, to seal it in a jar and hide it in my basement until it suffocates. But I don’t.

“I used to do that too,” I say with a nervous smile. “At the base in Missoula.”

Julie’s expression shifts to cautious amazement. The man with no past is reminiscing.

“Except I was a boy, so…I pretended the cannon was my penis.”

She stares at me for a few seconds, then bursts into laughter. It’s a sound of delight and surprise, and it delights and surprises me. Have I ever made Julie laugh before? Unintentionally, sure, with gaffes and pratfalls, but never like this.

“So…” she says with exaggerated earnestness, trying not to giggle at the sheer normalcy of it, “you grew up in Missoula?”

We proceed to have a conversation.

Months after falling in love, building a house, and traveling the country together, we do first-date chit-chat. Where we grew up. What our families were like. How we got to where we are—with substantial omissions on my side, of course. There will be a time and a place for the dark chapters, but not tonight, soggy and exhausted in this rattling motorhome. Tonight we keep it light, and I’m surprised by how much light I find. There is more to my past than shame and tragedy. There are childhood friends, tree forts and rope swings, river floats and hill hikes. Even my life in New York has days worth recalling, brief flickers in which I’m not the tortured scion of a corporate warlord, just a young man exploring the city, marveling at its grandeur and prying at its history, getting drunk for the first time a block from where Julie lived.

I give her the human parts of me. The parts that everyone has, in some shape and color. And when the time is right, I’ll give her the rest, and I’ll hope what we’ve built can withstand it.

We soar over the Narrows bridge and onto Staten Island, the ocean to the east and the shallow seas of New Jersey to the west. We curve down into Pennsylvania, a few hundred more miles of peopled land before the barren expanse of the Midwaste. Finally, sometime after midnight, Tomsen pulls off the highway onto a farm road. She drives about a mile until we’re well out of sight of the highway, then parks.

“Okay, goodnight,” M says, lowering himself gingerly to the floor.

“Hold up, big man,” Nora says, stepping over him to open a cabinet. “Very tough and impressive, forgetting you just got shot…” She pulls out a gallon of vodka and thumps it down on the counter. “…but we’ve got to get that mess cleaned.”

“Your opinion as a nurse?” M grunts. “Or just a girl who wants my shirt off?”

“Oh yeah,” Nora purrs as she unpacks Tomsen’s first-aid kit. “Nothing gets me hot like a septic gut wound.”

M sighs and stands up. Very carefully, he pulls off his shirt. As I’ve always suspected, his bulk is more muscle than fat. Not the sharp edges of a modern bodybuilder but the round, mountainous power of an old-fashioned strongman. Still busy preparing her instruments, Nora shoots him a sideways glance that sticks just a little longer than it should, a subtle raise of the eyebrows. Then her eyes settle on his wounds, and she’s all business again.

“Fold out that couch and lie on your back,” she tells him, and he obeys, grimacing with each movement. “Tomsen, do you have anything to put under him? It’s gonna get messy.”

M raises his head sharply.

“I don’t like messy,” Tomsen says, opening a cabinet that’s crammed so full it explodes onto her, burying her in obscure equipment that she holds in place with her shoulder and forehead. “Can’t get careless out here, have to stay neat, organized, ready for anything. Cluttered house, cluttered mind.” She plung-es an arm deep into the cabinet and emerges promptly with a folded blue tarp, then body-slams everything else back inside. “Can you sit up please?” she asks M, keeping an uneasy distance from his naked torso. When he obliges, she unfurls the tarp over the couch with a single crisp motion, then retreats to the front of the RV.

M lowers himself onto the crinkling plastic and frowns at the ceiling. “I feel like I’m in a fucking auto shop. You gonna change my oil?”

“Something like that,” Nora says, and jabs a pair of pliers into his shoulder.

One by one, she removes the staples that held him together during our mad dash out of Manhattan. He barely flinches, so I flinch for him, and I feel anger bubbling low in my belly. He took these bullets for Abram’s daughter. Did that man offer so much as a nod of thanks? Did he erase this gift along with a dozen others when he convinced himself he didn’t need anyone?

“I think I’ll give you two some privacy,” Julie says, looking queasy as she watches the surgery.

“Hell no you won’t,” Nora says, waving the bloody pliers at her. “You’re not leaving me alone in this horror show. Here.” She holds out the huge plastic vodka bottle. “Have a shot.”

Julie hesitates. “Well, when you put it that way.”

She takes a pull from the bottle, then offers it to me. I shake my head. Tonight is not the night to test my tolerance.

“Tomsen?” she says.

“I don’t drink alcohol,” Tomsen says, watching the proceedings from the elevated perch of the driver’s chair, spinning it left and right with her leg while her fingers wander through her short mat of copper curls. “Makes me jittery.”

“Hey,” M says, lifting his head to frown at everyone, “if anyone needs a drink right now, it’s me.”

Nora takes the bottle from Julie and pours it into M’s wound. He shrieks.

“Oh, wrong hole? Sorry about that.” Her sadism softens as she holds the bottle to M’s lips, pouring a gentle stream into his mouth. “I bet you miss being a slab of frozen beef, when you could get shot all you wanted.”

M swallows the liquor and lets out a sigh. “Those”—he winces as she plunges the stitching needle—“were the days.”

“Remember when we first met? When I shot you three times and you were too busy eating my friends to notice?”

The mirth drains from M’s face, but Nora gives him a playful slap on the cheek. “I’m just fucking with you, Marcus. Past is past.”

She takes a long pull off the bottle and continues stitching.

By the time the surgery is finished, Nora is far too drunk to be performing surgery. M looks a little tipsy too, but he’s spending all his euphoria on pain management. He eases himself back to the floor and groans, “Goodnight.”

“Are we done partying already?” Nora asks the room, crestfallen.

“It’s been a long day,” Julie says. She’s not entirely sober either, but her buzz looks more internal, the kind that leads to thoughts and feelings more than energy and action. The only kind I know.

“Fine,” Nora sighs, capping the vodka and handing it to Tomsen, who tucks it away with visible relief. “We should give these two the big bed,” Nora tells her, indicating Julie and I and the “bedroom” at the rear of the RV. “And I hope you have earplugs, because they’re wild ones.”

I feel heat in my face at the irony in her voice. It’s been so long since Julie and I had a moment alone, I had almost forgotten about our difficulties. But what were those difficulties, really? What could possibly be left of them after the fires we’ve passed through?

“Seriously, though,” Nora says, “we’re all taking our clothes off, right? We just survived a hurricane and I’m not sleeping in this soggy shit.”

There is a tense silence.

“I’m good,” M says, folding his hands on his chest. “But you should definitely strip.”

Tomsen glances around uncomfortably. “Goodnight,” she says, and curls up on the couch-bed as close to the wall as she can get, her shape disappearing beneath her baggy safari gear.

Nora shrugs and begins stripping.

“Goodnight!” Julie chuckles and drags me into the bedroom before I see more than a bare stomach. She slides the curtain shut, and we’re alone.

We slip under Tomsen’s ratty old blankets and I inhale a bewildering array of scents, from mildew to craft glue to various shades of body odor. Then as Julie begins to peel off her wet clothes, draping them piece by piece on a shelf, I forget about smell and focus on sight.

“Come on, R,” she says, tugging at my soaked shirt. “You’ll wet the bed.”

I shed my clothes while I watch her shed hers. She stops at her panties, which I take as a signal, so I leave my boxers on too. We curl up together in the back of this ancient RV, parked in some weedy field whose former crop I could never guess. I press my body against hers, both of us cold and clammy at first, then slowly warming, and despite the damp cotton between us, I feel myself responding. I want her, in every way. I always have, and I think I’ve finally thinned my hedge of fear. But a barrier remains, and it’s not mine. She eases away from me, a subtle retreat from my pressure.

“What’s wrong?” I ask her.

“I don’t know,” she mumbles. I wait a moment and ask again.

“What’s wrong?”

“I just…I still don’t know who you are. Not really.”

I give this a moment to settle. “I’ll tell you.”

I feel her shaking her head, rocking it back and forth on the pillow. “Not now.”

“Not now,” I agree. “But I’ll tell you.” I lean in, burying my face in her hair, but she curls up tighter.

“There’s too much.” She is nearly in the fetal position, like her nightly program of bad dreams is already starting. “My mom…everything. There’s just too much.”

I let my electricity dissipate. I relax my body, still touching but not pressing. “We’re going to find her, Julie.”

She doesn’t reply.

“Your mom. The kids. We’re going to find all of them.”

“Do you ‘know’ that?” she asks with her face still in the pillow. “Is that one of those things you ‘know’?”

I sense her alertness as she asks this. A step into dangerous territory. A question for the man she’s not ready to meet.

“I don’t know it. But I feel it.”

She breathes quietly. I can hear her heartbeat. “I know we won’t have long,” she whispers. “I just need to be with her at the end.” Her whisper trembles. “I need to hear what she has to say to me…before I say goodbye.”

I place a firm hand on her hip. “You will.” It comes out with surprising conviction, and although I don’t know the future, it doesn’t feel like empty comfort. “Before we deal with Axiom, before BABL and the rest of this ‘war’…we’re going to find our family.”

She’s silent for a long time. I kiss the back of her head and close my eyes. “Goodnight, Julie.”

She reaches behind her and places her hand on the back of mine, her fingertips nestled between my knuckles. Then she slides my hand off her hip and up her stomach and presses it around her breast. I surrender to sleep with the soft weight of her resting in my palm, breathing the sweet, spicy scent of her hair, and I allow myself an indulgent thought: maybe we’ll get through this. Maybe the home we left behind won’t have to become a memory. Maybe somewhere in the space between bullets, we can still find room for a life.

WE

ABRAM KELVIN is fifteen years old, and he is picking up his brother from school. A normal thing, a normal day. The wrongness is all in the details: the crumbling brick of the school, the sage brush that chokes the playground, the distant specks of patrols making their rounds on the barren hilltops.

“You don’t ‘love’ her,” Abram tells his brother. “That’s stupid.”

“I do too,” Perry says, smiling across the playground at a little blond girl whose name Abram has already forgotten. “I love her and I’m gonna marry her.”

“You’re only five,” Abram says.

“So?”

“So five-year-olds can’t fall in love.”

“Why not?”

“Because love is complicated and only grownups can do it.”

Perry shakes his head, still smiling. “I can do it.”

“You’re a weird kid, you know? At your age you’re supposed to think girls are gross.”

“Girls are cool. I like girls.”

Abram sighs. “Come on, weirdo. We’ve gotta pack.”

He grabs his brother’s soft hand and drags him away, wondering if Perry realizes he will never see that girl again, just like Abram will never see the girl in his combat class, the one who gave him that wicked smile when she flipped him on his back, a private invitation that he’ll never get to accept. This place. All these people. Gone and soon forgotten.

“Do you love anybody?” Perry asks him as they walk back to the house.

“Nah,” Abram grunts, then turns his head and spits for no reason, the way older men do. His father doesn’t do this but all his father’s friends do, spattering the garage floor with their milky phlegm. His father doesn’t always act like a man, even though he builds houses and works on motorcycles, and this troubles Abram. What if his father is weak? What if he can’t protect them from the world? If he can’t, it will be up to Abram to do it. Abram spits again.

“Why not?” Perry says. “Why don’t you love anybody?”

“I love our family.”

“Nobody else?”

“Nobody else sticks around. They’re not real.”

Perry squints at him. “Not real?”

“Think about it. Last year you said that Jeff kid was your best friend. Where’d he go? Do you even remember him?”

Perry frowns at the ground.

“Now you say Mike’s your best friend, but when we leave, he’ll disappear and you’ll forget him too. So was he really even there? What was the point?”

“Well…” Perry says, considering the question, “having fun. Playing and stuff.”

Abram shakes his head, suddenly embarrassed at his outburst of openness. “Forget it. Just remember to stick close to the family. Things might get bad out there.”

“Where are we going, though?” Perry asks.

“Don’t know yet. Somewhere safe.”

“But I like it here. I want to stay here.”

“It’s not safe here anymore. Even Dad says so. You want to be safe, don’t you?”

Perry looks over his shoulder at the town’s red roofs and cherry trees, the distant burble of the playground. “Nah.”

Abram snorts. “Then you’re weird and stupid. Wait till some-thing really bad happens to you, then you’ll understand.”

In the last image Abram has, Perry is still a boy. Soft cheeks and little white teeth, smiling just before the attack. Abram wonders what that boy became before he died. Did he ever grow out of that rose-twirling romanticism? Did seeing his family peeled away piece by piece finally make a man out of him?

Abram tells himself it doesn’t matter. What matters is the present, where he has a job to do.

In this all-important present, Abram is a thirty-one-year-old man gunning a rusty motorcycle down a forgotten stretch of highway. He is no longer anyone’s brother or son or husband. He is no longer an employee or a soldier, a colleague or a friend or anything to anyone—with one exception.

He is a father.

Despite all the death and pain that fill the pages of his book, he is still a father, and his daughter has never needed him more. His last image of her fits neatly over his last image of Perry: soft cheeks and little white teeth, smiling at him through the window of Axiom’s transport bus, happy to see her father even as he fails to fight off the guard, fails to stop the bus, fails over and over until she’s gone.

Abram holds the image close like a beloved photo. He runs it through his mind, caressing its sharp edges and savoring the sting of the cuts. He deserves the pain. He needs it. It will keep him moving.

The sound of an approaching vehicle scatters his musings. He swerves off the highway and hides the motorcycle in the underbrush, and as the noise resolves into the rumble of a big diesel engine, he entertains wild thoughts. It’s the bus. It’s her. In a few seconds I’ll see her face in the window and this time I’ll do what it takes.

He sees a flash of yellow as it passes. A glimpse of chrome and stripes.

It’s not the bus.

He steps out onto the road to watch it go. A garish 1970s motorhome, bristling with antennas and solar panels and fuel barrels marked “Do Not Steal.”

It’s them. It has to be.

How did he become the chaperone to that gang of overgrown children? How did they drag him into their suicide cult and why did it take him so long to get out? The bullet wounds in his arm and shoulder still throb, and he doesn’t doubt the girl would have kept shooting if he pushed her to it, but that’s no excuse. He had plenty of chances to snatch the gun, crack her skull, and go his way. But he stayed.

Did their fantasy infect him? Did he enjoy the sugary taste of their dream? For one indulgent moment, maybe he did. But as he watches the RV trundle away, big and bright and begging for abuse, he tightens his jaw.

No more dreaming. Abram will stay awake.

He heads back to the motorcycle, an old scout bike he salvaged from the wreckage of Fort Hamilton. Most would have considered it scrap metal. Abram got it running in two hours. He unearthed the tools and fuel from a bomb-blasted mechanic shop, crawling like a rat through the briar of twisted sheet metal. He is hard, he is resourceful, and he needs no help to do his job. He will do it alone like he always has. He will find the bus. He will take back his daughter.

And after that?

It’s a question he hadn’t expected to hear in his head, but the answer is clear enough: after that doesn’t matter. He is a man with both boots on the ground, and what matters is the next step. Watching the steps ahead is a good way to fall on your face.

And not watching them is a good way to get lost.

He stops. The thought is so loud it almost sounds external, like someone is whispering to him from the shadows. But he can’t place a position or even a number—is it one voice or many? His hands squeeze around imaginary weapons as he growls reassurances under his breath.

“I do what it takes to survive. I fight to protect my family. And that’s all there is to this.”

There’s more.

He whirls around, teeth gritted, fists clenched. But the road is empty. The city is silent.

He is alone.

I

MY SLEEP is a womb. I float in warm darkness and it nourishes me, feeding amniotic nectar into my fetal form. Unmade by the day before, broken into simple cells, I am growing a new body in this silent oblivion.

This is rest. This is what rest feels like.

I get perhaps four hours to savor it, and then a hand is shaking me and I’m gasping musty air and looking up at a bearded giant who appears to be throttling me.

“Hey,” M whispers, giving my shoulder one last shake. “Get up.”

I blink reality back into my head, a rush of information reminding me where and who I am.

“Need to talk,” M says. “Please.”

I’ve never heard earnestness like this from him. As I push the blankets off of me, I realize I’ve presented a clear view of Julie’s half-naked backside, but M doesn’t even look. And now I’m very concerned.

I throw on my clothes and tip-toe past the other two women. Nora’s clothes—all of them—hang from ceiling hooks above Tomsen, who seems to have uncoiled a little, accepting Nora’s persistent spooning in exchange for the body heat. It’s unseasonably cold. Outside, a layer of frost covers the fields, turning the old furrows into snowcapped peaks that glisten in the morning light. I glimpse a few strawberries among the weeds and think of a Beatles reference that Julie would have enjoyed once, back when all I had to do to impress her was to know literally anything.

“Okay,” I say, throwing up my palms. “What?”

M glances over his shoulder, a gesture that looks ridiculous in this empty field. He lowers his voice until it’s barely audible. “Do you remember a boy?”

I wait for him to elaborate.

“Before the airport. That long walk. Little black kid?”

The airport itself is a fog, and before that is nothing. A gray void of abstract symbols and formless sensations, like the dreams of animals. I give him an emphatic shrug that says of course not.

He digs his fingers into his forehead. “Keep having…thoughts. Dreams. I think maybe…” He squeezes his eyes shut. “Maybe I did something bad.”

“You did,” I say with a bewildered frown. “Lots of things. We all did.”

“No. Something worse.” He looks at the ground. “Something to Nora.”

“Like…what?” I ask cautiously.

He scrunches up his face, rubbing his shiny scalp. “Don’t know. A boy…a house… It’s just pieces.”

So M’s voyage through the past isn’t such a pleasure cruise after all. There was a time when I might have taken some ugly satisfaction from this, and I’m ashamed to remember it. There is nothing satisfying about the anguish on my friend’s face.

“Does she know?”

He shrugs. “Must not. But if she finds out…remembers…”

I clap a hand on his shoulder. I feel like I should offer him a word of wisdom, some gem that I’ve mined from my own past, but I have yet to pull the tarp off the results of that dig. It may be nothing but dirt and bones.

“She knows who you are now,” I hear myself telling him. “Whatever it is…she’ll forgive.”

I have no idea if this is true. I may be talking to myself more than to him. But it seems to take the edge off his fear, and he nods.

We both turn at the muffled sound of Nora’s voice in the RV. Then Julie’s, sharp with annoyance. I step back inside and M follows with a reluctance that almost looks like shyness. I hope no one notices the change.

“Fuck off,” Julie groans into her pillow. Nora is pulling on her ankle, trying to drag her out of bed. Only their years of friendship give Nora immunity to Julie’s morning wrath. Anyone else would die for this.

Tomsen is awake too and already sitting in the driver’s seat, her vivid green eyes lost in a sleepy haze while she waits for the vegetable oil to warm up.

“Get up,” Nora says. “Important shit to do, remember?”

“Not yet,” Julie pleads, pulling the pillow onto her face as if to smother herself.

“I thought you wanted to save the world, you fucking walrus. Get up!” Nora yanks the blanket off her, and this time it’s not her back that’s exposed. This time M does look, but I can hardly blame him.

“Oh my!” Nora laughs as Julie scrambles to grab her shirt. “Looks like you had a good night after all!”

Tomsen watches in the rear view mirror with a look of creeping apprehension: what have I gotten into?

“I hate you,” Julie grumbles, staggering out of the bedroom while buttoning up her jeans. “Like, so much.”

Nora makes a kissing noise.

Julie plops down onto the couch-bed and looks at the floor with puffy eyes. Her hair is the usual postmodern sculpture of crazed angles and spikes. She offers me a faint smile as I sit beside her, but it’s clear that her night was not the restful repose that mine was. Wherever she went in her dreams, part of her is still there, chasing her mother down dark alleys while the flood rises at her feet.

“Coffee,” she croaks at the floor, then looks at Tomsen. “Please tell me you have coffee.”

“I don’t drink coffee,” Tomsen says, but before Julie can burst into tears, she adds, “but I know a place.”

She starts the engine.

As day dawns on the highway, we begin to encounter traffic. The first car behind us triggers a panic; M and Nora reach for guns we don’t have and Julie starts rattling off a plan for how to overpower the attackers when they stop us, but then the car passes with a honk and a wave and we all feel foolish. We remember that not everyone in the world is a thief, a rapist, a killer, a cannibal, or an employee of an insane corporate militia. Some people are just people, on their way to wherever, and as more and more of them pass us on this crumbling highway, cars and trucks and bikes and horses, I realize our posture toward life may need some adjustment.

Somewhere between Baltimore and DC, we pull into a diner.

It looks the way a diner should look. Old, ugly, clean but well-worn. A blinking neon sign makes an unbelievable claim: OPEN.

“Is this real?” Nora wonders as we park between a boxy red camper van and a row of horses tied up saloon-style. “It’s some kind of secret base, right? A rebel front? Or are we in some suggestible universe shit?”

Tomsen’s eyes dart over to Nora. “You’ve read The Suggestible Universe?”

“Of course I have. Everyone was reading it back when zombies first went public. Fascinating stuff.”

“Too bad more people don’t believe it,” Tomsen says, hopping down from the driver’s seat. “But no, we didn’t think this into being. Lynda’s Diner, established 2021, best and only breakfast in town.”

The diner is busy yet eerily subdued. Most of the customers have a look of soggy exhaustion, and I realize these aren’t just customers, they’re refugees. Less than twenty-four hours ago, New York City sank a little deeper under the tide of inevitability, and the labor camp that called itself Manhattan vomited its population into the world. The few busloads that Axiom deemed valuable got free shipping west, to be reinstalled into the machine as soon as possible. Everyone else was left to scatter, and with all that traffic funneling through just a few remaining highways, Lynda’s will be a popular pitstop on the route of the New York diaspora.

Lucky for us, the rush hasn’t hit yet. We have been racing nearly non-stop since the moment the hurricane passed, driven by desperate quests, and our urgency has put us ahead of the brunch crowds.

Tomsen leads us to a booth by the window, and Julie and I squeeze in next to her on the red vinyl bench. M and Nora take the other side, but M sits near the edge, projecting none of his usual attempts at charm. Nora notices, and a curious frown hovers on her face.

A weary, middle-aged waitress approaches the table with a notepad at the ready, just like in the movies, but instead of “What can I get you?” she asks, “What’ve you got?”

Tomsen reaches into one of her jacket’s many pockets and pulls out two black objects: little bundles of wires encased in tape and plastic. “Signal filters,” she says. “Hook them to your walkie’s antenna, reduce jammer noise by ten percent. Limited stock, act now.”

The waitress picks up the gadgets, eyes them skeptically, disappears into the kitchen for a minute, then returns with a look of amazement. “I just talked to my husband on the farm. Still squealy, but I can hear him. You could get rich off these things.”

“They won’t be worth much once we destroy BABL.”

The waitress smiles patiently. “Right. And how’s that going, ‘H. Tomsen?’ Haven’t seen you in a while.”

Tomsen glows with the pleasure of being remembered. “I was in jail but these people helped me escape. I killed the jammer in New York, now we’re going to blow up the west coast.”

The waitress raises an eyebrow.

“It’s going to be beautiful.” Tomsen is bouncing in her seat like a child, and I wonder if someone should try to stop her before she gushes our plans to the whole world, but it’s coming out so fast… “You’ll be able to walkie your farm man whenever you want, tell him you love him and have radio sex, lost kids will find their families, weird people will find friends, we’re going to untie the gag so the world can talk again.”

I glance around, but no one is listening to us. The waitress scans our faces, dirty and bruised and tired, hair matted and wild, and I realize we probably look more like delusional drug addicts than villains, heroes, or any other threat to the norm.

“Good for you,” the waitress says with a faint smile. “So what can I get for you?”

“Five days of food and all your fryer oil.”

“Deal.”

“And coffee,” Julie mumbles, staring into empty space. “All your coffee.”

The coffee comes first and Julie nearly dunks her face in the mug. Tomsen slides hers over to Julie, who grabs it with her free hand and holds it at the ready.

I look down into the black well of my mug. Aromatic steam drifts up to my nose. Iridescent oils swirl on the surface. I take a sip of the inky brew, bitter and bracing, and I feel the caffeine meeting my neurons. A cautious greeting, then recognition, old friends reunited. My brain lights up like a city.

Ten minutes later, the food comes: a classic breakfast of pancakes, eggs, bacon, and fruit, and not the thin, pale, reconstituted versions I remember from diners of the old world. Not frozen food ingots dumped out of a bucket off a ship from China. Real food, fresh from a nearby farm, thick and brimming with life.

For the first time in weeks, I feel hungry.

I take a bite of pancake and my eyes snap wide when the flavor hits my brain. I can taste it. It doesn’t taste like carbohydrates and proteins and the knowledge that I won’t starve; it tastes like butter and maple and rich, doughy warmth. I pop a bulging strawberry into my mouth and my tongue ignites with tangy sweetness so overwhelming my eyes roll into my head.

“R,” Julie says with a wondering smile. “Are you…enjoying your breakfast?”

My cheeks are too stuffed to answer, so I just nod and keep chewing. The only thing I don’t inhale with rapture is the bacon. Staring at that thick rasher of smoky meat, my mouth tingles with desire, but my mind backs away. I am not ready for that. Maybe I never will be. It’s harder to decontextualize meat when you’ve chewed it off a living, screaming body. Perhaps some parts of my humanity should be left unremembered.

M notices my conflict and resolves it for me. Three strips of moral ambiguity disappear into his mouth.

There is no further conversation at our table. Food is a delightful novelty for me, but for these three women and their fully Living appetites, it’s serious. They’ve subsisted on little but Carbtein since we left the stadium—much longer, in Tomsen’s case—and despite providing all the nutrition of a proper meal, there is some aspect of human hunger which that miraculous chalk never satisfies. I can see a few patches of sunken skin on Tomsen’s neck, translucent brown like apple bruises, revealing the phantom malnutrition of a Carbtein diet, the body insisting “I’m fine!” until the very moment of death. All three of them are literally starving, and the meal proceeds accordingly. The minutes tick by in wordless chewing.

So I settle in to wait, feeling full in a way I never have in this life, and as I gaze idly around the diner, studying faces and skimming conversations, my ears perk to the sound of an escalating debate in the booth behind me.

“It won’t work,” says a man says with a faint East African accent. “Maybe with a dozen people in a house, maybe a hundred in a remote compound, but once it tries to be a society, it will always implode or be crushed.”

“And you’re so sure of this why exactly?” says another man with an Irish lilt.

“Because history! People have been trying this kind of thing for centuries. It does not work.”

“With all due respect to your field, love, history is overrated.”

“Oh is it?”

“History isn’t long enough to be an accurate predictor. It’s a statistically insignificant sample size. An idea fails a few times in a single century and that means it will always fail, no matter how much things change around it? Bollocks!”

“Okay, but—”

“You can’t take a handful of examples and call it universal law. Our entire recorded history amounts to a few thousand years—a nanosecond on our evolutionary timeline. We have no bloody idea what’s possible.”

I notice the rest of our table has tuned in. Julie sits upright and cranes her neck, trying to catch a glimpse of the speakers.

“Okay,” the other man says. “Valid point, if you want to zoom out that far. But right now? You really believe this could work right now?”

“It’s the post-apocalypse, Geb! All the old systems are gone, the rubbish is swept out. There’s never been a better time to try something different.”

The other man pauses. “Let’s take a poll.”

He turns around, smiling at us over the top of the booth, and suddenly we are participants. “Excuse me. My name is Gebre and this is my husband Gael and we are having one of those windy debates about how to rebuild society. Can we get your opinion?”

“Sure,” Nora says with an odd note of unease, perhaps fearing a repeat of the Julie-Abram conflicts.

Julie, Tomsen, and I twist around on the bench to face our neighbors. Gebre is slim and dark-skinned with short, tufted hair and a neat goatee, dressed for the wrong decade in crisp khakis and an improbably clean blue button-up. Gael is nearly his opposite, with fair skin and shaggy blond hair, his ratty mustard t-shirt revealing tattooed strings of numbers spiraling up his forearms. He gives us an apologetic smile as Gebre launches into his “poll.”

“So in the Old Gov days, society was a machine, yes? Each law was connected to another law leaving no empty space between them. There had to be a law for every situation, no loose parts, no gaps, because if there was a gap, someone would exploit it. You agree so far?”

No one confirms this, but he continues.

“We know that many people are good, but we designed the machine to assume everyone is bad. Most people wouldn’t choose to hurt others even if they were allowed to, but some would, so we had to design the machine around those ones. We couldn’t leave anything to choice. We couldn’t use soft human ethics for any of the machine’s gears. They had to be hard, made out of law and force.”

“Which severely limited the possibilities of the design,” Gael interjects.

“Yes,” Gebre agrees, nodding. “There aren’t many designs to choose from when they have to be this rigid. But what are you going to do?” He shrugs. “If you live underwater, all your vehicles must be submarines.”

“See, this is where Geb and I part ways,” Gael says to our table. “He thinks people are a mindless erosive element like water, that we’re always working to break down society, so the only kinds of societies that can survive are watertight ones.”

“No, no, no,” Gebre says. “This is not what I think, it’s what they think.” He waves a hand around the diner, taking in everyone. “What most people think. And whatever most people think becomes reality.”

“Our idea of what ‘most people’ think hasn’t been updated in a long time.”

“Well, this is my question for these people, isn’t it? So. You people.” He swings his hand back to our table and looks us over, taking in our haggard appearance, our bandages and scars. “You look…well traveled. You look like you’ve had your share of experience with humanity. What do you think?”

Julie leans forward against the bench, cocking her head. “About…what, exactly?”

“Would you want to live in a society that uses altruism and cooperation for some of its gears? A system that contains opportunities for exploitation but expects people not to choose them? A society based—at least partially—on goodness?”

Julie thinks for a moment, but not a long one. “Hell yes.”

Gebre hesitates. “Hell yes?”

“Fuck yes!” Her eyes glitter. “Sure, it sounds crazy, but we’ve been using sane systems for a long time and look how that turned out. If we’re not willing take a big leap, we’re going to end up right back where the apocalypse started.”

Tomsen raises her hand. “I say aye, concur and agree. Break stuff open and show what’s in it and make new stuff from the pieces.”

Gebre has lost some momentum but he continues. “It would be very difficult. People would have to rely on each other—not just their own groups but everyone together. We’d have to give up some security and independence. We wouldn’t have what we had before.”

“Fuck what we had before!”

I smile at the half-crazed passion in Julie’s eyes. Nothing gets her revved like a windy debate, no matter where, when, or with whom. Combine it with untold quantities of caffeine and…

“What we had before is what burned the world down. I’m ready for a whole new everything.”

“Chairs on the ceiling,” Tomsen adds. “An otter for president.”

Gebre looks at us for a moment, then tosses up his hands and turns back to his husband. “Well. Okay.”

Gael erupts with laughter. “You’re out of touch with the youth, old man.”

“I might even agree with them,” Gebre says with a shrug, “but they’re hardly representative of the general population.”

“We might be someday,” Julie says. “Maybe sooner than you think.”

Gebre grunts and resumes eating while Gael holds back a flood of gloating.

“But is this a real place you’re talking about?” Julie asks the couple, all but climbing over the booth. “Is there a enclave like this out there somewhere?”

“No, no,” Gebre says, waving dismissively. “Not a real place. Utopia means ‘no place.’”

“It’s just an idea that’s been floating around,” Gael says. “Although I’ve heard they’re getting close in Portland.”

“Even if it could work in theory,” Gebre sighs, “a seed this delicate could never take root while that is steamrolling the landscape.” He jabs a palm toward the TV hanging over the counter.

I stare at the screen and my stomach sinks. The onslaught of flashing images stings my eyes, but I can’t look away. A reminder of why we’re here. Where our road leads. What we’ll face when we get there.

There was once a nation that hated itself. It was founded on the idea that no one should need it, that each individual was his own nation and needed no alliance with neighbors, that each of the millions was separate, alone, and in competition with every other. This contradiction drove the nation insane. For the second time in its short history, the nation declared war on itself.

So to defend this nation against the people who comprised it, its government built a machine called BABL, and every communication channel but its own disappeared into static. This slowed the government’s fall. It bought a little time. And then, after years of fire and death and unimaginable mutations of reality, the government disappeared, too.

But like the impossible walking corpses that were rapidly replacing humanity, Old Gov’s channel shambled on after its death. It showered the ruins of the nation with a looping collage of stock images, fragmented clips, and foggy filler content, and people kept their TVs and radios tuned to this cultural compost because if they squinted hard enough, they could imagine the world was still turning. Even meaningless noise was preferable to silence.

This was the LOTUS Feed I grew up with: the jabbering ghost of a dead world, annoying but harmless.

Times have changed.

The ghost has become a demon, growling and spitting and fighting for possession. In between coded messages to Axiom operatives, the Feed spews dire warnings and aggressive recruitment ads, calling every able body to donate itself at the nearest branch. Zombie hordes and burning houses fade to smiling families safe behind concrete walls. Demure women clutching babies. Square-jawed men clutching guns. A surprising number of the diner’s patrons are watching this grim infomercial, but whether with interest or horror, it’s hard to tell.

I am relieved, at least, to see no recurrences of our wanted poster in the Feed. It seems Axiom has decided we’re no longer worth the airtime, no longer a threat worth worrying about.

Good.

“Lies Over Truth United States,” Gebre mutters. “How is anyone going to listen to an experimental civics lecture over all that noise?”

“They did,” Gael says, gesturing to us.

“That’s not the acronym,” Tomsen interjects.

“A joke,” Gebre says. “Who knows what it really means?”

“They listened, Gebre.”

“Old Gov never made it public,” Tomsen says, “but popular rumor is Lullaby Opiate Trauma and Urge Satisfaction.”

“Lady Ogle,” M mumbles, “Tits and Underwear…Show.”

“We listened, Gebre,” Julie says, cutting forcefully through all the cross-talk. “And there have to be more like us out there. And by the way”—she thrusts a hand out to our neighbors—“I’m Julie.”

“Hello, Julie,” Gebre says, shaking it.

“This is R, that’s Tomsen, and that’s Nora and Marcus.”

I smile. Tomsen waves. M nods. Nora stares.

“Pleasure to meet you,” Gael says. “Been a long time since we’ve heard any new names, hasn’t it, love?”

Gebre nods with a whimsical smile. “These days mostly just ‘hey you.’”

“So what brings you lot on the road?” Gael asks. “Fleeing New York, is it?”

Julie swallows the enormity of the understatement. “Um…yeah. You?”

Gael sighs. “We drove thousands of miles for a life in the big city and weren’t there a week before the hurricane hit. Not that we would’ve stayed long anyway.”

Gebre shakes his head ruefully. “The rumors made it sound so perfect.”

“Kudos to Axiom’s viral marketing department.”

“Where are you headed now?” Julie asks, her eyes filling with sudden inspiration. “If you’re going west, we could caravan!”

Gael shares a weighty look with Gebre. “We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“We’d slow you down. Going to be a wee bit scattered.” Gael’s eyes drop to his plate. “We’re looking for someone we lost.”

The cloud that gathers over him spreads to his husband and seems to shadow Julie as well, smothering her excitement. A reminder that people aren’t on these roads to meet new friends. A reminder that neither are we.

“Oh,” she says, sinking back into our booth. “Yeah. We lost a few too.”

A brief quaver as she rolls over the topic, like the bump of a body in the road.

“What’s your accent?” Nora blurts, staring at Gebre, and I realize how uncharacteristically quiet she’s been throughout this exchange. She watches the couple with an expression I can’t read.

“Boston,” Gebre says with a raised eyebrow. “By way of Somalia. Why?”

Nora shrugs, shakes her head, blinks several times.

There’s an awkwardly long silence. M squirms, then heaves himself out of the booth and stretches noisily, trying to bring the party to a close. And he’s right. A humming tension has crept into the air. It’s time to go.

Julie gives Gael and Gebre a deflated little wave as we all exit the booth. “Well…good luck, you guys.”

“You too, Julie,” Gael says with a sad smile.

“If you find your friend and you want to start that caravan, well…” There’s a subdued desperation in her eyes. “…keep an eye out for us?”

“Wild guess,” Gebre says, pointing out the window at the RV. “The yellow submarine is yours?”

“Her name is Barbara,” Tomsen says, a little defensively.

“Should not be hard to spot.” He smiles and flashes us all a peace sign. “Good luck, new friends. Maybe we see you in Utopia.”

We load the barrels of fryer oil onto the roof rack and stuff the RV’s fridge full of takeout boxes, then we’re rattling down the highway again. But despite the sunny start to this day, the bliss of breakfast and conversation with strangers, a heavy silence hangs over us. Everyone stares out the windows at the blur of passing hills, and I glance from face to face, trying to read their troubles. M’s I know. Nora’s I’m beginning to suspect. And Tomsen’s are too numerous to name. So I settle on Julie. I watch dark clouds pass across her face though the sky outside is blue. How many losses does she blame herself for? Has she added Sprout and my kids to her list? Did she count her mother twice? She’s convicted herself of so many crimes, maybe nothing less than saving the world will absolve her.

And then I have to wonder: if she sets the price that high for her tiny sins of omission…what could ever repay mine?

“What’s that?” Julie whispers, and for a horrifying second I wonder if I’ve been thinking aloud. But then I see it. A strange shape ahead. A twisted mass of metal slumped against the highway embankment.

A bus.

A New York City bus, its markings half-covered in faded decals…an ad for a show about sharks.

It’s the bus that took my children, and it’s lying on its side like roadkill, shattered and bent and crushed.

-

JOAN AND ALEX are not my offspring. They have none of my genetic material and I have never seen the woman who birthed them. I did not even raise them, never filled their heads with my words and ways like little Arks of the Covenant, commanding them to carry me forever. So I find it wondrous that I love them anyway. These tiny strangers who bumped into me in an airport, looked up at me and smiled. Like so much of love, this is a miracle. A small act of defiance against nature’s brutal physics.

And yet as I scramble up the side of the overturned bus and drop down through a shattered window, I find myself wondering how to switch it off. If I see what I’m afraid I’m about to see…do I really have to feel it too?

There are bodies in the bus. A man with a gut wound and a chunk of metal through his skull. A man with a bite on his leg, a gun in his hand, and a bullet in his head.

No one else.

A rush of warmth replaces my desperate calculations. I hop back down to my waiting friends. “Empty.”

“What happened?” Julie wonders.

“The kids,” I say, permitting myself a morbid smile at the thought of the guards’ wounds. “I think…they fought.”

“But where are they?”

M is walking the perimeter of the crash, scanning the ground with military focus. “Driver escaped.” He studies the debris on the pavement, the indentations in the grassy embankment. “Kids scattered.” He leans down, squints, touches the dirt. “Except…three. Group of three went together.”

“That’s them, right?” Julie says. “Joan, Alex, and Sprout? They would’ve stayed together.”

M follows the footprints—or whatever it is a tracker tracks—for a few yards, then stops. “Four now.” A faint note of anxiety enters his voice. “Another kid. Barefoot.”

Tomsen is still at the wheel of the RV and she idles along behind us as we follow M down the highway. The tracks lead up the embankment and stay there, as if ready to jump into the bushes at the first sign of pursuers. That had to be Sprout’s forethought. She must be leading them. But to where?

After about a mile, M traces the tracks onto a highway offshoot and stops. He looks into the distance, where the wilderness road becomes an urban arterial. “They went down there.”

“Highway One,” Nora murmurs. “That’s…” She turns abruptly and hops into the RV, and we follow her. “They’re going to DC.”

“DC was the Fire Church’s favorite target,” Tomsen says. “They were blasting away at it right up until the collapse. Been empty for years.”

“The kids don’t know that. They’re just trying to find people.” Nora drops into the passenger seat and slaps her thighs. “Let’s go.”

“Tomsen,” Julie says with a certain reluctance. “Is it empty? Or just exed?”

“Are you asking if there’s a hive? In a vacant city walking distance to a population center?”

Julie frowns. “Maybe…?”

“Is the sky gray? Is the Pope dead? Does a bear shit in the White House?”

“So that’s a yes.”

“Yes. There are many, many zombies in Washington Dead City.”

Julie looks at me. I look at the floor, my guts knotting.

Nora kicks the dashboard. “I said let’s go!”

The cold morning has matured into a full-boil summer afternoon. The sun hovers directly overhead, turning the RV into a barbecue, and I feel my skin getting slick with sweat. I should be thrilled to see my body resuming its Living functions—I am very nearly normal—but my concerns have moved outside of myself. All I can think about is Joan and Alex and tiny, worried Sprout wandering into town looking for adults to keep them safe, and finding a swarm of self-gratifying monsters instead. Are my kids at least still Dead enough to be ignored? Or will their hard-earned steps toward life be turned against them?

No one speaks as we travel up this dry artery into America’s stilled heart. Vine-choked suburbs give way to the beige boxes of retail, all bright colors long since bleached away, sidewalk trees and other caged flora baked to death by the hot concrete, advertisements faded to blue-hued ghosts of impossibly happy people, faint mouths grinning through the haze.

As far as I can see, the city is a silent tableau, and I begin to wonder if Tomsen’s information might be faulty. I see no signs of the super-hive she implied; it feels as empty as Detroit. I watch the windows of apartments blur past us, flashes of dark bedrooms, moldy kitchens, a face—I pull back with a grunt.

Sunken eyes follow me as we fly past. A man standing at his window, watching the street. And now that I know where to look, I start to see more of them. Not massed together like herds of animals. Huddled in their homes, watching their televisions or the street outside, as if awaiting news.

“Something’s different,” Tomsen says, squinting into the buildings around us. “Why aren’t they swarming? Hunting? I’ve never seen a hive like this.”

I remember a quaint neighborhood on the outskirts of Post. A cul-de-sac of crumbling houses. A quiet man named B, and hundreds of others like him, and I mumble:

“I have.”

As we enter the historic part of town, I begin to see more signs of the Fire Church’s efforts, but their work is oddly spotty. Individual buildings blackened, half a block here and there, but none of the scorched-earth devastation I remember. Perhaps the capitol put up more of a fight than the sad little towns they were used to. Not that it mattered in the end. The capitol is dead, all its grand endeavors erased, just like the Church promised. Whether by fire or subtler ruin, the point gets made.

But I wonder how their dogma has adapted to the Dead. What do they make of the aftermath of their work here, this booming population that’s not at all bothered by the loss of its comforts and not at all interested in the Church’s reasons for taking them? These people who simply are?

The density increases as we approach the city center and small swarms appear in the weedy lawns of various monuments. But even these are oddly subdued. Almost focused. They don’t shuffle around in vague orbits, waiting to detect human flesh. They stand and stare at the ground and even at the sky, that gaping mouth of an unknown god that’s always about to swallow them.

The knot in my gut begins to relax, warming with cautious hope. If this is the assembly that met the kids, they may have passed through freely. They may even have found friends.

“Last time I visited,” Tomsen says, “there was a steady flow of hunting parties going into Baltimore and the surrounding camps. They were stockpiling flesh. It was a busy place, almost industrialized.” She watches a woman standing alone in the Reflecting Pool, staring at its bone-dry bottom. “But this I don’t understand. No signs of feeding. They should all have starved to full-death.”

“Maybe the rules aren’t as rigid as we think,” Julie says, and glances at me.

We drive deeper into the white marble carnival of American pageantry. The sun blazes off Egyptian obelisks and Roman columns, an empire’s monuments to its invincibility built in the styles of fallen empires. The White House is now just a white house. Barely even that with its pillars and doorways scorched by the flames that gutted it. But I’m surprised the Fire Church wasn’t more thorough. Surprised they didn’t come back to finish the job once the government was gone. For a group seeking to scour the earth of its pretensions toward progress, there could be no bigger target than the very symbol of civic ambition. I see a few of their slogans graffitied on the walls, but they’re lost among the thousands of other tags, the disgust of an entire nation hurled like rotten fruit at the government’s face. Perhaps a pillory is exactly what Paul Bark had in mind when he chose to leave the place standing. A public humiliation instead of the usual obliteration, driving the point a little deeper: none of this is coming back.

“Where am I going?” Tomsen asks the rear view mirror. “Should I just drive down random streets until we run over the children? That will take a long time. Guidance welcome.”

No one offers any. A hush hangs over us as we tour this haunted city. Julie is looking at Nora like she wants to ask her something, but Nora is far away, staring through the windshield with blank, round eyes that don’t track the passing scenery. Their only movement is a barely perceptible twitching.

“14^th,” she blurts suddenly. Her voice is distant, like she’s transcribing a dream. “North on 14^th. Ten blocks. Then right on U Street.”

Tomsen takes the cue without question. We head north on 14^th.

M sits on the edge of the couch, watching Nora. She never looks back, so he watches the back of her head, looking into her cloud of curls as if searching for a ticking bomb. I’ve seen him weather countless mortal dangers with a stoic grimace. I’ve never seen real fear on his face. It frightens me.

WE

NORA GREENE has a strange way of reading.

We find her crouched in a dim aisle of the Library, books scattered at her feet. She picks one up, skims it, drops it, grabs another, throws it aside. Then she’s in another room, another hall, up on the ladder, down in the basement. She appears to be looking for something, but in fact she’s looking for nothing. She avoids fiction, music, poetry, art. She looks for magazines, textbooks, history, science. Things that will chat with her through the door without asking to come in.

But the uninvited guest keeps sneaking inside. She opens a volume of economic statistics and finds a feature about a family’s escape from a burning city. She flips through a book on human anatomy and finds a chapter titled “The Big Man.” She opens a travel magazine and finds a photo of a girl and a boy with a caption that says:

Find us.

Her scream echoes through endless halls, scribbling grief into the margins of every book.

“Nora,” Marcus says. “Can I ask you something?”

Blackened houses drift past like sinister temples. The fires traveled well in Little Ethiopia. Some buildings are reduced to mounds of charcoal, others are merely scorched, but no part of the neighborhood escaped untouched. Nora hears sirens. Helicopters. Police and firefighters drowned out by a voice booming over loudspeakers, warning her of what’s coming, urging her to accept it, let go, surrender to the peace of God’s plan. And a woman—a white woman with Nora’s brows, Nora’s jaw, Nora’s long legs—running through the streets shouting, Amen! Amen! Lord take us home!

“Nora?”

“What.” It comes out with difficulty. A feeling of choking.

“Your family…you said you didn’t have one. What’d you mean?”

She doesn’t answer. She watches the buildings get sootier as the RV approaches U Street and she hears a voice somewhere in the distance. Not the woman’s. A boy’s voice. Small and high and too far away to understand. But she knows it’s calling her.

“Where did you grow up?” Marcus asks. His tone is strangely insistent, and Nora feels anger coiling in her.

“Why?” she says with the bluntness of a crowbar. She sees the melted sign of Dukem Restaurant, where her parents first met. She sees the blasted entryway of the habesha grocery where her father used to work. She sees the pile of ash that was the community center where she spent so much of her childhood. “Here,” she says without looking at him. “I grew up here.”

She feels something pushing at the side of her vision, like a reel of film trying to overlap the one currently playing. She fights it. She feels Julie’s eyes on her, watching with mounting concern, and she opens her mouth for a joke or lighthearted quip to make everyone comfortable again, but she finds herself utterly empty of these things. She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes—a shadow reaches toward her—she opens them wide and begins to breathe hard.

“Nora?” Julie says.

The voice is closer. She can almost discern the words.

“ I didn’t really have a hometown,” Marcus says at a weirdly high volume, like he’s forcing a panicked shout into the tone of casual chit chat. “Dad was Navy. Moved every year, so not much chance to make friends. Just me and my brothers, town after town. Did you…” His voice cracks. He sounds terrified. “Did you have any siblings, Nora?”

R puts a hand on his shoulder and shakes his head, don’t. That strange, lanky ghoul and his gigantic friend. Tall man. Big man. Two corpses walking and talking, lives and deaths and new lives. Time doesn’t flow; it’s a solid mass. It’s here all at once, tripping over itself.

“Did you have a brother?” Marcus pleads, and R pulls him back, muttering admonitions.

But Nora doesn’t register the questions. She is listening to someone else. A voice that’s loud now but still unintelligible, like a scrambled radio signal. She is watching a burnt building grow nearer and she’s shrinking back against her seat. It looms ahead like a monster in a dream; she tries to run away but she can’t turn around; she floats forward, locked on a track.

She is standing in the dead grass outside the burnt building, staring up at its crumbled plaster frame, its bright green paint peeled and scorched, its windows empty and black. She hears people talking behind her, questions and warnings and urgent entreaties, but she doesn’t know these people. They are from a distant, unimaginable future, and a voice from right now is calling her.

She steps through the doorway of the apartment where she lives. Her boots crunch on the charred wood staircase and a few steps crack under her, but she ascends. She passes the doors of the neighbors she’s never met, a community of hunched shoulders disappearing around corners. She passes the window where she practices her aim, shooting BBs at birds in the birch across the street, hating her accuracy when they fall to the ground but telling herself it’s necessary, because sooner or later her parents will fail her, and she’ll have to take care of herself.

No. Not just herself.

She hears the voice, very close now, just behind the last door. She doesn’t want to go in. Her heart is pounding and she can’t catch her breath, but the door is open. She smells frankincense and coffee. The voice is sad and alone. It’s been waiting for her.

She steps into her family’s apartment.

There is a void sitting on the sofa.

She feels everything in her trying to run away, and yet she doesn’t run away. She wonders how this can be. If everything in her says run, what is left to say otherwise?

We are learning how to speak.

We can’t shout, but we can whisper. We can’t push, but we can nudge. We can slip truths between pages until finally she reads them.

Nora stands in front of the void and croaks a name.

“Addis?”

Her brother looks up at her. Her brother is here, sitting on the sofa.

Nora sways on her feet. Her vision blurs in and out. How? After all these years, how? It can’t be real. He can’t be here.

“Addis?” She stumbles closer. She reaches toward him. “Are you…”

She touches his cheek. His skin is cool, but he’s here. His eyes are strange, but he’s here.

“Addis, it’s me, it’s—”

It’s hard for her to speak. Her throat is full of warm water. “It’s Nora, your sister, do you…?”

She sees a distance in his gaze, not quite recognition. But he’s here. The hole in his shoulder that started this, the bite just above that finished it—both wounds are dry, and there is fresh blood smeared on his mouth, and Nora knows what all of that means. But he’s here. Perhaps not Living, but not gone. His yellow eyes regard her with curiosity…and something else. Some distant tremor of feeling.

It’s enough.

Nora collapses to her knees and embraces her brother. Sobs burst out of her in waves; tears stream from her closed eyes and soak her brother’s neck. If he bites her, so be it. If she joins him in whatever foggy limbo he inhabits, so be it. They will wander it together.

The boy’s name is Addis.

We draw lines between his scattered volumes, connecting them with his sister’s, and we smile. Two tiny parts of our vast body, a brother and a sister, severed and now reattached. The average temperature of the universe rises a degree.

“Addis, I’m sorry,” Nora sobs. “I’m so sorry.”

His arms are limp at his sides. His face is tight with confusion. But when Nora finally releases him, he stares into her eyes, frowning in concentration, and raises one hand. It trembles in the air for a moment, as if about to fall. Then it brushes Nora’s face.

We dwell in this moment for as long as we can, wrapping it around us like a warm blanket. Then, with great reluctance, we step back into the cold river of time.

Nora hears footsteps creaking on the staircase.

A chill rises in her spine and she stands up, wipes her eyes, steps in front of her brother.

The big man enters her home.

I

“M,” I HISS. “Don’t.”

He moves toward the scorched building like he’s being dragged. “Have to,” he mutters. “Have to be there… Have to explain.”

I look to Julie for help but she’s staring at the top window with a preoccupied frown. Tomsen is busy with her scooter, cranking it down from its rack to ready it for a tour of DC. Neither of them seem to share my concerns, and I can’t even define what they are. All I know is I don’t like the coldness in Nora’s eyes and I don’t like the fear in M’s, and I don’t want them anywhere near each other.

“Julie,” I say. “Is this Nora’s house?”

“I don’t know. She never talks about her childhood.”

“But I’ve heard you…”

“I know she grew up in DC and I know her parents abandoned her in Seattle, and that’s about it. Took me years to pry that much out.” She takes a step toward the building, then reconsiders. “She has this recurring nightmare about a wolf in a playground. It always makes her get weird for a while, but this…”

I grit my teeth as M climbs the steps to the entryway. “So she wants to be alone right now, right?”

Julie seems to wake up, just now realizing M’s intent. “Oh. Marcus! Yeah, definitely don’t go in there.”

He steps through the door and onto the staircase.

“Hey! You really don’t want to bother her when she’s like this.”

He disappears into the sooty blackness.

“Fucking idiot,” Julie says, throwing up her hands. “No idea what she sees in him.”

I run after my fucking idiot friend. At the top of the stairs, the floor is covered in a layer of dust so thick it’s almost soil. The sun pours through gaping holes in the burnt roof, painting golden bars on the clusters of moss and weeds. But a trail of footprints has destroyed much of this newborn landscape, and I don’t have to be a tracker to recognize these tracks: a woman and a man and four children.

I see my friend standing in the doorway. Over his shoulder, I see Nora. Her eyes are red. Wet. Round. And behind her: a small Dead boy who bears her a striking resemblance.

“No,” M whispers. “No, no.”

“You,” Nora says.

“Nora, I’m…”

“You,” Nora says.

“I’m so…sorry. Didn’t…remember. I’m so—”

A throaty scream rips out of Nora, a knot of grief and rage and confusion tangled and pulled tight.

She lunges at M.

He stumbles back into the hall and I hear the fleshy thumps of her fists slamming into him. Not the hooks and jabs of an honest fistfight, not clean punches to sturdy targets like the belly and the jaw—she hits him in dangerous places. The temples. The throat. The wounds she just finished stitching.

She is trying to kill him.

And I am paralyzed, because I don’t understand what’s happening. He is nearly twice her size and could fit both her fists in one gorilla palm, but his hands hang at his sides. He does nothing to stop or even soften her blows. And not because she is too weak to hurt him—she is hurting him. He gasps and chokes and reels backward, then finally collapses, but Nora doesn’t stop. She straddles his chest and pummels his face over and over, and the whole time he just looks at her, his dark red blood mixing with tears.

“Nora! Stop!”

Julie rushes up the stairs behind me and tackles her friend, knocking her onto the dusty floor. For a moment I’m certain Nora will attack Julie; her face is contorted and her bloody fist is cocked and I wrench myself free of my paralysis to intervene. But she regains just enough control to convert her punch into a violent shove. Julie tumbles off her and Nora jumps up, runs into the apartment, and emerges with the boy in tow. She lingers for just a moment over M, and I see the red mist clearing from her eyes, leaving a sort of numb horror. Then she rushes the boy down the steps like the building is still on fire, burning all these years and forever.

I hear Tomsen’s voice from outside. “You’re bloody. What happened? Who’s that? Is he Dead? He looks like you. Hey. What are you doing?”

I hear a small motor starting up, revving, fading into the distance.

Then I hear a voice from the apartment behind me, soft and scared. “Julie?”

Sprout stands huddled in the doorway. Joan and Alex are behind her.

Julie staggers to her feet and kneels in front of Sprout, breathing hard. “Are you okay?”

Sprout hesitates, then throws herself into Julie’s arms.

“Our friend,” Alex says, gazing sadly at the empty stairwell.

“She took our friend,” Joan says.

They come out into the hall and stand next to me, looking down at M. His right eye is already swelling shut. His left opens to a narrow crack, glistening with tears. He pulls in a shuddering breath and sits up.

I hug my children. They hug me back. They are warm.

I emerge from the building with M’s arm draped over my shoulder, keeping him balanced as he totters and sways, grimacing with each step.

“That’s why she was bloody,” Tomsen says, nodding as if this answers all her questions.

While Julie tends to the kids, I lower M onto the RV’s rear bed and gingerly lift his shirt. His wounds are inflamed and seeping blood, but most of the stitches are still in place.

“You okay?” I ask him in lieu of a medical examination.

He lets out a slow groan. Pain and regret and disgust. “Do you remember now?” he says. “The boy?”

I find a few glimpses of the boy’s face in my fog. A muted presence hovering behind my kids as they tried to redeem the airport, watching them tape photos to the windows in a childlike attempt to remind the Dead of life, observing but not quite participating in their noble arts and crafts.

And before that…faint flickers. A long walk. His hand held in bony fingers while grinning skulls taught him to kill.

“I remember a little.”

M rolls his head back and forth on the pillow. “I killed her brother.” His voice is choked, not just from the swelling in his throat. “Once I saw him…it all came back. Bright and loud.” He closes his eyes. “Wanted her to kill me. She deserved to.”

I watch Julie buckling the kids onto the couch. Their bus debacle gave them a few new cuts and bruises to go with the ones from the plane crash—all they need now is a shipwreck to complete their collection—but they appear mostly unhurt.

I hear Sprout asking about her father and Julie struggling to explain. Your father went looking for you and now he’s gone. Your father is lost and broken, and you are rapidly realizing it.

Unhurt? No. No one here is unhurt.

“I used to be Axiom Management,” I tell M, very softly. “I’m Mr. Atvist’s grandson.”

He says nothing, but even his swollen left eye widens a little.

“We’ve all been monsters. We’ve all toured Hell.” I give his good shoulder a slap. “But now we’re here.”

I return to the front.

“She went north on 16th,” Tomsen is telling Julie. “Probably toward 495 if she’s still sane.” She cocks her head. “Is she still sane? Looked like maybe not.”

Julie slips into the passenger seat and doesn’t answer. She looks back at me. “That was her brother, wasn’t it.”

I nod.

“And I’m guessing Marcus…?”

I nod.

“She never told me she had a brother.”

She stares through the windshield at the burnt wreckage of Nora’s home. Tomsen starts the engine and pulls onto 16th. A single tire track cuts through the ash on the pavement.

“I can’t say I know what she’s feeling right now,” Julie says, watching the trail veer from lane to lane, “but I know what it’s like when someone you buried comes back. It’s not a sane thing.”

The ash thins on the outskirts of town, but before the trail disappears, it shoots up the 495 onramp, heading west.

Julie’s voice drops to a whisper. “Where are you going, Nora?”

WE

OUR BOOKS CANNOT BE BURNED.

They can be lost, abandoned, taped up in boxes; their pages can be pulled out, scribbled on, crumpled up and tossed into dark corners; they can be locked in a vault and withheld from everyone, even their authors. But they cannot be burned. Wherever they are hidden, they remain there, their words unchangeable, waiting to be found and read again.

So Nora is writing a new draft to replace them. She is trapped in a house, surrounded by monsters, but this time she escapes unharmed. This time she kills the monsters. This time she saves her brother. She doesn’t wander for years, alone and adrift, looking for someone she can’t remember—a vague ache in her chest, a sourceless sadness that never leaves. This time her brother is with her, sitting on her lap, clinging to the handlebars of this sputtering scooter. He is not a void in a dream, a shadow playing in a sandbox while a lupine hellmouth opens up behind him. He is Addis.

According to calendars and math, Addis is fourteen years old, but he looks the same as the day she lost him. Seven years of resisting the plague’s rot, holding this impossible balance, and now here he is: a boy frozen in time. Nora wonders who he is inside. Did his mind halt, too? Is he still the fragile, good-hearted child she remembers? Or is he more?

It takes a long time for her thoughts to return to earth. She doesn’t know how many miles she’s traveled by the time she realizes she’s traveling. She is on a highway, pushing the scooter’s engine to its limit, but who is pursuing her?

Did she kill someone who cared about her? Did she abandon all her friends?

She buries these distressing thoughts—an ability she retains despite her recent exhumations—and focuses on the road. She is aware that she’s going west. Something important is waiting for her in the west. A task. A home. Some kind of future. Her present feels fragmentary, shattered and scattered by this explosion of memory, but it will come back to her. For now, she has only one concern, and he’s sitting on her lap, his dry, dusty hair like wool against her throat.

The whining engine makes talking to him impossible, but he seems calm, so she sets her questions aside and tries to follow his example. She tries to enjoy the feeling of the warm wind in her face, the pleasant tug on her scalp as her hair forms a parachute. She tries not to feel the pain in her knuckles or see the blood spattered on her clothes.

After a few hours, the engine begins to gasp. Nora forces herself to look down at the light that’s been blinking for a while and finds exactly what she feared: the tank is empty.

She pulls off on the next exit and feathers the throttle, coaxing as much distance as possible before the engine dies in a puff of fry-scented exhaust. Her boots hit the ground with a dry crunch. She looks up, hoping to find herself in a populated area with some possibility of help, but that would be too much luck. It’s one of those roadside blips that may or may not have a name. Inexplicable encampments floating in the vacuum between towns, a lone gas station surrounded by a few moldy houses; no industry, no schools, no fathomable reason to be here. A place where the end of civilization didn’t change a thing.

She helps Addis off the scooter and stands next to him, surveying the dusty ruins. “Well, Addy,” she says, “here we are again.” She laughs at the sound of her voice, the sound of her brother’s nickname filling the air after so many years in storage. “Just like the bad old days.”

He looks up at her with those unsettling yellow eyes. The same color as R’s and Julie’s during that moment of geysering hope when anything and everything seemed possible. The same color as the Gleam, which feels distant and imaginary now, though it was a fact of her daily life less than a month ago.

“Are you still you?” Nora asks him. “Do you remember anything?”

He doesn’t answer, but his stare isn’t blank. It’s not the gape of a mindless corpse; it’s the searching gaze of a philosopher. The same unquenchable curiosity she remembers, but the questions have gone internal.

“All right,” she says. “I see you thinking. Good enough for me.”

It bubbles up suddenly, an uncontainable joy. The absurdity. The impossibility. She is talking to her brother.

She starts wheeling the scooter toward the gas station, hoping for another miracle. Addis remains where she placed him, watching her walk away.

“You coming?” she says. “Or are you gonna stand there like a dumb-ass?”

He considers this like it’s a profound question, then he follows her.

The pumps look too dry to bother with but the repair garage is still locked, always a good sign. She kicks the glass out of the office door and opens it. Rows of dusty snacks; rock-hard chewing gum, disintegrating jerky, and neon orange chips that are probably still edible. Addis picks up a bag of Teddy Grahams and stares at the packaging, bleached silvery white by the sun. He tears it open. He looks inside. He pours its powdery contents onto the floor and drops the bag with a distant frown.

“Sorry Addy,” Nora says, fighting confused tears. “Snacks later.”

The garage is a scrapyard of rusty car parts and oily rags. She finds a barrel marked DIESEL, but a hard kick makes it ring like a gong. Of course it’s empty. Why would anything in this place be full?

She is preparing herself to face a grim reality—that they will have to either continue on foot or risk hitchhiking in a world trained to shoot her brother on sight—when she hears a noise. A distant snarl of tires on gravel. She experiences an emotional paradox:

My friends are here, and I’m terrified. I must get away from my friends.

She hides behind a stack of tires and watches the dust cloud approach. But it’s not her friends. It’s a boxy, armored bank truck hauling a horse trailer. She catches a glimpse of three young people as the truck rolls by: a woman and two men in their early twenties. She steps out of the garage and watches them drive the short distance to the edge of town, where they stop at a train crossing, turn around, and back the trailer up to the tracks.

She watches them climb out of the truck. The woman is thin and pretty, the men tall and handsome in their slim jeans and chambray shirts, trimmed beards and neat haircuts. They laugh and shove each other while the sun glows on their light tan skin and Nora thinks of beach parties and barbecues, mountain cabins and crowded campfires, a lush LOTUS vignette filling her with emptiness.

She takes Addis’s hand and rolls the scooter toward the truck. She stops at a safe distance and waits.

The youths all freeze when they see her, then the driver waves. “Hey there!” he says, flashing a big smile. “Didn’t expect to meet any friends way out here. Everything okay?”

She doesn’t answer. The man’s eyes dart to the blood on her hands for half a second but his smile doesn’t waver. “Need any help?”

Nora can’t find any answer except the truth. “Yes.”

During this exchange, the three youths have closed the gap she placed between them, subtly gliding into conversational range.

“What’s your name?” the woman asks with a warm smile. Either she’s a true natural beauty or she has a stash of makeup somewhere, because her face is creamy perfect like the models in old magazines.

Nora gives the woman her name without thinking about it. She is wondering what her own face looks like. She can’t remember the last time she saw a mirror. She wipes her hands on her pants, but the blood is dried. She touches her hair and finds a few leaves in it.

“Nice to meet you, Nora,” the woman says. “Is this your brother?”

Nora nods. “Addis.”

The woman bends down and leans on her knees. “Hi, Addis!”

Addis stares at her blankly.

The woman gives Nora a sad smile. “How long has Addis been Dead?”

Nora stiffens.

“It’s okay,” the driver says, holding out a hand as if to stop her from running. “We’re totally cool with the Dead. We welcome all kinds of people, wherever they’re at in life.”

“Anyone who’s willing to listen,” the woman says.

Nora looks from face to face. All three of them—even the man who hasn’t said a word—watch her with sincerity pouring from their eyes like there’s nothing in the world more important than befriending her.

“Who are you guys?” she says.

“We’re part of an outreach group,” the woman says. “We’re going across the country looking for people in need. Especially Dead people in need.”

“He’s not Dead,” Nora says.

“I’m so sorry,” the woman says with a wince. “Nearly Living? Is that the term he prefers?”

“We’ve heard all about the changes,” the driver adds hastily. “The ‘cure’? We respect that. We think it’s great. It’s a wonderful thing God’s chosen to do.”

“To bring the Dead back so they can witness the Last Sunset with us?” The woman closes her eyes. “Such a beautiful gesture of grace.”

Nora feels the impulse to recoil from their gooey enthusiasm, but she’s so exhausted, all she can manage is a skeptical squint. “So you’re like…missionaries? Out to convert the heathens?”

The driver laughs. “I guess you could put it that way if you wanted to. But we let God do the converting. What we’re really about is community.”

“Community,” Nora repeats.

“The world is fucked up, Nora.” He says it like he’s confiding an intimate fear. “And it’s only going to get worse. How do we respond to it? What’s our purpose in these last few days?”

“We believe it’s a test,” the woman says. “God’s showing us the emptiness and ugliness of the world because he wants to see if we have the courage to let it go. To abandon ourselves and let things fall apart…so he can scoop up the pieces.” She smiles.

“But it’s hard,” the driver says. “It’s confusing and painful, and that’s why we need our community. We need to gather together and support each other, because the world is full of traps.”

“False loves and false hopes,” the woman agrees.

“And no one should have to walk through it alone.”

Nora watches their beautiful faces straining with conviction. Her first instinct is to laugh at them, but something deeper inside moderates her response. “No offense,” she says, “but you guys sound kinda nuts.”

They laugh uproariously, even the quiet one.

“We get that a lot, Nora,” the driver says.

“Sorry if we come on too strong,” the woman says. “It’s just hard to play it cool with something you’re really passionate about, you know?”

Nora nods. “Right. So is your cult the kind where no one has names? All are one within the Community?”

“Oh shit!” the driver laughs. “Sorry, Nora. Got a little distracted there. I’m Peter.”

“Miriam,” the girl says as she and Peter take turns shaking Nora’s hand.

“And the guy who never talks?” Nora says, jutting her chin toward the taller man.

He smiles. “Sorry. I’m such an introvert.” He offers his hand. “I’m Lindh.”

“So Nora,” Peter says, “we’re not a cult, and we’re not trying to sell you anything. But you did say you needed help.”

Nora’s posture softens a little at this reminder.

“And please don’t take this the wrong way…” He looks her over, from her finger stump to her blood-spattered clothes to the dirt and sweat and scars that cover her body, and then to the ashen boy at her side. “…but you and Addis look like you’ve had a hard time out there. Like the world hasn’t been kind to you.”

Nora’s eyes fall to the ground. It’s an obvious statement and an understatement, but somehow, she has never really spoken it to herself. Never phrased it quite that way. She feels a sudden lump in her throat.

“If you need a place to go,” Miriam says softly, “well…you can come with us.”

“Where?” Nora mumbles.

“To our community in South Cascadia.”

Nora looks up.

“It looked like you were heading west anyway,” Peter says. “I’m guessing you ran out of fuel?”

Nora answers with silence.

“So why not ride with us? Check out our little town. Get some dinner and a hot shower and meet some great people. All we ask is that you keep an open mind.”

Nora stares hard at the three youths, but she finds nothing in their eyes but radiant sincerity. There’s a bang against the wall of the horse trailer and she seizes the disruption, trying to recover her footing. “So on top of being smooth-talking hipsters, you’re cowboys, too?” Her flippancy rings hollow in her ears, but she holds onto it. “Coolest cult ever.”

Three more bursts of laughter.

“I like her!” Peter says to Miriam, then turns back to Nora. “But no, I’m afraid we’re not that cool. Have a look.”

He gestures to the window slits along the side of the trailer.

Nora peeks through a window. Then she jumps back, gagging.

There are no horses in the horse trailer. Dozens of metallic gray eyes bulge at her in the shadows, and a stench far worse than horse shit smacks her in the face.

“What the fuck,” she says. “What the fuck.”

“Just people in need,” Miriam says. “Just like your brother. We find them out here, lost and confused, and we bring them home to our community.”

“What are you doing with them?” Nora watches the trailer rock on its squeaky hinges as the Dead stir from their standing sleep.

“We take care of them,” Peter says. “We give them a home and treat them with respect, until God reveals his plan for them.”

“We can help your brother,” Miriam says.

Nora instinctively grabs Addis’s hand, and Miriam’s demeanor adjusts.

“Nora,” she says, tilting her head with a look of deep empathy. “I know you just met us. We don’t expect you to trust us that quickly. But just so you know, in a few minutes a train will be pulling up to this station. We’re going to get on it with all these sick people, and we’re going to ride it all the way to South Cascadia. And if you want to, you can come with us.”

“Our community is two hours east of Post,” Peter says. “It’s a beautiful little town. We have everything we need there. And no pressure at all, but if you decide you want us to…we can help you take care of Addis. We can make a life for him.”

Nora’s feet are embedded in the ground. She looks at Addis, but his open face gives her nothing. She can’t tell if he knows they’re talking about him, or if he even understands a single word. The decision is hers.

In the silence of this hollow town, she hears the distant chug of a train. It’s a sound she hasn’t heard in a very long time, a storybook sound, and it makes her feel that she is dreaming. In this dream, she is stranded in a desert, and a magical mystery train is coming to take her away. In this dream, beautiful friendly people are offering her everything she needs. And outside the dream, people are pursuing her. People who have hurt her and people she has hurt. People whose faces will destroy her if she lets them get close again.

A speck appears on the tracks. Peter and Miriam and Lindh smile at her and wait.

Nora grabs her brother’s hand and closes her eyes. She will let the dream decide.

I

I REMEMBER what it felt like to set the fires. It felt good. All of us had grown up powerless, reminded over and over that we were dirty, broken dolls that should be grateful to be played with by God’s hand. We were to withdraw from the world, to barricade ourselves in our homes and wait patiently for God to pull the plug, and if we emerged it should be for one reason: to drag others in.

The fires changed everything.

We were no longer refugees; we were warriors. We had been a small circle of saints persecuted by the mob of the world, but it was remarkably easy to turn the tables. With the flick of a lighter, we could preach a sermon that no one could ignore. We could transform centuries of human endeavor into a blazing reminder of its futility. We didn’t have to wait for God’s timing; we could nudge him along, push him to do what we knew he wanted to do anyway, and it wasn’t pride, it was prayer. Every city we burned was an eloquent orison urging God to act. Our message was for Earth, but it was bright enough to be seen from Heaven: let it end.

It took only twelve of us to destroy Helena.

We had no fancy munitions then. No napalm or phosphorous grenades. We were just a few kids with Coke bottles full of gas and gym socks for fuses. We spread across the grid, positioning ourselves at the densest points, and when our watches beeped, we sprung. We tossed and ran, tossed and ran, pulling bottles from our backpacks like arrows from quivers, and by the time the first fires were called in, we had already set dozens. By the time the first trucks left the station, there were more fires than there were firefighters, and it was ludicrously too late.

I remember thinking how strange it was, that it should be this easy. We could have done it anytime. Anyone could have. All it took to crash the system was enough people deciding to do it.

I watch the last few razed houses fade into the distance as we leave DC behind. That’s who I was, then. A mad young man with a heart of hot coals, capable of winning minds and changing the world, but only for the worse.

Who am I now?

How much of that charred foundation is still under me, and can I use it for anything good? It’s much easier to burn a house than to build one.

I hear a groan from the back of the RV. M is sitting up, cradling his head and wincing at the floor like each heartbeat is a boot to the face. Julie glances over her shoulder at him.

“She packs a big punch in those skinny fists, doesn’t she? I learned my lesson the first time I tested her.”

Tomsen looks shocked. “Nora punched you?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Why would Nora punch you? I thought you were friends.”

Julie shrugs. “Sometimes friends punch each other.” She looks at the floor and a nostalgic smile creeps over her face. “That’s how we became friends, actually.”

“Is that usually how it happens?”

Julie chuckles, failing to notice Tomsen’s straight face. “I was out of my mind back then,” Julie says. “My boyfriend cheated on me and somehow that was Nora’s fault, this bitch who ‘stole’ my man, like he was an inanimate object. She didn’t even know me, the problem was between me and Perry, but I went running up to her room…” She shakes her head. “She tried to talk me down but I started swinging at her like the dramatic little kid I was…so she knocked me out. One punch.” She laughs and shakes her head. “When I woke up, she was sitting next to me holding some ice on my face. She shook my hand and said, ‘Hi, I’m Nora. You want some vodka?’ And that was it. Friends forever.”

Tomsen stares at her like she’s not speaking English.

“So Marcus,” Julie calls back to him as he stumbles toward the front, “try not to despair too hard, okay? These things find a way to work out.”

He looks at her blankly. “I ate her brother.”

Julie shrugs. “Yeah, well…not all of him.”

Abandoned farms rush past us on both sides. Most of them are just fields of baked dust, but a few of the more high-tech crops refuse to die with dignity. The highway plunges between two fields of “Mayze” brand corn and the stalks tower above us like trees, their bloated ears breaking off under their own weight and littering the ground like lumpy cysts. The gnarled trees of a Rad Delish orchard cling to their fruits long after they should have fallen, masses of mealy pulp wrapped in leathery skin, left to rot on their branches. Even the birds know to stay away.

I wonder if there are any crops left that were never redesigned by a board of directors, never stretched into transparency to fit the ballooning demands of population and profit. I wonder if these plants, with enough time and guidance, can find their way back and become food again, before the next generation starves.

I feel an eye on my cheek. Sprout is looking at me, a faint smile on her face, like she’s reading my thoughts and finding them funny. Joan and Alex watch me from the other side of the little fold-out table, and it occurs to me that the next generation is sitting right in front of me. It occurs to me that they are different from any before them, stronger and stranger, and there is no way they’ll give up their turn.

I release my anxious breath.

“Do you see it?” Sprout asks, looking past me into the twisted jungle of a Durapeach orchard.

“See what?”

“The train.”

I assume this is one of her “visions” and I follow her gaze mostly as a courtesy, but I’m surprised to see a flicker of movement behind the stooping trees. We emerge into another empty field and the trees sweep aside like a curtain, and there it is: four freight containers grinding along behind two silver passenger cars and a rusty green engine belching clouds of black smoke.

“We’re pretty far from people and this is probably just a reality vacillation,” Tomsen says, “but is anyone else seeing a train over there?”

The engine wears a fearsome mask over its front: a massive wedge of crudely welded steel, like an old locomotive’s cow catcher redesigned to catch bigger things: abandoned cars, blockades, and other modern obstructions.

“I see it,” Julie says, her eyes narrowing.

“Haven’t seen a train in years,” Tomsen says. “No commerce, no travel, no one coming or going. Rare enough to see cars.”

“It’s got to be Axiom,” Julie mutters. “Another load of beige jackets to dump on Post.”

“Or…” Tomsen says, shooting Julie an uneasy glance. “Could be specimens.”

Julie’s eyes widen slowly, filling with hope and fear. “Follow it.”

Tomsen hits the gas and Barbara lurches forward, sending the kids’ water cups tumbling off the table. The cabinets rattle and clang, the tires roar and the whole vehicle begins to wobble dangerously, but the train continues to pull ahead of us. Then we’re surrounded by alien crops again. The splotchy gray jungle obscures our view for several miles, and when we finally emerge into daylight, the train is gone.

“No, no, no,” Julie growls, eyes darting. “Tomsen, can’t this thing go any—”

“Do you hear that tinkly chattering?” Tomsen shouts over the cacophony. “Those are dishes. This is a house. Don’t ask if a house can go faster.”

Julie grits her teeth and waits, diverting her anxiety into her white-knuckled grip on her armrests. And then she springs forward. “There!”

She’s pointing at a small cluster of buildings on the rippling horizon. A plume of smoke drifts up from behind them.

“They must be making a stop in that town. Pull off!”

Tomsen takes the next offramp and we bounce and sway into the sad little rest stop of a town. But the smoke is already moving again, and we reach the tracks just in time to see the train dwindling into the distance.

Tomsen slams the RV into park with an air of finality. “We can’t catch them,” she announces.

Julie digs her fingers into the dashboard, but she doesn’t argue. We are silent, watching the black cloud disperse into the atmosphere. Then Julie jumps to her feet. “Is that…?”

She shoves the door open and runs to the railroad crossing. M and I follow her.

Nora’s scooter is parked next to the tracks. The dust shows two sets of footprints walking away: boots and bare feet. They reach the rails and disappear.

“She got on the train,” Julie says, mystified.

M is examining the scooter, putting his face near the ground and scanning the dust for signs of struggle, sniffing for blood, perhaps dragging whatever’s left of his Dead senses back into service. But Julie stops him with a tap on the shoulder.

“Marcus,” she says, and presses the scooter’s gas cap into his palm. “I think she went willingly.”

M stares at the cap, then the empty tank. “So it wasn’t Axiom, then.”

Julie shakes her head. “Even if she had a full nervous breakdown, I can’t see her doing that.”

“Then who?”

I run my eyes down the tracks to where they disappear in the distant mountains. I feel a brand-new anxiety begin to knot my guts.

“Tomsen,” Julie says while our driver loads the scooter back onto its rack. “Do you know where these tracks go?”

“East-west. Maybe a few squiggles.”

“So if we keep following them, we’ll end up somewhere near Post?”

“Close enough. Assuming we pass through the Midwaste undigested.”

No one questions this last comment, so I assume it’s just another colorful Tomsenism and let it go.

“Fire up the fryer,” M grunts, hopping back into the RV. “Let’s move.”

With a roar and a rattle we cruise back to the highway and follow the tracks west. The train’s smoke lingers like a bad memory, staining the horizon black.