was making some wild leaps—but I wasn’t sure he was wrong about our parents. If they possessed these powers, did that mean Cairo and I had inherited them?
My mind was full of so many things, too many for me to discuss them with my brother before our friends returned and we were once again surrounded by other voices, other thoughts. So I said the most important thing first: “I shouldn’t have turned on you like that last night, Cairo. I’m really sorry.”
“Thanks for saying that. But I mean it, Ravenna. I get why you didn’t believe me. Why you were angry. You thought I was leaving you, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“No such luck.” My brother grinned at me over the rim of his paper coffee cup. “No matter how weird it gets from now on . . . we’re in it together.”
“Mississippi?” Sally asks, tucking dirty-blond hair behind her ears.
Margie shrugs and fiddles with pages, swollen after getting wet in the rain. “Too hot right now. Besides, we’ll be coming from the west here, under Canada. That’s where we left off planning yesterday.”
“Page fifty-seven, then,” Sally says, leaning her elbows on the table.
Margie rolls her eyes as she flips through, letting the atlas open almost on its own volition. “You know, I really don’t get your fascination with West Virginia.”
“It looks pretty,” Sally says, tracing her small fingers around the counties.
Neither girl has been there. Neither knows anything about it other than the contours on the map and the teaser entries from the guidebooks stacked along the front wall under the window.
Margie pulls the light closer and checks over her shoulder outside. It’s full dusk, the summer days stretching late and dying slow. Greasy smoke chokes up from the lantern—almost all their oil is dirty, and dark patches stain the ceiling over the kitchen table from their evenings cramped over the atlas.
“So maybe we come in on the interstate here,” Sally says, “but I think it would be more fun if we did the smaller roads after that. More scenic and probably less crowded.”
Margie pushes a notebook across the table, sifting through the pages until she finds where they’d left off the night before. “You start writing it all down, Sal. I’m just going to check outside real quick.”
Sally looks up at her sister then. It’s almost silent in the cabin, just the sputter of the flame and the two girls breathing. “Why?”
“One last sweep before bed.” Margie tries to keep her voice from fluttering.
“You already did the last sweep,” Sally points out. A sliver of hair hangs limp and heavy across the side of her face, throwing her eyes into shadow.
Margie doesn’t want to tell her that something outside keeps making her look up. It’s the feeling on the back of her neck, like the tension before a thunderstorm—that quality of light spreading a sense of dread somewhere in your body left over from before humanity knew such things as language and science.
“Here.” Margie squats by the small stack of books against the wall and flips through for the right one. “You figure out where you want to stop for dinner and if there’s any sightseeing you want to do. Plan it all out, and I’ll be right back.” Margie sets the Visitor’s Guide to West Virginia on the table and picks up the shotgun before stepping outside.
When she looks back, her little sister still kneels on the bench by the table. Her finger’s stuck on that map, pointing at something too far away, which probably doesn’t exist anymore anyway.
Margie never mentions to Sally that sometimes she just has to get away from the tightness of it all. In the beginning, just after the change time, she’d hated the outside, hated to leave the comfort of four walls and a roof, but now it makes her feel trapped. She’s always judging the escape routes, figuring distance and the time it would take to cover it.
Their newest cabin sits on top of a mountain that’s steep enough to keep the monsters away. There’s a deep well, a gun cabinet stashed with crates of ammunition, a cistern of fuel oil, and a pantry brimming with canned food—enough to make Margie think that perhaps they have a shot at surviving all of this so long as it’s just the two of them. They’ve lived here for most of the summer, so that now the fear’s just a low humming noise in the background, like the sound of bees around a blackberry patch.
The first thing she did after Sally and she moved in, other than tossing the bodies over the cliff, was cut down all the rhododendron and laurel. She piled it in a circle partway down the mountain and in the gaps she strung old cans and bottles on twine to rattle if anyone—living or dead—came near.
That’s why it doesn’t make sense that something could be moving around outside. That’s why she’s jittery and pre-lightning-strike aware. If someone’s on their mountain, it’s not one of the monsters, and too often it’s the living that end up being worse than the dead. She’s seen it before when the bandits have come claiming supplies and people and shelter as their own. There’s not enough safety in this new world, and too many people are willing to take what little they can find at any cost.
“I know you’re out there,” she calls, her fingers curled around the gun, holding it tight to her shoulder. She’s lying—she doesn’t know that anyone’s really out there at all. She figures that if it’s somehow a monster, he’s already smelled her, so shouting won’t give her away, and if it isn’t a monster then she may as well have been shouting at the stars.
No one answers, which doesn’t surprise her.
“I’ve got the place trapped,” she calls out again. “You try coming inside and you might as well go blow your own head off.”
Another lie—but nothing whoever or whatever is out there needs to know.
“Find anything?” Sally asks when Margie gets back inside.
“Skunk,” Margie mutters. “Don’t go out there stumbling around until I find him,” Margie warns. “We don’t need to smell things up again.”
Sally crinkles her nose. Dirt mingles indistinguishably with freckles along the bridge. She yawns, long and loud.
“Bedtime,” Margie says, pushing Sally toward the rope ladder up to the loft.
Once they’re both curled up on the wide bed with just a sheet pulled over them, Margie says, “Tell me about this trip we’re taking through West Virginia.”
“There’s this place there called the Paw Paw Tunnel—it took them more than a decade to dig,” Sally starts to tell her. “First we’ll have to stop by the town and eat at this place on a hill called Panorama at the Peak. It’ll be a long walk from there to the tunnel, but the travel book says it’s a must if you’re visiting the area.”
Margie closes her eyes. Her little sister smells like sweat and unwashed hair, but it’s a sweet smell, familiar and steadying. Margie tries to sleep—she wants to sleep—but instead she just counts heartbeats. Outside it begins to rain, thunder tripping through the valleys around them. Sally’s breathing falls into a steady rhythm, and in between lightning strikes all Margie can think about is someone being outside. Right now. Watching their little cabin.
She sneaks back down the ladder and crouches by the window, looking out at the clearing surrounding the house. Rain courses from the sky—a