White Horse

ONE

When I wake, the world is still gone. Only fragments remain. Pieces of places and people who were once whole. On the other side of the window, the landscape is a violent green, the kind you used to see on a flat-screen television in a watering hole disguised as a restaurant. Too green. Dense gray clouds banished the sun weeks ago, forcing her to watch us die through a warped, wet lens.

There are stories told among pockets of survivors that rains have come to the Sahara, that green now sprinkles the endless brown, that the British Isles are drowning. Nature is rebuilding with her own set of plans. Man has no say.

It’s a month until my thirty-first birthday. I am eighteen months older than I was when the disease struck. Twelve months older than when war first pummeled the globe. Somewhere in between then and now, geology went crazy and drove the weather to schizophrenia. No surprise when you look at why we were fighting. Nineteen months have passed since I first saw the jar.

I’m in a farmhouse on what used to be a farm somewhere in what used to be Italy. This is not the country where gleeful tourists toss coins into the Trevi Fountain, nor do people flock to the Holy See anymore. Oh, at first they rushed in like sickle cells forced through a vein, thick, clotted masses aboard trains and planes, toting their life savings, willing to give it all to the church for a shot at salvation. Now their corpses litter the streets of Vatican City and spill into Rome. They no longer ease their hands into La Bocca della Verità and hold their breath while they whisper a pretty lie they’ve convinced themselves is real: that a cure-all is coming any day now; that a band of scientists hidden away in some mountaintop have a vaccine that can rebuild us; that God is moments away from sending in His troops on some holy lifesaving mission; that we will be saved.

Raised voices trickle through the walls, reminding me that while I’m alone in the world, I’m not alone here.

“It’s the salt.”

“It’s not the fucking salt.”

There’s the dull thud of a fist striking wood.

“I’m telling you, it’s the salt.”

I do a mental tally of my belongings as the voices battle: backpack, boots, waterproof coat, a toy monkey, and inside a plastic sleeve: a useless passport and a letter I’m too chicken to read. This is all I have here in this ramshackle room. Its squalor is from before the end, I’ve decided. Poor housekeeping; not enough money for maintenance.

“If it’s not the salt, what is it?”

“High-fructose corn syrup,” the other voice says, with the superior tone of one convinced he’s right. Maybe he is. Who knows anymore?

“Ha. That doesn’t explain Africa. They don’t eat sweets in Timbuktu. That’s why they’re all potbelly skinny.”

“Salt, corn syrup, what does it matter?” I ask the walls, but they’re short on answers.

There’s movement behind me. I turn to see Lisa No-last-name filling the doorway, although there is less of her to fill it than there was a week ago when I arrived. She’s younger than me by ten years. English, from one of those towns that ends in -shire. The daughter of one of the men in the next room, the niece of the other.

“It doesn’t matter what caused the disease. Not now.” She looks at me through feverish eyes; it’s a trick: Lisa has been blind since birth. “Does it?”

My time is running out; I have a ferry to catch if I’m to make it to Greece.

I crouch, hoist my backpack onto my shoulders. They’re thinner now, too. In the dusty mirror on the wall, the bones slice through my thin T-shirt.

“Not really,” I tell her. When the first tear rolls down her cheek, I give her what I have left, which amounts to a hug and a gentle stroke of her brittle hair.

I never knew my steel bones until the jar.

The godforsaken jar.

My apartment is a modern-day fortress. Locks, chains, and inside a code I have three chances to get right, otherwise the cavalry charges in, demanding to know if I am who I say I am. All of this is set into a flimsy wooden frame.

Eleven hours cleaning floors and toilets and emptying trash in hermetic space. Eleven hours exchanging one-sided small talk with mice. Now my eyes burn from the day, and I long to pluck them from their sockets and rinse them clean.

When the door swings open, I know. At first I think it’s the red answering machine light winking at me from the kitchen. But no, it’s more. The air is alien like something wandered freely in this space during my absence, touching what’s mine without leaving a mark.

Golden light floods the living room almost as soon as my fingers touch the switch. My eyes blink until they summon ample lubricative tears to provide a buffer. My pupils contract just like they’re supposed to, and finally I can walk into the light without tripping.

They say it’s not paranoia if someone is really out to get you. There is no prickle on the back of my neck telling me to watch out behind me, but I’m right about the air: it has been parted in my absence and something placed inside.

A jar.

Not the kind that holds sour dill pickles that crunch between your teeth and fill your head with echoes. This looks like a museum piece, pottery, older than this city—so says the grime ground into its pores. And that ancient thing fills my apartment with the feel of things long buried.

I could examine the jar, lift it from the floor and move it away from here. But some things, once touched, can never be untouched. I am a product of every B movie I’ve ever seen, every superstition I’ve ever heard, every tale old wives have told.

I should examine the jar, but my fingers refuse to move, protecting me from the what-if. They reach for the phone instead.

The super picks up on the eighth ring. When I ask if he let someone into my place, his mind goes on walkabout. An eternity passes. During that time I imagine him clawing at his balls, out of habit more than anything else, while he performs a mental tally of the beer still left in the fridge.

“No,” he says, eventually. “Something get stolen?”

“No.”

“What’s the problem, then?”

I hang up. Count to ten. When I turn the jar is still there, centered perfectly in my living room between the couch and television.

The security company is next on my list. No, they tell me. We’ve got no record of anyone entering apartment thirteen-oh-four.

“What about five minutes ago?”

Silence. Then: “We’ve got that. Do you need us to send someone out?”

The police give me more of the same. Nobody breaks in and leaves things. It must be a gift from a secret admirer. Or maybe I’m crazy; they’re not above suggesting that, but they use polite, hollow words designed to make me feel okay about hanging up the phone.

Then I remember the answering machine’s blinking light. When I press Playback, my mother’s voice booms from the speaker.

“Zoe? Zoe? Are you there?” There’s a pause; then: “No, honey, it’s the machine.” Another pause. “What—I am leaving a message. What do you mean, ‘Talk louder’?” There’s playful slapping in the background as she shoos my father away. “Your sister called. She said there’s someone she wants you to meet.” Her voice drops to a whisper that’s anything but discreet. “I think it’s a man. Anyway, I just thought you could call her. Come over for dinner Saturday and you can tell me all about him. Just us girls.” Another pause. “Oh, and you of course. You’re almost a girl,” she tells Dad. I can picture him laughing good-naturedly in the background. “Sweetie, call me. I’d try your cell phone, but you know me: ever hopeful that you’re on a date.”

Normally, I feel a small flash of anger in my chest when she calls to match make. But today…

I wish my mom were here. Because that jar isn’t mine.

Someone has been in my space.

The human body is a wondrous thing. It’s an acid manufacturing plant capable of transforming simple food into a hot burning mess.

I vomit a lot now. I’m great at it. I can lean forward just right and miss my boots completely. If the world wasn’t gone, I could go to the Olympics.

As soon as breakfast comes up, I poke down an apple. It takes.

“Do you have to go?” Lisa asks. She’s chewing her bottom lip, working the delicate skin into a pulpy mass.

“I have to get to Brindisi.”

We’re standing in the farmhouse’s yard, encapsulated in a constant damp mist. Plush moss springs from pale stones that make up the house’s exterior walls. My bicycle is leaning against a long-abandoned water pump. Somewhere along the way, the owners had resources enough to reroute the plumbing and enter the twentieth century, but they left the pump for charm or lack of caring. The bicycle is blue and not originally mine. No money changed hands. It was purchased for the paltry sum of a kiss outside Aeroporto Leonardo da Vinci di Fiumicino. No tongue. Just the surprising taste of tenderness from a Norwegian man who didn’t want to die without one last embrace.

“Please,” Lisa says. “Stay.”

“I can’t.” There’s a tightness in my chest from the mountains of regret heaped upon it. I like her. I really do. She’s a sweet kid who once dreamed of nice things. Now the best she can hope for is survival. Thriving is not an option and it may never be.

“Please. It’s nice having another woman here. It’s better.”

Then it strikes me, the note of desperation in her voice. She does not want to be left here alone with these men. They should be bound to protect family, and they do. But shared blood isn’t the only reason: I suddenly realize they see her as a possession. A way to while away the hours until humanity draws its last ragged breath. I should have sensed it sooner, but I was so bound to my own agenda that I failed to look beyond my borders.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know. I should have, but I didn’t.”

A pale pink flush creeps over her fair skin: I’ve guessed her secret. Although she can’t see me, I glance away to give her a moment to recoup. My cheeks buzz with shame.

The silence lasts long enough for the precipitation to congeal into raindrops.

“You can’t stay any more than I can. Come with me.”

I should regret the words, but I don’t. If she agrees, it will add who knows how many days to my journey. Time is a luxury when you can’t see what’s left in the hourglass. But with humanity limping along as it is, kindness is rare. I have to hold on to what makes me human.

“Really? You’d let me go with you?”

“I insist.”

Her neck pops as she jerks her chin over one shoulder, back at the house.

“They won’t let me go. They’ll never allow it.”

What did they do to you, baby girl? I want to ask. Whatever she says, it won’t affect my decision anyway: she’s coming with me.

“Go up to your room and get your things. Make sure you’ve got something comfortable and warm to wear.”

“But—” I can see she’s still worried about the men.

“I’ll take care of it.”

We go inside together, and in the abrupt shelter we luxuriate for a moment. It feels good not to be rained on. Then we nod and she inches up the stairs while I make for the kitchen.

As far as kitchens go—and I’ve known few—this one is lean. Not an efficient leanness, but the too-thinness of a woman who fights to maintain an unnatural weight. The room has sag; I can see where things should go if one had the inclination to decorate or a love for cooking. It yearns to be filled with a family.

Only one man is present: Lisa’s uncle. His skin is filled to capacity and oozes over the chair’s borders. It’s a sturdy piece of furniture probably many generations old. The wood is dark from time, and the seat is some kind of thick wicker with a honeyed sheen. The chair has seven empty siblings.

The big guy glances up, scans me for weaknesses he can exploit. My breath catches as I pull my shoulders back and push my chin forward, trying to look as strong as my body will allow. He finds nothing he can take without considerable effort and goes back to chewing on the bread I made two days ago after I picked the weevils from the pantry’s ample flour supply. Crumbs fly from his mouth, spraying the table with damp flecks that will harden and stick if they’re not wiped down soon. Neither Lisa nor I will be here to do it. These men will be wallowing in their own filth in no time.

“Lisa’s coming with me.”

He grunts, swallows, fixes his beady eyes on me. Raisins pressed deep into dough.

“She stays.”

“It wasn’t a question.”

His bulk gathers like an impending storm as he heaves himself from the chair.

“We’re her family.”

This can’t go anyplace good. A cold spot the size of a quarter forms on the back of my neck and spreads until I’m chilled all over. What was I thinking? He’s bigger than me. Morbidly obese and slow, true, but large enough that if he gets me on the ground, I’m screwed.

We stare each other down. If we were dogs, someone would be betting on him, impressed by his sheer size.

A sharp shriek tears the artificial calm. Upstairs. Lisa. For a second I tune out, my attention latching onto the strange silence that always follows a scream.

The fat man lunges for me. Lisa is in trouble, but right now I am, too.

I feint left, dive right. He’s like a crash test vehicle hitting the wall, plaster dust forming a white halo around his body. It takes him a moment to recover. He shakes his head to clear the pain fog, then comes at me again.

Again I manage to dodge him. Now we’re staring each other down across the width of the table. Just a few feet between us. No weapons in sight. Lisa is a tidy housekeeper, and though this isn’t her home, just one they stumbled across the same way I did, everything is in its place.

Another scream. This one drifts like dandelion fluff.

Inside my chest, my heart hurls itself at its bone prison. It knows her father is up there with her and it knows what’s happening.

“I’m going to her,” I say. “And if you try and stop me, you’re a dead man.”

He laughs. His jowls wobble and shudder.

“When he’s done fucking her, we’re going to take turns fucking you, bitch.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t try sooner.”

He holds up both palms. “What can I say, love? We like lamb, not mutton.”

It’s my turn to laugh, only mine is bitter and dry.

“What, bitch? What’s so fucking funny? Share the joke.”

I inch down the table toward the open doorway. On the other side of this wall there’s an umbrella stand. What’s in there is useless for keeping a body dry, but the pointed end could still easily put out an eye.

“Did I ever tell you what I did for a living before all this?”

He grunts. Follows me down the table until we’re both at the blunted edge.

“Some kind of lab rat.”

I nod. Something like that. “I’ve done a lot of lifting, so I’m pretty strong for a skinny woman. What have you done besides shift gears in your truck and swing a glass of Guinness?” There’s less strength in my body now than there was before the world ended, but my survival instincts have brought me this far. I make a break for it but I miscalculate: his reach is longer than mine. His arm snaps out. Fat grasping fingers coil themselves around my ponytail. He jerks me backwards and pulls me against him until his gut is a stuffed IHOP pancake bulging against my back. A triangle forms around my neck and tightens. Chest, humerus, ulna.

Usually when I long for the past, I dream of meals in chain restaurants where they serve the exact same dish every time. I dream of how it feels to be dry, or how my skin tingled when I stood too long in a too-hot shower. But now? High heels. Stilettos. With a four-inch metal rod keeping the heels straight and true. Because my captor has socked feet and it would take nothing to drive my fashionable weapon right between his metatarsals.

I’m wearing boots with a thick sole made for walking, but he’s six-foot-something and I have to exaggerate to see five-five, which means my heels aren’t going to do much besides grind his toes. It’s not enough.

“I win,” he says.

Maybe he’s right, but the game isn’t over yet. There’s more than just me at stake.

“When was the last time you saw your own dick?” My voice thickens as the arm tightens at my throat. He’s pulling me closer and higher. My heels are rising off the ground. There’s a whisper of rubber against tile as my feet flail to seek stability. “Can you hold it to piss or do you sit like a woman?”

“Fuck you.”

“Please. Fat guys like you can’t get a hard-on.”

Dark spots obscure my vision. It’s morning but my daylight is fading fast. Lisa is sobbing now between the screams.

There’s more strength in him than first appears. Adipose overlays significant muscle mass; the perfect camouflage. My toes leave the ground.

Everything that follows happens in an instant.

My chin drops and I sink my teeth into his forearm. The enamel slices through the tissue and scrapes bone. I draw my knees up so when he drops me and lets out a roar that comes all the way from his scrotum, my weight falls like the sparkly ball on New Year’s Eve and my boots crush his feet. A gasp shoots from my throat as I fall forward onto my knees. Impact pains set my shins on fire. My opponent recovers long enough to deliver a swift kick to my backside with his damaged foot. Warm copper with a hint of iron floods my mouth. I scramble to my feet, dart sideways, arm held protectively over my stomach.

Without a thought in my head besides survival, I reach for a chair. It’s lighter than its mellowed wood would suggest. Or maybe not. In times of need, the human body can conduct amazing feats. I know this because That’s Incredible! told me. And Cathy Lee Crosby had a face an eight-year-old could trust.

White bone gleams through the skin as I lock my hands into place on the chair’s back. He’s English, which means he understands little about my national sport. This chair is my bat and his face is the ball. Baseball on steroids.

He comes for me and I swing. There’s a sharp crack as his face shatters. Wet droplets of blood splatter my shirt and face: a mosquito’s wet dream. Broken teeth crumble from his sagging mouth, and he falls. He is a mountain of flesh conquered by a woman holding a chair. The wood slips from my hands as I stagger into the hall and mount the stairs.

I get his name from a friend of a friend’s sister.

“Oh my God, you have to call him. He’s the best,” my friend says with the exaggerated enthusiasm of one passing on thirdhand news.

Nick Rose. He sounds like a carpenter, not someone who listens to problems for a crippling fee. A woodworker. Someone average. I can do that. I can talk to someone regular. Because normally when I think about a therapist I imagine an austere Sigmund Freud looking for links between my quirks and my feelings about my mother. My relationship with my mother is just fine, although I haven’t yet returned her call or contacted my sister like she asked.

What would Freud make of that? What would Dr. Nick Rose?

I make the call out on the street from my cell phone. The city is in full tilt. Horns are the spice sprinkled over relentless traffic. Bodies form an organic conveyor belt constantly grinding along the sidewalks. Out here my words will be lost, but that’s what I want. I’m a rational woman but the jar’s arrival has me questioning my grip on reality. And deep down inside me, in the vault where I keep my fears carefully separated and wrapped in positive thoughts, I get the crazy notion that the jar will know.

So I stand outside on a corner, cup my hand over the phone’s mouthpiece, and dial.

A man answers. I expected a female assistant and I tell him so and immediately feel a jab of guilt for stereotyping my own sex. Some feminist I am.

He laughs. “It’s just me. I like to talk to potential clients. It gives both of us a feel for each other.”

Clients. Not patients. My shoulders slump and I realize how taut my body has been holding itself. Dr. Nick Rose’s voice is warm and bold like good coffee. He laughs like someone who is well practiced in the art.

I want to hear it again, so I say, “Just so we’re clear, I don’t secretly want to have sex with either of my parents.”

Another laugh is my reward. Despite my reservations, I smile into the phone.

“Me either,” Dr. Rose tells me. “I worked through that in college just to make sure. It was touch and go for a while, especially when my father kept asking me if he looked pretty.”

We laugh some more. My tension is rendered butter melting away from my psyche. And at the end he tells me that Friday afternoons are all mine if I’ll have him.

When we hang up, I am light-footed. The mere act of procuring a therapist has done wonders for me already. Friday. It’s Tuesday now. That gives me three days to fabricate a story about the jar. A dream, maybe. Psychologists love dreams. Because I can’t tell him the truth and I can’t explain why because I don’t know. The answer isn’t there yet. I don’t want him to think I’m crazy, because I’m not. Desperate is what I am. Quietly desperate and insatiably curious.

I follow the routine: unlock, unlock, open, close, lock, lock, chain, security code. The blinking light on the panel glows green, just like it’s supposed to.

The jar is waiting.

Lisa’s whimpers come from her bedroom. I say her bedroom; but who knows who it really belongs to. Whoever was here before shook all their personal belongings into suitcases, or maybe boxes, and fled. So I call it Lisa’s room, although it won’t be for much longer. Not if I can help it.

Left at the top of the stairs. Second right. Through the open door.

What’s left of her family is in there with her.

Her father is a leaner man than his brother, younger by a handful of years, although from this angle I can’t see his face. His ass is a glowing white moon with a pale slash of hair dividing the hemispheres.

Beneath him, Lisa is pressed into the bed facedown. She’s past struggling, resigned to her place in the family hierarchy. A crude puppet impaled by her puppet master, hunching the bed herky-jerky with his every thrust.

Disgust is lava and pyroclastic ash erupting from my pores. A small cry is all the warning he gets as I race forward and grab his testicles mid-slap. Before our world ended, I was never one for manicures and pedicures. A stranger flicking a file across my feet would only make me squeal as the nerve endings danced. Hangnails frame my fingertips still. White dots are albino freckles on my nails. The edges are ragged where I’ve lain awake and nibbled while I rifled through my thoughts. All of this adds up to the one time a man doesn’t want a woman’s hand on his balls. My nails are pincers sinking into the delicate skin..

I expect him to shriek, but he doesn’t. There’s one last ripple of his ass and he stops cold as though he’s awaiting my instructions.

“Get off her.”

His voice is husky from the grunting. “I’m sorry.”

“Not me. Pull out and tell her that.”

He eases out. His erection withers until it’s a limp shoestring dangling in the air.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats.

“Lisa,” I snap. “Get up and get your things.” I wish my words could be gentle, but that won’t get her up and moving and out of here.

There’s a moment’s hesitation, then she pushes her body off the bed. She tugs up her jeans and fastens them without lifting her chin. This is not your shame, I want to tell her. It’s him. All him. But now is not the time.

“Lisa’s part of my family now,” I tell the man who created half of what she is. “We’re leaving.”

He’s a chipped and damaged record. “I’m sorry.”

When I release him, he remains frozen. His shoulders shake and it occurs to me he’s crying. I kneel beside him as his daughter gathers her things and crams them into a backpack the same size as mine. My hand comes to roost on his shoulder and I am shocked at myself because I know I’m about to comfort a rapist.

“We don’t have to be monsters. We still get to choose.”

“I have urges.”

“She’s your daughter.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We’re leaving now. Lisa?”

She shakes her head; she has no last words to give him.

We pack food: bread, preserves, canned goods. Anything with a high-calorie punch. These we wrap in plastic trash bags and tuck into my bicycle’s basket. There’s milk in the kitchen drained by one of the men from the cows that wander the yard. They’re living off grass now, scavenging the land. And they’re lucky, because all the rain means thicker, lusher pasture for the eating. At the back of my mind is an image of me slaughtering a cow to survive, my arms stained with what looks like ketchup but is really blood. I shove it away and try not to think about that yet.

“We should drink it all,” I tell her, dividing the tepid liquid into two glasses. My gag reflex tries to reject the fluid, but I force it down, knowing that my body needs this. Food is becoming more scarce. An estimated ninety percent of the population is dead, but perishables are long gone and fast food is anything but. What remains is processed foods. Hamburger Helper that for the first time actually does help. Eventually we’ll all be down to foraging, or subsistence farming—if any of us make it that far.

Lisa sips at the milk: a church mouse with a precious piece of cheese.

“Where’s my uncle?”

The question hangs in the air between us.

“On the floor. I had to stop him.”

She swallows. “Is he dead?”

I don’t want to touch him. I don’t. But she’s looking to me like I know what to do. She doesn’t know that I’m making it up as I go along. Pulling it out of my ass like my butt is a magician’s hat.

Kneel. Two fingers against her uncle’s neck. They’re swallowed by his flesh knuckle-deep, like he’s made of quicksand.

Please let him stay down, I chant. The fingers not lost in flab curl around a paring knife. A postapocalyptic insurance policy. For a few seconds his pulse eludes me and I think he’s dead. But no… there it is. Pa-rump, pa-rump, pa-rump. He’s the Little Drummer Boy on speed.

“He’s alive.” For now, because a galloping pulse can’t be good in a man the size of a VW Beetle.

“Thank God,” Lisa says.

Yeah, God. That guy. He forgot to RSVP to mankind’s last party. Who could blame him? The fireworks were great but everyone attending was sick.

On the other side of the kitchen, knives wait in a drawer. Knives for sawing bread, for slicing cheese, for dicing tomatoes, for hacking meat. One cleaver for me, and the paring knife. Both bear keen edges.

“You should have a knife.”

Lisa’s brows dip. “Oh no, I couldn’t.”

“What if you need to cut something?”

“I thought you meant…”

She’s staring toward the thin air above her uncle. The drawer beckons. A corkscrew. Good for taking out an eye. An adequate weapon for someone who doesn’t want to carry one.

“Take this,” I say. Her fingers close around the helix. One presses against its point and she winces. “Just in case we find a great bottle of wine. This is Italy, remember?”

We walk with my wheels between us. Lisa’s hand balances on the seat, using it to guide her path while I hold the handlebars and steer us true. She took the corkscrew without question and shoved it into her jeans pocket, where she reaches down and traces the outline every few dozen feet.

This is the middle of nowhere, although its existence proves that it must be somewhere. So I pull out my compass and wait for the needle to still. Southeast. I want southeast. If we take a right at the farm’s entrance, that’s the road east. Good enough until we find a road that wanders south.

We don’t speak until we’re at the white mailbox and the old planks that form a halfhearted attempt at a fence are behind us.

Lisa cracks the silence. “I hope he’s okay. My dad.”

“He’ll be fine.”

“He’s my father.”

“I know.”

“You could have killed him.”

“But I didn’t.”

There’s a pause as she formulates the question. “Why?”

“The world you knew, that we all knew, is gone. Humanity is mostly dead and what’s left is dying.”

A ditch forms between her eyebrows, and it’s filled with ignorance.

“I don’t get it.”

“I like being human.”

The ditch digs a little deeper.

“He did it because he loved me,” she says after a while. “That’s what I tell myself so I don’t hate him. He’s still my dad, and a person shouldn’t hate their dad. In a way, I feel like I owed him something. It was a hard job, looking after me out here, being blind and all.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“Sometimes.”

“It’s no excuse,” I tell her. “You didn’t owe him that.”

She disappears inside herself for several moments before returning with a new question.

“During sex, did you ever close your eyes and pretend it was someone else?”

Did I? Maybe. When I was younger. Before I began having sex with someone other than myself.

“Sure,” I say to make her feel better. “Probably everyone does that.”

“I tried. It didn’t work very well.”

“Honey, what he was doing to you wasn’t sex or love.”

“Can I tell you a secret?” The question mark has a rhetorical curve, so I stay silent. When we reach the first crossroad stamped into the landscape, she says, “I think I’d still like being touched one day. By a man who likes me.”

“I think you will, too.”

“Do you have any secrets?”

I look at her sideways, tell myself I won’t let this one come to harm when I’ve lost so many along the way. “No.”

TWO

Dr. Rose opens a window. Sun and fresh air rush in like they’re in a hurry to go no place but here. This is their ultimate destination, their dream vacation.

I hold my face up to the light, smile. “That could be symbolic.”

“Of what?”

“Of what you do here.”

He smiles. “An optimist. That’s a step in the right direction. Often people who come see me look on therapy as a negative. A black mark against them.”

“I called you, remember?”

He gets up, goes out to the waiting room. “You want something to drink?”

“Is this a trick question?”

“Yes. I’m going to read your personality based on your beverage choices, so choose wisely.”

I smile. I can’t help myself. This isn’t what I thought it would be. I expected a dry soul shoehorned into a somber setting.

“Coffee with cream. Two sugars.”

“Two?”

“Okay, three.”

“That’s more like it.” He returns with identical mugs, passes one to me. The liquid is hot, sweet, smooth. I alternate blowing and sipping until the first inch disappears.

“What does this say about me?”

He takes his own long sip, slurps a little, doesn’t apologize. When he’s satisfied he swaps the mug for a notepad and pen. “You like asking questions.”

“My coffee tells you that?”

The pen moves on the paper. “No, your questions do.”

I laugh. “If you don’t ask, you may never know.”

He smiles down at his paper. “Why don’t you tell me why you called me?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I’m a therapist, not a psychic.”

“That would make your job easier, no?”

“Scarier.”

I take another half inch of coffee. “I’m not crazy.”

“There are two ways to look at that. Either no one’s crazy, or we’re all crazy in our own way. As a great Greek philosopher once said: Man needs a little madness, or else he never dares cut the rope and be free.”

“Socrates?”

“Zorba.”

Again with the laughter. “I don’t know, Doctor, it’s possible you might be crazier than me.”

“Sometimes I talk to myself,” he admits. “Sometimes I even answer myself.”

“Only child?”

“Eldest. Of two. I have a brother.”

“I have a younger sister. She had imaginary friends. And because my folks wouldn’t buy me a Ken doll, I drew a mustache and chest hair on one of my Barbies.”

“Do you still do that?”

“Only if my date turns out to be a woman.”

The dimple in his cheek twitches. Am I serious and therefore nuts, or am I the perennial comedienne, stowing my pain under a funny blanket? Am I in dire need of analysis? Would I make a great research paper wedged somewhere between obsessive-compulsive plucking and multitasking personality disorder?

“If this is ongoing, you should be in therapy,” he says.

“Do you think?”

“Why don’t you tell me why you’re here.”

I lean back. Take a small sip. Arrange my lie.

“I’ve been having this dream about a jar. Not the grape jelly kind—the old kind. It’s the color of scorched cream.”

“How does it make you feel, this dream?”

“Terrified….”

“It’s old,” James Witte tells me. Letters trail after his name, interspersed with periods to denote that he’s spent a whole lot of time with his head in books and his mind in the past. He’s an assistant curator at the National Museum. An old friend, although he looks the same as the day we graduated high school: thin, narrow-shouldered, pale. His eyes gleam as he circles the jar.

“Really old.”

“Is that a technical term?”

He laughs. I get a flash of him sucking on a beer bong at a postgrad party. “Yeah, it’s technical. Translation: I don’t know how old it is, but it’s really fucking old.”

“Wow. That is old.”

“If I had to guess, I’d say it’s Greek. Maybe Roman. The curve of the handles, the way they attach to the tapering trunk… But there’s no design. Yet, it’s symmetrical, which would suggest it was made on a wheel. And everything made on the wheel had some design, be it painted or etched.”

A soft shadow bats at the window. My next door neighbor’s cat, Stiffy. Because Ben’s a teenage boy living in the basement of a grown man’s body. The window barely has time to scrape against the frame before the marmalade beast’s squeezing underneath, launching his invasion.

“Can I take it?” James asks. “I’ll bring it back. But I can give you a much better idea of when and where it’s from if I can inspect it in my own space. That way I can get other opinions if I can’t figure it out. Our new intern sorts potsherds like some kind of savant. The other interns call him Rain Man.”

I’d trust James with my life. We’ve been friends since tenth grade when he moved to the area from Phoenix. He’s steady. Loyal. Decent to the bone. So I tell him what I can’t tell Dr. Rose: that someone sneaked into my home and I’m driving myself slightly nuts wondering how and why. All except the fear. I hold that close to my bones lest it seem trite, thin.

He listens intently. That’s how James has always listened. Every so often he asks a question and I do my best to answer it.

“Why don’t you just open the thing?”

“It’s not mine to open.”

On the door, the locks feign innocence. Don’t blame us, the security system failed you. The panel blinks silently. It’s just a robot awaiting instructions from a mother ship in a building downtown.

“Why not toss it in the dumpster?”

“It’s not mine to throw away.”

“Leave it to me.” He grins. “I love a good mystery. Worst case I’ll bring Rain Man here. I’ll tell him it’s a date.”

Stiffy rubs against my skin, his purr vibrating all the way up to my knees as he figure-eights my shins.

“Aha, so he’s cute, then?”

“Tasty. And smart. Can’t beat that with a stick.”

“Bring him over. I’ll make lasagna.”

The cat detaches himself from my legs and saunters over to the jar. He circles it twice, then sits a foot away, tail tucked neatly around him in a protective ring. With a fascination bordering on obsession, he stares at the jar.

“Curiosity killed the cat,” James says.

On the second morning after we leave the farmhouse, Lisa vomits. The sky is dim through the thickly leaved canopy that conceals us from the road and sky. Under here, the weather is mostly dry, with a chance of frigid drips.

For once, I don’t. Cold beans scooped from a can with a jagged edge settle in my stomach in a nourishing gelatinous lump.

Up ahead is a village. Maybe two miles away. It’s a black dot on a map, nameless but present. We should go around, avoid contact if there’s any to be made. I look at Lisa bent at the waist, unleashing her beans onto the ground. Her hair is in my hands. Poor kid. Although I run the risk of making myself sick, I glance at the mess she’s made. No blood. At least not yet.

Vitamins. They might have vitamins in the town. We could both use them.

“I’m sorry.”

The retching travels all the way from her toes.

“Don’t be. You can’t help it.”

Her thin shoulders shake. “Do you think I’ve got White Horse?”

White Horse. The plague that killed the world’s population. Some preacher down south with a too-big mouth and a popular cable TV show heard voices from God telling him these were the end-times. Dying people had nothing better to do, so they watched. It was that or listen to the static that used to be daytime television.

That preacher named the virus White Horse.

“The first seal is opened and the white horse has come with its deadly rider to test us with Satan’s disease. Any man, woman, or child who doesn’t believe and accept Jesus Christ as his or her savior will die from this White Horse. The nonbelievers will burn in the pits of hell, wishing they’d had the courage to accept the Lord. They will writhe and burn, their souls thick with maggots. This plague is the white horse. And the other three are coming….”

Everyone assumed it would be a flu-like illness that would knock us out of the evolutionary tree, but it wasn’t anything so merciful. White Horse was like nothing in the medical books except maybe late-stage cancer. The CDC and WHO barely had time to react when people began running to their doctors in droves, toting sick bags and buckets, begging for something to stop the nausea. The vomit turned bloody as the protective cells, designed to stop the stomach acids from burning holes and leaking into the body, sloughed away. Within days the vomiting quit, only to be replaced with nonspecific aches, some more severe than others.

Then a scientist came forward and told us what we had no way of guessing.

“White Horse is not a disease as such. It’s a mutation. Some outside source has flipped switches in our DNA, turning on some genes, turning off others.” He struggled to keep the words simple enough for the public to understand. Speech faded to mumbles when time came for the media to ask their questions. Enlightenment sans illumination.

I could lie and tell her no, or I could lie and tell her yes. So I take the chickenshit truth route.

“I don’t know.”

She speaks through the bile foam. “I don’t want to die.”

I pull a tissue from my pocket so she can wipe her lips.

“We all die sooner or later.”

“Later sounds better.”

“We should make a bucket list,” I say.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a list of everything we want to do before we die at the ripe old age of three digits. Like skydiving. Or swimming in a waterfall.”

“What’s the point?”

The absurdity of our situation fills my eyes with hot tears. Two women standing alone at the end of the world, talking about things we want to do before we die. We’ll be lucky to get one last hot meal.

“Fun,” I tell her. “There’s a village up ahead. I thought maybe we’d check it out. What do you think?”

“What would you do if I wasn’t here?”

“Probably go around.”

“So, why aren’t we?”

“Because they might have medicine.”

“Do you think I’m going to die soon?”

I shake my head, let the rain take my tears where it will.

“I want to get married and have a family,” she says. “I’m going to put that on my list.”

“Forget it,” I tell Jenny.

My sister’s voice is Minnie Mouse with a dash of fingernails down a chalkboard, but only when she wants to bend me to her will.

“But he’s really nice. You’ll love him. Or maybe you’ll just love him a time or two.” I picture her waggling her eyebrows as she encourages me to have casual sex. Our mother would love that.

“Nice,” I say.

“And dreamy gorgeous.”

“I have to wash my hair that night.”

“I already told him about you. You have to come.”

“Then untell him.”

There’s a gap in her chatter. “You almost had me for a second. I can’t. That would be rude. You have to come.”

“I won’t,” I say, and hang up.

My mother rolls out the guilt parade and slaps my buttons like my psyche is a game of Whac-A-Mole.

“…two years,” she drones on. “That’s how long it felt. You were the stubbornest baby ever. Not like your sister. At least she had the courtesy to come two weeks early. Three hours. She wanted to come out. Not like you. That was the longest thirty-six hours of my life….”

I have two choices: attend my sister’s dinner party or tie a plastic sack around my mother’s head until she runs out of nagging. I choose the evil that doesn’t come with a felony conviction.

THREE

The village appears over the road’s hump: Aphrodite rising from the water. She steps through the never-ending drizzle to greet us. There’s no knowing whether she’s friend or foe, but I guess she could say the same about us. In this world everything is a fat question mark. Taxes are no longer certain—only death.

We pass under a stone arch, the reddish brown of clay earth. The whole village is garbed in this same shade: clusters of earthen cottages with shallow porches and roughly shingled roofs; a handful of shops with wares gathering dust behind grimy windows; a church with its windows shuttered and high wooden doors bolted.

There is a calm that feels anything but peaceful.

We stop. Turn. Inspect the deserted street. Nothing moves. Not even a twitch of lace in a window.

“There isn’t anybody here.” Lisa cups her hands, yells through them. “Hello?” Her words ricochet off the deserted buildings.

“Don’t.”

Her hands fall away. “I didn’t think.”

“It’s okay. It’s just best to be quiet, that’s all.”

“Why? What do you think is out there?”

“Desperate people.” And monsters.

“My dad said that’s why we had to stay at the farm. Because at least there we had food and no one was trying to fight us for it.”

“He was right.”

“Do you think we should go back?”

I don’t answer. My attention is on what appears to be a small grocery store. Neat stacks of preserves in ribbon-wrapped jars fill the lower third of the window display. Fruit and sugar. Our bodies could use both.

“Do you hear anything?”

She listens. “No.”

“Wait here,” I say. Someone needs to protect what we’ve already got.

The bell barely trembles as I ease the door open like I’m handling dynamite. I’m standing in what passes for a 7-Eleven in this part of the world. Or maybe it’s a souvenir shop. That would explain all the woven baskets and cross-stitchings clinging to the walls inside cheap frames. I fill two baskets with preserves: strawberry, peach, cherry. The other shops are useless. A butcher and a produce store, both with rotted wares. There’s no medicine here—not even an antacid. The houses are just as selfish: they give me nothing I can use to heal. What these people had is long gone.

Against one wall I find a broom resting, waiting to be of use. So I grant it that wish, twist its head from its neck, assign it a new occupation.

Outside, Lisa is scuffing her boot on the stone steps leading up to the door. Her mouth droops at the edges as though she’s sinking into darker thoughts.

“Jam,” I announce as loud as I dare, and imbue the word with what I hope is a smile rather than a grimace. “Who needs bread? We can pretend we’re kids and eat it straight out of the jar.”

“Can we go? I don’t like it here. It’s too quiet, if that makes sense.”

A year ago this village would have teemed with life. Tourists oohing and ahhing over the postcard-perfect scenery as they spent too much money for a commemorative trinket that would wind up in a drawer the moment their suitcases were unpacked. Locals smiling at their heavier purses, grateful the road through their village was more heavily traveled, thanks to a popular movie and a spate of wall calendars. Even in her dark world, Lisa would have loved it then. I would have, too. I used to have one of those calendars, and the movie went great with a quart of Ben and Jerry’s.

“Soon.”

I hang the baskets on the handlebars before curling Lisa’s fingers around the broom handle.

“It’s a cane,” she says, lightly tapping the tip on the foot-worn paving stones. “So sticks and stones won’t break my bones. Thanks.”

My gaze fixates on the church at the village’s eastern edge. Doors bolted. To keep something out. Or maybe in? There could be supplies in there, a makeshift sanctuary.

“Did you find medicine?” she says.

I stark walking. “There wasn’t any,” I throw over my shoulder. “I want to check out the church.”

“I’m coming, too.”

“Someone needs to guard the food.”

“I’m blind,” she says. “Not useless.”

“Okay. But if anything happens, run in the quietest direction and hide.”

In. Definitely in. Because a heavy beam has been dropped into brackets attached to the door’s frame. What is this village hiding? Who sealed the doors and where did they go?

I suck in as much air as I can. I already know I’m going to throw them wide, because what we need might be inside, and because I can’t help myself. Knowledge is power. Or maybe it will lead to capitulation. Best-case scenario I get to talk to God. Because we need to have a talk, He and I, though we haven’t done so in some months. And there’s a good reason for that.

Don’t do it, Zoe.

Do it.

Remember the jar.

Coincidence.

Words written on a bathroom wall: There is no such thing as a coincidence.

Curiosity killed the cat. Then it killed the world.

The thoughts swirl until they’re swept away by my determination. I reach for the makeshift lock that reminds me of the Middle Ages. I wasn’t paying attention in class the day they discussed the history of doors.

“Tell me what to do,” Lisa says.

I guide her hand toward the problem.

“We’re going to push up, okay?”

“Okay.”

Constant dampness keeps the wood swollen; it bulges in a mockery of gestation. My fingers pull from above, then push from below to no result. Lisa’s shoving, too, her face screwed up and intense—the same expression I feel on my face.

The beam shifts, groans, shoots straight up like a rocket, and we both stumble in its wake.

“Thanks,” I whisper. Lisa smiles and dusts her hands together, wipes them on her jeans and does a little Voilà! move like she’s a gymnast. I can’t help it, I join in. We spin, twirl, pose, like we have an audience of millions. This is Italy and my inner child is at the helm. I want to throw my coins in the fountain, meet my prince, spend my last dime on a villa, lose myself in the grandeur of Brunelleschi’s dome, be kissed between the legs of Titus’s arch. I want to live here, not die.

Then just like that, our performance stops and we’re ground down by the journey once more.

“What do you think is inside?”

Lisa looks flushed from our silliness. I probably do, too. Tugging the elastic band from my hair, I finger comb the damp strands, then smooth everything back into place and fasten the thick bundle.

Decomposition has its own smell. It’s the mugger of scents, slapping your face, kicking you in the gut then bolting with your wallet while you’re busy staggering and recoiling from the stench. Every so often I catch a whiff of that rotting meat smell. But also… something else I can’t define.

“There’s only one way to find out. Could be something, could be nothing.”

“Whatever it is, you have to tell me.”

“I will. I’m going in.”

She backs up fast. Like ripping off a Band-Aid, I wrench the doors open wide.

My mind goes into overload. Acid bubbles up into my mouth and I wrestle to force it down.

Detach or go crazy.

Holiday snapshots from rainy Italy: corpses, mutilation, rotting flesh. Atop the priest’s corpse a rat died nibbling at what was left of his face. DNA gone so far wrong that even the bones are so gnarled, so anomalous, they’ve ripped through his skin from the inside. What looks like a tailbone. Not just the nub people have, but a lengthy ladder of bones that hangs past the knees. Horny protrusions jutting from what used to be faces. Bodies, unrecognizable as human but too similar to be alien. Italy has made grisly art from the Reaper’s work.

There is a wet sucking sound. I know it. I don’t dare close my eyes to think, and I can’t focus on single pieces long enough to isolate its meaning. It’s a cat’s tongue dragging along a meat chunk, keratin hooks stripping away the flesh. It’s the slurping of noodles from a foam bowl. It’s the sucking of marrow from freshly snapped bones.

Something is feeding. A monster who would be man were it not for a madman’s experiment. Its inhuman lapping is both a whisper and deafening, and my eardrums clang with the sound.

Someone shut them in here. Someone locked them in this place before abandoning this living tomb, and I cannot fault them for that decision.

My hands can barely hold the wooden beam steady. With Parkinson’s-esque control I tamp it down into the brackets with my fists so that thing inside can never get out. I walk away, back to Lisa, fists tight at my side.

“What was it?” she wants to know, but I don’t know what to tell her. That thing used to be human once, but now it’s a new link on the food chain.

I shake my head. I can’t speak. If I do, I’m going to lose the beans.

We’re maybe a half mile away. The rain is lighter now and tickles my wet face before rolling under my rounded shirt collar. Lisa is chattering and I welcome the way in which she throws around words in any which order, because at least it takes my mind off the church.

Another mile. The compass indicates we’re still headed east with a slight jag south, which is exactly where I want to be. The sky feels low enough to reach down and touch my head. The clouds are congealing into a solid dark mass. The world is sucking in its breath, but for what?

Then everything blows apart at the seams. A roaring boom shakes the countryside until even the grass sinks to its knees. We hit the ground, our stomachs flat against the soft soil, arms forming a protective M over our heads. Food scatters as the bicycle falls between us.

The air thumps. Pressure forces us deeper into the grass.

“Are you okay?”

Lisa nods, her cheek flattened by the ground. Her eyes are wide and unblinking. She’s unhurt—or at least not bleeding on the outside. I determine the same about myself and roll onto my back, propping myself up on my elbows.

“You?” she asks.

“I’m okay.”

“What was that?”

“Something blew up.”

The explosion came from behind us. I know this because that’s where the fireball is rising into the sky. Smoke is a voluminous, billowing, high-fashion cloak framing the fire, enhancing its dangerous beauty.

Its significance is not lost on me, and the surge of hormones that is my flight-or-fight response whips my pulse onward, telling me flight is smarter.

“We have to go. And we have to get off the road.”

Her lips sag at the edges. “But that means we have to go through the mud. Our feet…”

“I don’t like it, either, but we don’t have a choice.”

“But why?”

“Because that explosion means there might be someone behind us. So it’s better if we stay out of sight.”

“Do you think it was the church?”

“Probably.”

There’s a short pause. “What was in there?”

“Have you ever heard of those old maps, the kind from before we knew what the continents really looked like, when people thought the earth was flat?”

“I think so. In school. Why?”

“Some of them used to have pictures of dragons or other fantastical beasts strategically placed in unexplored areas.”

The wheels turn. “Are you saying a dragon did this?”

“No. I’m saying that the whole world is dangerous now. And there are monsters out there that used to be us.”

We move on from this place, sticking to the thicker grass so our boots don’t sink and us along with them. The rain persists.

I hate you, I mouth across the table at my sister.

She shrugs. What?

I scratch my nose with the middle finger of my right hand. Grown women acting like teenagers.

“The Chinese,” the voice next to me drones on. “Now that’s our biggest threat. They’re playing God over there with their weather modification program.”

“So they can dry their laundry faster?” my brother-in-law asks. Mark is no racist, but I can see he’s as bored with the boob next to me as I am.

My blind date’s ego is made of yeast, and the hotter it gets, the more he puffs up. It’s a marvel his trendy polo shirt and chinos don’t pop.

“They did it during the Olympics,” I say. “They shot silver iodide pellets into the sky. But it’s not just China. We do it here, too.”

Daniel, the dough man, recoils like I’ve slapped him. “We do not.”

“Yeah, we do.”

Jenny picks at the tablecloth. She knows I won’t let this go. Anyone else and I might, but this guy is rubbing sandpaper on my raw nerves.

“What did you say you do again?”

“I work for Pope Pharmaceuticals.”

He nods. “I’ve seen their products advertised. Antidepressants and sleeping pills.”

Over bagged lunches the cleaning crew jokes that Pope Pharmaceuticals is an insurance policy: it manufactures drugs for every contingency, including things you never knew you had.

“And drugs for dicks,” Mark says. “For when you can’t get it up.”

Daniel ignores him. “What do you do there?”

“I clean.”

He throws his hands in the air like he’s won some victory in some competition only he knows about. “Ladies and gentlemen, domestic engineering now qualifies a person as an expert on weather control.”

It’s all I can do not to shove my wineglass down his throat.

“Excuse me.” I take off for the privacy of the backyard. I pace the length of the pool, stop, turn, retrace my steps. The moon is bright in its glassy surface. By the time I reach the diving board my fingers are searching for my phone.

I dial. Four rings. The fifth breaks as the connection is made.

“You’re there. I thought you’d be gone for the day.”

“Who is this?” Dr. Rose asks.

My voice catches and he laughs.

“I’m joking, Zoe. Are you okay?”

“No.” I rub my fingers over my forehead like it’s a piece of crumpled paper and I’m smoothing out the lines. “Yes. Can I ask you something?”

“Boxers,” he says. “Briefs exacerbate my claustrophobia.”

Normally I’d laugh, but my body is a violin string held taut to the point of snapping.

“I’m on a blind date. It was my sister’s idea.”

He lets out a grunt that triggers an image of him leaning back in his chair, resting his feet on his desk, because this is going to be a long night and he wants to be comfortable.

“A blind date,” he says. “How—”

“Please don’t ask me how I feel about it. If I had to pick a word, I’d say homicidal.”

“That answers my question. Which was going to be ‘How’s it going?’”

I throw a leaf into the pool and the moon shivers.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called. You have a life outside of neurotic patients.”

“You’re not neurotic,” he says. “You’re on a blind date. The only other question is: Why aren’t you drinking heavily?”

“I’m allergic.”

“To alcohol?”

“To assholes. I get hives when I mix the two.”

I can feel him smile.

“You mentioned a husband in our first session.”

“Sam.”

“Sam. Tell me about him.”

“What’s to tell? We fell in lust, married in a quickie ceremony in Las Vegas, then he died before we had a chance to fall in love.”

“I’m sorry. I assumed you were divorced.”

“That’s the logical conclusion these days.” The question hangs in his silence. “Car crash. His mother was driving.”

“Drunk driver?”

“Seizure. She drove straight into the path of a semi.”

His voice is cool balm on my raw nerves. “I’m sorry for your loss. How long ago?”

“Five years. My family think it’s time I moved on.”

“What do you think?”

“I’d like to move on with a non-asshole. I hear they can test DNA for that now.”

There’s silence, and for a moment I think we’ve lost our connection. Until he laughs.

Daniel pokes his head around the open door frame, an extinguished pharos incapable of shedding revelatory light.

“Come on,” he says when he spots me. “Don’t be a pouty brat.”

“Excuse me,” I tell Nick. “I think my invisibility cloak just failed.”

“If you kill him, call me. I’m bound by doctor-client privilege.”

“Really?”

“No. But the courts make exceptions for assholes.”

I follow Daniel into the house.

“I’ve got tickets for Waiting for Godot.” He says this like he just laid a golden egg.

“I’m right about the weather,” I say. “Tell Jenny and Mark I said good night.”

Darkness creeps across the countryside. When it catches us, we have to stop. There are no worn paths here where hundreds of feet have gone before us, or even the same pairs of feet hundreds of times over. The ground is virgin, and each step a potential danger.

“We’ll take turns keeping watch. Between your ears and my eyes, we should be okay.”

Lisa’s tired. We both are. There’s a weariness to my bones that has become a part of me, like a leg or an ear. It belongs to me. In return, it owns my body and dictates when I should rest, sleep, yawn from fatigue. Every day a fear flashes through me: that I have White Horse and it’s the disease commanding my routine, not the journey. But there’s been no blood, no tissue-deep pain, so the fear creeps away and hides until it can ambush me the next time.

I set the cups and flasks outside the tree line so they can refill.

“I’ll take the first shift,” I reassure her. She rubs her eyes with balled fists, then curls up between the tree’s roots. My body stays rigid. I play games with it, tensing the muscles until they weaken, then relax so blood flows back in.

Seconds tick by; minutes meander; the hours drag a ball and chain. Night is out there beyond the tree. It’s still there, waiting, watching, when I wake Lisa at two. I wish we had a dog. A dog has ears and eyes. A dog is always on guard, even in sleep.

“Peach or strawberry?”

“Peach,” she says, then settles against the tree trunk, half here, half in Dreamland, where the pretty things live.

I worry that she’ll fall asleep. That whoever caused that explosion will find us here, vulnerable kittens for the snatching. That they’ll be a monster clad in human skin. And that my instincts won’t let me see the truth. But my mind is performing one last walk-through for the night, flicking off the switches of my consciousness. Worry is for the waking. So I roll onto my side, back protected by the tree’s broad trunk, and let my mind douse the last light.

The world is ending, the population halved, then halved again. I have to get to Brindisi. I’m stuck at the airport waiting on a plane, any plane, to get me to Europe. No money changes hands; it’s meaningless now except as mattress stuffing.

“You, you, and you,” the man says, pointing to me and two others. “We’re aiming for Rome. Do you accept the price?”

I do. The price is nothing more than a bag of blood. I’ve got plenty of that.

On the tarmac, they tap a vein. My fists clenches and releases to force the blood out faster.

“Why blood?” I ask.

The nurse preps another traveler’s arm, shoves the needle in deep.

“There’s a small group of scientists who still believe they can stop this. Word is they think they can find a cure in healthy DNA.”

“Really?”

“That’s what they say. Course, I never cared much for what people say. It’s what they do that matters.” She passes my blood to someone else. The red liquid sloshes in the bag. “Have a cookie.”

Everyone ahead of me is holding a fortune cookie. We’re too dazed to eat them. My mind feels detached from my body like it’s a full step behind the rest of me, a lagging toddler trying to make sense of a much bigger, more adult picture.

There is no attendant with a breezy impersonal smile ushering us onto the plane, just a couple of soldiers holding weapons they look too young to carry. A few short years ago their mothers were tucking them into their beds, and now they’re primed to kill if necessary. The toy soldiers don’t speak as I inch my way past and drop into the nearest empty seat, but their eyes swivel, then snap to attention. I take the aisle although the window is vacant. I don’t want to look out and down. I don’t need to pretend things are normal. That kind of self-deception can only lead to madness. It’s best to accept that this is and all the blood donations in the world can’t drag the calendar backwards.

People squeeze down the aisle after me. Some have nothing. Others are minimalists like me, toting a single backpack and maybe a pillow.

A worn woman stops inches away. She hugs a small Louis Vuitton suitcase to her chest. “Is that seat taken?”

“It is now.” Although I mean to sound light, my words are pancake flat.

I swivel my knees toward the window to let her past. She settles in the seat, suitcase perched upon her lap. Strange, I think, until I realize I’m doing the same thing.

“I love Rome,” she says. “It’s romantic. More so than Paris, I believe. Have you been?”

“This is my first time.”

We are a parody of normality. Strangers discussing travel like two robots mimicking human speech.

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“You should go with someone you love. I did. My husband. Well, husbands. They loved Rome. They’re both dead now.” Her knuckles tighten on the bag’s impeccably stitched edge, white marbles beneath paper-thin skin. They barely support the nest of rings stacked on top of them. “I love Rome,” she echoes. “It’s romantic.”

We don’t speak after that. She retreats to her world, the one where she wears a haute couture dress with one ring, one necklace, where her husbands are still alive, where someone else carries her luggage. I attend to my stomach, which is launching a protest, and rip into the flimsy plastic wrapping the fortune cookie. It has snapped into pieces from the tension in my hand, which saves me the trouble of breaking it in two. The slivers dissolve on my tongue until they’re little more than the memory of sugar.

The fortune is stiff between my fingers. I unfurl it and read.

Welcome change.

I read my fortune until I laugh. I laugh until I cry. I cry until I sleep.

FOUR

I wake in a panic, drenched in tepid sweat. It’s not rain, because it smells sour, metallic, with an underlying sweetness like fruit just as it turns. My plane ride to Rome swirls down the drain, dormant until the next time I close my eyes. I shove myself up from the tree roots and look for Lisa. She’s asleep.

When I rouse her, she barely recognizes my voice through the sleep fog.

“What?”

“You fell asleep.”

“I was tired.”

“I have to be able to rely on you.”

She leans over, vomits, heaves until I worry she’ll turn inside out. Between bouts, she manages to speak.

“I’m sorry. It just happened.”

“Come on. We should go.”

We push off from our resting place and I glance behind us, scan the land. Nothing but trees and grass. But something follows. Branches crack when they shouldn’t. Every so often I hear a step that doesn’t come from me or Lisa.

We are not alone out here.

“Have you ever turned it over?” Dr. Rose asks. “Looked at the bottom?”

I look at him, my mouth sagging softly because that never occurred to me.

It’s Friday evening. In my head I call this “date night,” because I’m not like the other people who come here. I’m not crazy. I’m not even a little off balance. At least I don’t think so. But that jar bothers me. The mystery of it curls cold fingers around my heart and squeezes until I ache.

“No. Never.”

“Maybe you should. Maybe it’s time to take action in your dream. Take control.”

“What do you think I’ll find?”

“A message. A clue perhaps. Or maybe a Made in China sticker.”

Laughter spills from my throat. “Wouldn’t that be a trip? My dream the product of mass manufacturing in China.”

We leave together. I’m his last appointment. He locks the office door while I wait, then we stroll toward the elevators like he didn’t just print me an invoice while I wrote him a check.

“Do it,” he says as the steel cables hoist the oversized dumbwaiter to our floor. “Push that thing over and inspect the bottom. Look, you’ve seen every other part of it. It’s a dream. If it breaks, I don’t think they’re going to hold you to the ‘You broke it, you bought it’ policy.”

He has a point, but not the full picture.

My voice wobbles out on unsteady legs. “I haven’t seen all of it. I haven’t seen the inside.”

A sharp ding echoes in the hall. Metal scrapes as the elevator locks into place. When the doors slide open, Dr. Rose’s hand goes to my waist and gently urges me ahead of him. His warmth seeps through my shirt. There’s a familiar smell about him that I can’t quite grasp. Trying to pin it with a label is like nailing Jell-O to a wall.

“Dreams are funny things,” he says. “All this technology, all these specialists and their experiments, and we still don’t have a grip on what they are or what they mean.” The elevator shakes and hums. “You asked about my dreams. Since we’re just two people making conversation, I’ll tell you.” He hits the Stop button and we jerk to a halt. “I’m standing on a beach in Greece, where my family are from. There’s no sand. The beaches are pebble, the water still. I feel… like I’m the only person left on earth. So I crouch down and pick up a smooth stone, and when I stand I feel there’s someone behind me. A woman. I can’t see her but I know she’s there.”

“Because you’ve had the dream before?”

His smile is reluctant. His eyes dark and serious. “Many times. It always plays out the same. When I turn, I’m almost deafened by the sound of a single gunshot. Red blooms across her stomach. It spreads fast until she’s covered in her own blood. I race to her, scoop her up as she falls, but it’s too late. And I am helpless.”

“The man who would help everyone is helpless,” I say.

“Not everyone.” He smiles. “Anyone on a reality TV show is screwed.”

Sunshine. He smells of sunshine. My eyes close for just a moment and I’m standing out in my grandmother’s yard, surrounded by fresh sheets being slow-baked under a high summer sun. When I open my eyes, he’s watching me.

“What do you think it means?”

He shrugs, taps the Stop button, and we start moving again.

“Nothing. It’s just a dream.” A dimple breaks the plane of his cheek. “Unless it’s not. I’ll make you a deal. Take action in your dream. Tip the jar. See what lies beneath.”

“And if I do that?”

“I’ll take you out to dinner.”

It’s what I want; I know that.

We lurch as the elevator stops. He’s still watching me, the question in his eyes, waiting on my answer.

The words catch in my throat, then shake themselves loose. “I’m sorry,” I say, “but it wouldn’t be right. But if the world ends tomorrow, understand that I regret saying no.”

The world doesn’t end the next day. Or the day after that. But six months later, humanity is too busy circling the drain for any of us to worry about dates we didn’t accept.

The day grinds on. Each hour heavier than the last. Theoretically they should be getting lighter as I get closer to Brindisi, but like any theory it’s there to be disproven.

When I mention this to Lisa she asks, “What’s in Brindisi?”

“Boats. More specifically, a boat. The Elpis.”

“Can I come?”

This morning she was glassy-eyed, but now she’s clear and bright. Her chest bones are a skin-covered xylophone peeking out of the V-neck of her shirt. Mine are the same beneath my raincoat.

“If you want to.” Though where she’d go without me hadn’t entered my thoughts until now. “I’m counting on it.”

“Yay.” She gives a little clap. “Where’s the boat going?”

“Greece.”

“Why go there?”

“Because I’m meeting someone.”

She chews on this for a moment. “What if they’re not there?”

“They will be.”

“But what if they’re not?”

“They will be.”

“They will be,” she parrots.

Ben’s eyes are bloodshot; a snot droplet hangs from the reddened rim of his left nostril.

“Have you seen Stiffy?”

It’s 2:53 a.m. I haven’t seen anything but my crazy dreams for the past five hours. I try to think. When did I last see his cat? The night James came over? That was two, no, three nights ago. Have I seen the marmalade tomcat since then?

“Is he missing?”

My question is stupid. Of course he’s missing, otherwise Ben wouldn’t be here searching. But the sleep has scrambled my head and I haven’t yet untangled myself from its hold.

Ben wipes the back of his hand across his nose. He pulls his omnipresent brown cardigan tighter around his narrow body. He’s pale, I see that now, and not just from the hallway’s harsh light.

“Yeah. For a couple days now. It’s not like him, you know?”

“He likes his food.”

“Yeah.”

I feel bad for Ben; Stiffy is all he has. “I’ll keep an eye out, okay? I have to work in a few hours, but I’ll help you look for him tonight.”

“Really?”

I make all the right noises and Ben retreats. Sleep doesn’t come again. It’s done with me for the night. Friday. The last day of the working week. Tonight I see Dr. Rose. Which means it’s three nights ago, not two, that I saw James.

Steam rises from the cup in my hands. It’s a thin, shimmering shield that separates me from Dr. Rose. He’s watching me—not like a woman, but like a client. Between last time and this time he’s flipped a switch, and now we’re each of us in our proper place. I’m glad. Really, I am. Because I like Friday nights; I want to see the next one with him. And the one after that.

“Why do you do it?”

My thoughts pull out of the coffee. “Why do I clean floors?”

He nods once.

“Would you believe me if I said I like working with my hands?”

Seconds tick by without him speaking. He isn’t visiting any other part of me until I’ve shown him this piece.

“Because when Sam died I realized that life is about an inch long, and I didn’t want to drop more hours in a bucket I had no intention of filling. So I took a janitorial job that paid well enough, offered decent benefits, and didn’t ask me to think too hard. It gave me time to think about what I want to be when I grow up, where I want to study. And it’s satisfying. It yields immediate results. Something is dirty, then it’s not.”

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Happy.”

“I want to see that.”

“What happened to your friends?” Lisa asks.

“Dead.”

“Me too.”

A while later…

“Do you think they’re better off?”

“Sometimes.”

“Why?”

“Because not everybody can handle this.”

“But we can.”

“We’re doing our best.”

“What do you think will happen to us?”

“I don’t know,” I say truthfully. “How about you?”

She shrugs. “I think I’m going to die. I’m scared. Are you scared?”

“Sometimes. But I try not to think about it too hard.”

Lisa’s makeshift cane taps constantly, chipping away the miles. My blisters have hardened into thick lumps on my heels and soles.

“Have you ever been in love?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“What was it like?”

“Great and terrible.” Like Oz.

“I’ve never been in love. At least, I don’t think so. I used to have this boyfriend, Eddie. He wasn’t really a boyfriend—more like a boy who was a friend. He kissed me one time and then after that he wouldn’t speak to me. I cried for a week. Do you think that was love?”

“Maybe. Only you can know for sure.”

“I don’t think it was. I hope not. But I hope so, too. Because I don’t want to die without falling in love at least once.”

James is leaning back on the couch, poring through a textbook bigger than his head.

“So, what do you think, Rain Man?”

I laugh. “Jesus, you can’t call him that.”

“Sure I can.” He winks at me.

Raoul turns away from the jar, flashes me a smile that makes me wish I was wearing sunglasses. “I know what they call me behind my back. Could be worse. Like James.”

James is making a meal of Raoul with his eyes when he’s not focused on the book. Part lust, part fascination with the younger man’s expertise.

If Raoul notices, he’s oblivious.

“It’s got to be Greek.”

James’s head bobs like a parrot. “That’s what I said.”

“But from when?” they say at the same time.

“It’s like a missing link,” Raoul says.

“Bridging two periods of history.”

Raoul rubs his fingers across the delicate curve of the lip. “It looks like something I saw once. In a painting, though, and the artist wasn’t Greek. Pandora’s Box.”

“Ahh,” James says as though that is the answer to everything. “The Eve of Greek mythology. You nosy women can’t help yourselves.”

I’ve heard the story about the woman who opened the box and let havoc grab a choke hold on the world. But the correlation between that and my jar eludes me.

Raoul correctly interprets my confusion. “It’s a matter of one small error in the translation of Hesiod’s work. What was thought for some time to be a box was actually a jar. Zeus gifted Pandora with a simple jar similar to those used to store foodstuffs or bones—”

“Like an ossuary,” James adds.

“—and then forbade her from opening the lid.”

We all look at the jar, at the lid with its rim of wax neatly sealing the top.

“Of course, she opened it,” James says. “But who wouldn’t have?”

Raoul circles the jar, his hand still upon its rough surface. “It’s important to remember that like Eve she was just curious and didn’t act out of malice. Curiosity isn’t a bad thing. It drives us to improve and explore and discover. Without curiosity I wouldn’t have a job. Her actions may not have been all negative. For when she released all the ills of the world on mankind, she also gave us obstacles to overcome. Without them we would have been little more than men of clay. Instead we think and struggle and grow.”

He looks at me. “I wonder what’s inside. Any guesses?”

A cold-hot wave washes over my cheeks. I feel them pinken because he’s picked on my obsession and thrown the question out there like it’s nothing.

“Bones,” James says.

“Dust,” I say.

“Drugs.” James’s second offering.

Raoul flashes his smile, this time at James. “Ancient corn.”

I flop down on the armchair, stare at the jar. “Death.”

Raoul sinks into the couch next to James. We sit. We stare.

The village isn’t on the map, but it’s there off to the left of the road like an afterthought. It’s little more than a knot of houses, at least from our vantage point. The road rises ahead, an endless gray ribbon winding through the mountains. We’re going southeast, although the road struggles to stay true. When I tell Lisa this, her feet slow.

“Can we stop?”

“No. I have to be in Brindisi in fifteen days.”

“But they’ll have beds. Real live beds. With blankets and pillows.”

“Fine.”

“Ha! I win.”

“If you can carry it, you can have a blanket,” I say.

“But I want to sleep in a bed.”

“We can’t stop there. We can’t risk it.”

“Because you have to get to a boat and find your friend. They’re probably dead just like everyone else.”

I want to grab her, shake her, tell her I’m terrified whatever is following us isn’t human anymore. That her prolonged rape could seem like a beautiful dream compared to what a stranger could do. But I don’t because she’s just a kid. I want to tell her that getting to the Elpis is the only thing to do, that the person I’m meeting will be there. But I don’t say that, either, because there’s a cold tickle in my belly that says she’s right.

“And maybe we’ll both be dead tomorrow.”

That shuts her up.

Guilt paints another coat of grime on my shoulders, but it’s not enough to change my mind. We’re safer out here.

“The air feels strange,” she says. “What does that mean?”

True enough, the clouds are the pale green of hospital scrubs.

“Hail.”

“I want to feel the sun again,” Lisa says. “That’s going on my list.”

“Mine, too.”

The clouds thicken overheard and dip down to meet us.

It’s the hail and high-force winds that force us into the village. We struggle to keep the bicycle upright as we slog our way to the shelter of the stone homes, wending our way between the trees. The road has the worst of it. Here we are slammed, battered, until all our energy goes into keeping ourselves standing. My body aches like a punching bag pounded with maddened fists. Branches fly, catapulted by gusts of untamed air. This wind is new. Please, I think. Please don’t let it be omnipresent like the rain.

We don’t stop and announce our arrival, nor do we stop to take stock of our surroundings. We bolt up the stone steps for the nearest door, dragging the bicycle. I push Lisa in first, the bike, then I tumble into safety.

The wind dies immediately when I slam the door behind us, yet it waits for us, knocking, scratching, flinging fistfuls of hail against the wood. Come out, come out, it dares us. Come out and play.

Lisa is wild-haired and red-cheeked. Cuts mar her skin. I feel the sting where flying debris has marked my own flesh.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. You?”

Down the door I slide until I’m using my knees as a chin rest.

“Okay. Good.” My eyes drift closed just for a moment.

When I open them a moment later, it’s dark. The constant plink plink of hail has stopped, but the wind is still trying to huff and puff the little brick house down, and it’s brought the night with it. What time, I don’t know. There’s not enough light to see my watch. There’s not any light except a vague promise from beyond the windows. A little has trickled through the clouds.

All that listening, and it takes me several minutes to understand Lisa is missing.

My breath catches and holds. If I drown out my own sounds maybe I’ll hear hers. People make all kinds of noises: sniffing, throat clearing, belching. Even shifting inside a space can produce sound: the rub of fabric against fabric, or the squeak of sweaty skin.

Breathing. There should be breathing at least, but there’s just a house full of emptiness.

“Lisa?” The name falls into the room like an iron lump. I try to remember the topography of this space, but sleep came too quickly for my surroundings to sink in.

Once more, with as much volume as I dare: “Lisa?”

In this dark room, the nothingness stretches on forever. She is not here. Not alive, at least. The house is too small—I remember that much, and I would hear something if she were.

How far can she have gone by feel alone? I hope I can reach her with my voice.

The door is at my back. I wrench it open, throw her name into the wind. In the distance there’s a golden glow, small enough that I can cup my hands around the light and snuff it. A flame? A light? There is no steady electricity, hasn’t been for at least three months—maybe longer, maybe less here—so I know it’s not that. Greasy hair strands flog my cheeks and forehead, until I’m wincing from the blows.

And then I see it’s not raining. It’s not raining.

I trot down the steps, raise my head to the sky. The clouds are still a thick blanket obscuring the stars, but it’s not raining. For the first time since I stepped on Italian soil, it’s not raining. I want to laugh. It’s right there, bubbling in my chest, waiting for my diaphragm to push it free. Here it comes…

…and dies in my tightening throat. My fingers clutch at what’s binding me and touch the harsh fibers of rope. I’m reeled in like a gasping fish.

Someone speaks. “Why aren’t you dead?” A voice with all the softness of a sack filled with nails and broken glass. “Tell me,” he rasps. The rope tightens and burns. “Why aren’t you dead?”

FIVE

Never get attached, I remind myself. Don’t give the lab mice names. They have numbers assigned according to their birth date and sex; they don’t require more. Blowing kisses as I sweep the laboratory floor is borderline acceptable.

Pope Pharmaceuticals’ labs are a stereotype, taking white to new shades of pale. They’re filled with the usual array of machines, each costing more than a house in California, test tubes, petri dishes filled with agar. A chip packet is a bold sun against the floor. Laboratories on television are always clean. In my reality the lab workers eat lunch at their computers and desks. I don’t mind my work. It’s a means to a specific end: I want an education.

I’m mopping when Jorge comes in. He’s a grease spot on an otherwise pristine work environment.

“Don’t forget to see the doctor, eh?”

“I won’t.”

“Good, otherwise…” He mimes snapping a neck that’s clearly mine. “You want me to come with you?” He acts like he’s my supervisor. I act like he’s my barely tolerable coworker. One of us is right and I’m sure it’s me.

The cleaning cart sticks on the door tracks. I persuade it with a shove.

“I suspect I’ll manage.”

From there I go to the women’s locker room, change out of my uniform, and toss it down the hatch that I know leads to the laundry. Another fresh one will be waiting for me next shift. With my bag slung over one shoulder, I take the elevator up to the tenth floor, where the medical facilities are located.

Biannual physical. Company protocol. No checkup, no job, no paycheck, ergo: no college.

Dr. Scott is waiting. We go through the routine I’ve performed three times before today: blood pressure, EKG, weight. He takes a vial of blood and then he’s back with another needle. It’s not the first time.

“It’s that time of the year again,” he says. “Company orders.”

He rolls up my sleeve until my upper arm is bare, then swabs an area the size of a quarter. The tip goes in like I’m butter.

“Hold still,” Dr. Scott says by rote, even though I’m a statue.

The pain is a spider unfolding impossibly long legs.

“What the hell?” It takes all I’ve got not to jerk away. “What is that stuff? Liquid fire?”

“Flu shot. Keep still. Nearly done.” He eases the needle out. “All done. You know the routine.”

I do. Rest for half an hour to make sure there’s no reaction. The fire blazes long after he drops the needle in the hazardous-waste trash.

“Seriously, what was that?”

“Flu shot,” he repeats, like they’ve made him practice the words a thousand times. “Everyone has to have one. You can go now.”

My breath comes in desperate bursts. The rope grinds into one of my tracheal valleys, held snug there in the shallow V. Pounding in my chest blocks out all ambient noise.

“Where’s Lisa?” I try to say.

The rope jerks and my mouth opens in an airless gasp.

“I’m asking the questions.”

The accent isn’t American or British, but the wind could be distorting the softness of the vowels, the crispness of the consonants.

My fingers work the rope, searching for weakness, a gap I can exploit the way the rope holder exploited mine. I find it at the back and discover he’s looped it around my neck without bothering to twist, which means there’s space enough for two fingers. Cracking my head into his face isn’t an option, because his mouth is shoved up against my ear.

Rough fibers grate my fingers as I ease them along the path. They burn new grooves into my whorls and loops. No helping hand comes from the weather; the wind dumps dust in my eyes before whisking away the irrigating tears.

“Why are you alive?”

“There are still people alive.”

He shakes his head against me. “Not without a good reason. What are you? Somebody important? You’re just a woman.”

“I’m nobody.”

“Liar.”

He might have a weapon. If he has rope, then chances are better than good that he does. But I do, too. There’s the paring knife in my pocket, nestled between the seams. One of us has to be faster, and from where I’m standing—with a rope around my neck—that had better be me.

I close my eyes, try to blink away the grit. Maybe it’s my imagination but the wind seems less determined now, like it’s running out of breath, too tired to go on.

“Speak up,” he says.

“Screw. You. Asshole.”

I jerk my left arm up, ram my elbow into his gut. He jumps back in time to avoid most of the damage, but gives me an advantage in doing so: his fingers have released enough of the rope for me to twist around, snatch up the slack, and yank it from his hands.

It’s too dark to see the rope burn through his skin, but his muffled yelps deliver the message.

“Lunatic,” he says when he recovers. He drags me by the arm back up the stairs into the house I just left. “Talk. But not too loud.”

“Where’s Lisa?”

“Dead.”

My heart is an elevator with broken cables crashing through the floors all the way to my feet. I snap. I can’t help it. My fist crashes through something in the dark. It feels like it might be his face. A palm collides with my cheek. Teeth rattle in my head. A sob claws its way through the miserable lump in my throat.

“You bastard. She was just a damn kid.”

“A stupid girl, outside in the dark alone. You should have raised her better than that.”

“She’s not mine. Just my responsibility.”

“Well, then she’s a fucking stupid child. A stupid dead child now.”

“What did you do?”

He shoves me to the window, points. “Do you see that light?”

The light is still there. Steady. Constant. “I see it.”

“Your idiot friend is there. What is left of her.”

“I want to see her.”

“Not yet. First you must answer my questions.”

“I want answers, too.”

“No. You have no choices now.”

The accent, I still can’t pinpoint it. Somewhere European. German, Austrian, Swiss maybe. I can’t tell the difference, which makes my stomach squeeze with shame. How little of the world I knew before it was almost all gone.

Lisa is dead. It’s just me now. Me and this guy.

“I’m nobody. A cleaner at a drug company.”

His laugh is tight and bitter. “A cleaner. You are telling me a janitor made it this far?”

“Why not?”

“You’re as stupid as your friend. Come with me.”

Like I have a choice. He loops the rope around my hands so I’m forced to follow him back down the steps. The wind has flatlined. There’s no sign of rain. It’s cloudy with a good chance of death.

I see his shape in the dark. There’s not much to him, although what there is of his physique is hard. He’s made of wire, not bulk. My height, in heels. I can take him. If I wait, I can take him. I hope. For Lisa’s sake. For mine. Because nothing will stop me from meeting that boat.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, and hope that Lisa can forgive me.

“I am going to show you something. But if you make a noise, I will snap your stupid neck. Nod if you understand.”

I nod, show I understand, although in truth I’m more ignorant than I ever was.

The stone behemoth squats in a field past the village’s rim, malevolent in the dark with its single glowing eye. It’s a half-blinded beast from a world that came to a different end to ours.

My captor creeps now, each step deliberately pressed into the damp grass. He pulls me with him and I see no good reason not to obey. He has all the information and all I have is a sense of foreboding that fills me with frosty dread.

When we reach the window, he shoves me into the shadows, holds a finger to his lips, lifts his face to the glass.

I want to see, too. I need to. Even if all the horrors in all the world are collected in this barn, I need to look inside.

He senses my urgency, the fair-haired man with cheekbones high enough and sharp enough to slice cold cuts, and indulges my desire.

From beams thicker than my thigh, hooks dangle, Spanish question marks that ask a question for which I wish I had no answer. But I do; I know what happens in this place and I wish so hard I didn’t. I’m a city girl, born and raised. My meat used to come with price tags and a dose of carbon monoxide to keep it red. But here, meat moved in herds.

The village has survivors and they’ve gathered, the half dozen of them wrapped in clothes that will never know good days. My gaze zooms in. Pans and scans. Breaks everything into can-deal chunks. Takes in the nest these once-people have created. Bones and rust-colored straw litter the barn. Decaying gore. Old bones, judging from the meatless sheen, from chickens and other livestock. They’ve been picked clean, snapped in two, the marrow slurped from their centers. Heaps of cans rust in the corners. Empty food wrappers form a carpet that will never rot. Tools hang on the walls, abandoned. No more harvests under a bulging autumn moon.

One of the villagers breaks away, crawls across the floor to a wooden bucket jerked from a well, but his pose is anything but penitent. A row of jagged bones forms painful-looking spikes along his spine. They shudder as he swallows. When he’s done, he sits on his haunches, rivulets racing down his face, dripping onto his food-stained chest. Animal blood has dried on his tattered shirt many times over, then soaked anew. The others crouch in a crude circle, staring up, up, at some object of fascination. So I follow the path of their obsession. My gaze slides along the networked beams until it catches on something blond and blue. My heart lurches.

Lisa.

Desperation and terror must have pushed her up so high. I can’t see the how, but it doesn’t matter: she made it to relative safety.

My shoulders twitch with need-to-go, need-to-get-to-her. The stranger holds me back, steers me until Lisa disappears from view. He turns us around, walks us back to the village proper.

I clutch at the damp lapels of his jacket. It’s too dark to see here, but I remember it being the drab green of all things military. “You said she was dead.”

“She is dead. Or she will be when I blow that place off the planet.”

Now I see the burden he carries: a backpack filled with secrets.

“It was you at the church, wasn’t it?”

He doesn’t confirm, only grunts.

“You can’t do it. Not with her in there. I won’t let you.”

“You have no choice.”

The jar is heavier than it looks, as though its core is filled with sand. Or maybe good intentions. Silence is the only protest as I walk it backwards and lean its top half onto the soft ottoman.

Something shifts inside. There’s a whisper like old, discarded snake skins rubbing together. A chill tiptoes down my spine’s spurred steps.

My knees dig into the beige carpet’s level loop pile as I kneel to follow Dr. Rose’s recommendation. Maybe there’s a clue here about what lies beneath. I look. Nothing. A whole lot of nothing but more of the same. Smooth, with a hint of chalkiness. It’s left a faint dusting of itself on the carpet, and I can’t help but run my fingertip across the cheap fibers. The residue is soft and silky like cornstarch.

A frustrated sigh rides my breath. I wanted there to be something. Even if it was a Made in China sticker.

This time Dr. Rose doesn’t wait for me to speak. We settle into our respective chairs and roles, or so I think until he sets his notepad aside. Instinctively, my legs cross and I lace my fingers together, clasping them over my top knee. A model of cautious propriety.

He drinks in my defensive pose with his dark gaze, then knocks it aside with his question.

“Do you want me, too?”

“Yes. And no.”

He leans back, flashes a smile that makes me wish we hadn’t met here, in this place where my mental health is a question mark.

“I’ll take that. For now.”

Inside I shiver because for now means there will be a later, and he thinks I’m worth the wait. The pursuit. But part of me flares because I turned him down, and here he is steamrolling over me like my “No, thank you” was a meaningless thing.

For a moment he watches me and I feel naked. Usually it’s just my mind feeling exposed here, but now it’s my body as well. My nipples tighten. I swallow hard.

“Did you have the dream?” he asks.

“What?”

He never goes first. Never prompts me. But here he is changing all the rules. The notebook is back on his lap and he’s sitting there, pen idle in his right hand. That much, at least, is normal.

“The jar.”

“Oh. That.” The jar, the jar, the stinking jar. The tumor in my life. The jar is like having cancer and trying to figure out where you went wrong so its growth was nurtured. Was it the butter? The margarine? Too much beef? Too much watching and waiting on the microwave to ding? What had I done that someone felt compelled to enter my home and give me an antediluvian mystery? I pick through the bones of my life looking for clues and find nothing.

“Yes,” I say.

He waits.

“It’s the color of scorched cream.” My hands reach into thin air and grasp invisible handles. And stop. They sink to my knees, massage the patella. “We do this every week and nothing changes.”

“Did you look at the bottom?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“Wherever it’s from, it’s not made in China. That I know of.”

We share a tense smile.

“What do you think is inside?” he asks.

“I couldn’t guess. Most likely nothing.”

“Have you wondered?”

“No,” I lie.

“But something has changed: this week you looked at the bottom. Next time I want you to see if you can look inside. How do you feel about that?”

My hands ball into fists. “Fine.”

Dawn comes in the same gray cloak she always wears these days. Shades of blue would be more becoming, or maybe pearls and pinks and peaches, because somewhere out there it’s spring—or should be. My eyelids fly open to the welcome feeling of no nausea and the less welcome feeling of a two-by-four beating against the inside of my skull in some kind of erratic Morse code. Pressing my hands against my stomach, I perform a half crunch and my muscles tense in protest. Concave, although slightly closer to flat than before.

“Amino acids.”

“What?”

My captor is crouched on the floor, fastening wires to a cigarette-pack-sized block of sweating plasticine.

“You still want to save your friend?”

“Yes,” I rasp.

“Be my guest.” He doesn’t look up.

“What about amino acids?”

“They are the building blocks of life. Combined in the right order, they make proteins. DNA is made of amino acids. Probably they will kill her and eat her. Human flesh has the amino acids they need.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Are you menstruating?”

“What?”

“You’re angry. Women are often angry when they menstruate. It is the hormones.”

I rub my head until the tapping subsides to a tick.

“Where do you come from?”

“Switzerland.”

“Do they teach manners there?”

He keeps working with his blocks. “They don’t teach anything there now. My country is gone. And my people.” Hard planes maketh this man. He is the Alps of his homeland in miniature: hard, unyielding, cruel.

I pick up my body, then I pick up my backpack. And I leave.

I am going to rescue Lisa. If I don’t, there’s no hope for the child growing inside me. I need to be able to save someone.

Purple paper does not flatter Stiffy, but that’s what Ben wants.

“The bright color will make people look,” he says.

Who am I to argue? I’ve got a soft spot for that hunk of orange fur with the Kiss my ass, but not too close attitude. A roll of tape gets dumped on top of the paper stack.

“Put them everywhere. Cover other people’s lost pets if you have to.” He takes off, shoving fliers at all available warm bodies. Purple paper floats to the ground, but Ben doesn’t notice that people think he’s just another loon with something to shill.

The opposite direction is mine. I’m more conservative as I tape Stiffy’s face to walls and poles. I smile at a few people, but they glance away, focused on their own troubles. At the end of the block I turn back. That’s what we agreed to. Ben and I meet in the middle outside our apartment building.

His top lip twitches beneath his crusty nose. When I ask how he is, he shrugs.

“Just a cold,” he says. “And I think maybe I’m pregnant, because I’m always riding the porcelain bus, or thinking about it.” He sounds like honking geese when he laughs. “I’m happy now, though, because someone’s going to find Stiffy. He’ll be back by tonight, I know it.”

He’s wrong. The fliers yield nothing more than a handful of obscene calls and one guy with a Korean accent inquiring about a job. Stiffy shows up a week later, gaunt and matted and filthy from some adventure that only makes sense to him. He saunters through my window with his usual nonchalance and takes the front-row seat in front of the jar.

Something cold and scaly uncoils in my gut.

“Stiffy.”

Usually he’ll glance up at me, rub my shins, make noises about food. But this time he employs selective hearing and ignores me. When I approach him, he spits, lashes out, nothing like the cat I know. I shut the window and call Ben. The phone rings in stereo, through the floor and in my ear. Nine rings. I dial again. Three more and he picks up.

“Hold on.” His throat forces out noises that sound like he’s coughing up a hairball. “I can’t stop puking,” he says, but he makes an effort when I tell him I have his cat.

A minute later he’s busting through my door, his skin waxen, his breath acidic and foul.

“Stiffy!” He rushes to hug his cat.

Ben leaves with a spring to his step. The last image I see of Stiffy is the marmalade cat wide-eyed and unblinking, staring at the jar over his owner’s shoulder.

SIX

New physiology brought with it change to old patterns. Humans infected with White Horse mutated in unpredictable ways. Ninety percent died. Of the remaining ten percent, maybe half were immune. The other five mutated in a way that was survivable. Unless pushed by career or some other drive such as the burning desire to beat the next level on a video game, humans are not nocturnal. Oh, we can do it, of course, but never wrench from it the satisfaction that comes from sleeping nights.

But in this leftover world, in the dying gasp of humanity, some things now hunt at night. Which means during the day they sleep….

The once-woman twitches like a dog mid-dream. Is there enough human in her that she dreams of an exorbitant shopping trip in Milan, or has her mind slipped into the primordial stew where her single-cell body propels itself to its next meal with a whip-like flagella?

All six creatures are sleeping like obscene, fattened kittens nestled in the straw. Their mouths chew in their sleep, but they’ll stop when the Swiss blows this barn clear off the field. These stones have withstood earthquakes, weather, and war, but they will crumble in a duel with plastic explosives.

Lisa. I have to get her. I can’t leave her here.

She’s crouched in the same wooden intersection, knees drawn to her chest as though they’re a shield that will keep the monsters at bay, the equivalent of a blanket warding away the bogeyman.

When I move several inches to the left to gain a better view inside the barn, Lisa’s head jerks as though she’s spotted me. But it’s a lie. Her eyes are flat and lifeless. She’s given up. Probably thinks I’m dead, or as good as, too.

Please don’t let her move. While the creatures sleep, there is a chance.

The backpack slides off my shoulders. I cover several dozen feet and drop it at the base of a tree. The paring knife is already in my pocket, and a moment later I am wielding the cleaver. It has good balance.

Please don’t let me need to use it. Would that my wish held more magic than a prayer.

The barn has one set of doors. A rusted padlock is a broken arm dangling from an equally oxidized latch. It’s a low building with the characteristic red roof that dots the Italian countryside like the measles. Three windows. One on each wall that doesn’t have a door. None are large enough even if they did open. Which leaves me with the door and hinges so old they’ll sing soprano at the first touch.

I pray Lisa can hold on.

At the house, the Swiss is poking through a metal box. He slaps it shut as I stride past him with silent purpose, straight to the tiny galley kitchen.

“Were you unlucky?”

“No.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Nothing.” I pull a gallon can of olive oil from its hiding place beneath the narrow strip of counter. There are no cabinets below, just curtains concealing pots, pans, and baking goods from polite company.

“Olive oil?”

“No kitchen in Italy is complete without it.”

“You can’t save her,” he tells my back. “They probably ate what was left of the other villagers. They won’t care about your stupid friend.”

It’s not just college grades that fall in a curve. Human decency is bell-shaped, with some of us slopping over the edges. Saints on one end, sinners on the other—if you want to be biblical. There’s no way of knowing where these posthumans fall, how much of the person is driving the meat bus.

I can’t play the genetic lottery with Lisa’s life. I’m armed only with my own good intentions.

Oil slops over the hinges, seeps between the metal cracks. I pray to a God I don’t really have faith in just so I feel like I have company, but He doesn’t answer. Minutes tick by. I wait as long as I dare; I don’t know how long the posthumans will sleep. For all I know, they’re like dogs, sleeping with one ear open, waiting for food to fall on the floor in the next room.

Behind the dense high clouds, the sun is a spot of lighter gray. Morning is here in full. Enough light that I can peer through the window and tack together some kind of rescue plan.

The door barely complains as I inch my body through the narrow slit I’ve made. And then I’m in a scratch-and-sniff snapshot of hell. The church was just a warm-up. These things sleep here. They shit here. They eat here amongst their own filth.

My boots poke holes in the straw. I look down because I don’t want to step in the brown sludge piles littering the floor. In places it’s thick, like a melted-down mud hut. It is this disjointed dance of one hesitant step after the other that carries me to the beam holding Lisa.

One of the beings stirs.

I hold my breath until it settles again.

Hold.

The pressure stings. Carbon dioxide burns my lungs, but I don’t dare release too soon.

Hold.

Tears fill my eyes.

On the barn floor, the creature is still once more, lost in its wretched dreamworld.

Quietly, I mouth to Lisa, then reprimand myself for forgetting. So I wrap the word in softened breath.

Lisa’s lips move, forming the shape of my name.

Matted, bloody hair clings to her right ear in a red poultice. Her right eye is beaten to a blackened slit. They must have knocked her out to bring her here, although I haven’t yet figured out how they got to her and not me. She must have gone exploring after I fell asleep, probably through a window, because the door was blocked by what there is of me.

No. Something must have lured her. There’s no way she’d go alone.

Idiot kid.

Thank God she’s alive.

Blood flakes from the red-brown crust around her mouth. She seems even thinner than yesterday. Her legs are compasses bent at tight angles beneath the denim. I want to cry. I want to hug her. I want to shake the stupid from her bones.

There’s the scraping of the doors closing and locking as the rusted parts rub together.

I run to the doors.

“No,” I whisper as loud as I dare. “Don’t do this.”

His voice is as cold as winter in his homeland. “They’re an abomination. I warned you.”

“You prick.”

“If you can survive this, maybe your life is worth saving.”

“Your logic is flawed.”

“Is it?” He sounds surprised.

“I’m going to Brindisi, and I’ll be damned if some cheese maker is going to lock me in a barn and blow me off the planet. I haven’t come all that way for this.”

“Have you heard of Charles Darwin?”

“Origin of Species. Natural selection. I picked up that bit of trivia before I went to work for Pope Pharmaceuticals.” Sarcasm is my intention, but it sounds like desperation.

He falls quiet.

“Hello?”

The locks scrape. The sound is an alarm clock for the sleeping beasts. Sleep falls from them in ragged sheets. Enough of their stuffing is still human that they wake in a fog, clawing at their eyes, trying to figure why they woke prematurely. Who knows if they’ve conquered caffeine addiction yet?

“Lisa?” I scan the barn, search the seams for a way up. “How did you get up there?” But then I spot the heap of rotting sticks on the ground. Leftover ladder parts.

Think, Zoe. Harder.

Being quiet won’t save us now—only being fast.

“Lisa, you’re going to have to jump.”

Her head and body shake with the idea.

A slit appears between the door and jam. The Swiss stares at me, eyes devoid of warmth. “On the Origin of Species, to be precise. I am Swiss. People rely on our watches for their accuracy.”

I risk it all in one harsh breath. “Lisa!”

Her head jerks up. Her mind engages long enough to understand my demand. I snap my fingers, give her an aural goal. Move toward me, not them. That way lies madness; she’s known enough of that for all the lifetimes of all the people left in the world.

Three sets of eyes swivel toward me. Two more don’t. The largest male, a man maybe forty years old before White Horse, pins one of the females to the floor facedown, mounts her like a four-legged creature. She squirms beneath him, but only until he bangs her face on the shit-crusted planks. The others crawl towards me, their backs hunched and tense. The sixth villager staggers to her feet. She spasms like a puppet tied to strings, then her joints seem to melt and her bones no longer hold her upright.

White Horse kills a hostage. The once-woman’s body seizes, flinging straw with dying fingers. For a moment, the scene reminds me of macaroni art. A second woman scrambles to her side. She pulls the other close, smoothes the snarled hair with a ruined hand, cradles her until Death rides away with his prize.

“Now!”

For a moment Lisa hangs in the balance, until gravity tucks a finger in her shirt pocket and pulls. Then she’s falling like a pretty pebble.

I collapse under the weight of her, but refuse to stay down. My will to survive is our trebuchet. I shove her ahead of me, squeeze her through the door’s gap into the light, thrust myself into what’s left of the space.

It’s the still-human sobbing that jerks me still. The world is filled with tears; these should be drips in an overflowing bucket. I should be immune. But I still have a heart, and it rushes to sympathize.

I taste their grief when I bite down on my lip. It’s salt with a hint of winter.

The Swiss snatches a fistful of my shirt, drags me backwards.

“Don’t be a fool,” he says. He locks the doors in silence, although the silence is only his. There’s Lisa’s crying. Then there’s me.

“They’re still people.”

“They’re an abomination,” he says. “Unnaturally selected because of a disease we made.”

I don’t ask how he knows about the disease’s origins or how much. Not now. Later, maybe. Right now I want to check on Lisa and get us moving again.

We go as far as the tree where I left my backpack, she and I. Pink rivers take the southern course down her youthful skin, more rain than blood. Her chin is awash with strawberry fluids. The cuts on her head don’t appear to be serious, although there is no way of knowing how deep the damage goes. Could be she’s a time bomb, the seconds ticking away until the pressure inside her skull squeezes the delicate pink hemispheres and… pop.

“Hurry,” the Swiss says. He’s sneaked up on us. “The doors are locked, but they might find another way.” He nods at Lisa. “She will recover.”

“What are you, a doctor?”

“Yes.” Equally blunt. He grabs her chin, tilts it up. “As I said, she will be fine.”

“Are you okay?” I ask.

Lisa’s nod blurs into a shake.

“How did they get you?”

Another shake.

“Her eye is gone.” He shoves up her eyelid, revealing a bleeding hole where there used to be a whitish orb with a pretty gray-green center. “Perhaps they popped it out like a grape. The soft bits are a delicacy.”

“Lisa, baby girl, how did it happen?”

She lifts her head from the Swiss’s hands. In her lap, her fingers curl like dying leaves. They’re wet with tears. “I don’t know,” she murmurs. “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Beneath the worn cotton, her shoulders tremble.

The Swiss isn’t done speculating. “The stupid child did this to herself.”

I stand, pull on my backpack, help Lisa to her feet. I need to get her fed and cleaned, then get her away from here before the once-humans find that way out.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I ask him.

“She’s blind.”

“She always was.”

“And yet, she wanders out here unsupervised. She’s a fool and a liability. You should not trust anyone,” he says. “Not even her.”

“Shut up,” I say. “Just shut up.” But he’s planted a seed and now the vines of it are creeping through my mind.

“Have you looked inside the jar yet, Zoe?”

“No. I know I have to.”

Dr. Rose’s voice gives me confidence. He washes me in calm.

“If you’re going to move past this, you have to look inside.”

“I know.”

“I know that you know.” Our smiles meet and touch in the center of the room, the way our bodies never will.

By the time I reach my apartment my mettle has melted, leaving only fear.

“He’s going to blow up the barn,” I tell Lisa. “I can’t stop him.”

The bicycle is heavy with food again, all of it canned, from the village’s pantries. I found bandages and antibiotic cream that she now keeps in the waterproof pocket of her rain jacket.

We stand on the road we crossed just yesterday, the world still and damp around us. Then it explodes and fire fills the sky. We don’t fall to the ground this time. We stand and watch and I am not glad the barn is no more. All I can do now is hope those people found a sort of peace.

“I thought I was going to upchuck again,” Lisa says as we watch that piece of our past burn. Her voice is pale and numb. “I heard the rain stop, so I went out for fresh air. I got lost, couldn’t find the window to climb back in. I heard them coming. Making noises like dogs, they were. I didn’t know they weren’t dogs. Not at first. Not until I woke up in the barn. I was trying to get out when I found a ladder, so I climbed it.”

“What happened to your eye?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“You’ll think I’m stupid. A stupid blind girl.”

“A stupid person wouldn’t have climbed that ladder.”

For a moment she fades away. Shock is still lingering around her edges.

“It wasn’t the dog people. There was something sharp in the wood. A nail, maybe. A big, fat nail. See? I’m so stupid. No one will love me now. Not with one eye.”

An invisible line scratched in the ground between us stops me from crossing the breach. And I’m all out of useful words.

“I was supposed to get a Guide dog, before all this. I always wanted a dog. Dogs love you no matter what.”

“What happened?”

“My dad said we didn’t need another mouth to feed.”

She turns away.

I don’t know why I’m perpetuating the lie. Maybe because it’s like an express train: once the journey’s started, there’s no changing tracks until the end of the line. Or maybe I’m just a bad person. But I don’t really believe that.

“I dreamed about the jar again last night,” I start, and then I stop, spread my fingers wide enough that I can massage both temples with my thumb and middle finger. “Actually, no. No, I didn’t dream about the jar at all.”

He’s wearing his business face: smooth, nonjudgmental, eyes bright with awareness. Nowhere can I catch a glimpse of the man who showed interest in knowing more about who I am when I’m not playing a basket case on this couch. He glances down at the notepad, scribbles, lifts his gaze to meet mine.

“Do you feel like that’s progress?”

“What did you just write?”

He stretches back in the chair and, in a blatantly male move, rubs his hand across his stomach. Through his shirt, I can see it’s hard, flat, lightly defined.

“Does it matter?” he asks.

“Probably not. I’m just curious.”

His laugh is tight.

“What?”

“I can’t convince you to open the jar, but you want to look at what I’m writing.”

“Maybe I want to know what you really think about me.” My legs cross. I lean forward. Give him a look Sam once told me was equal parts trouble and seduction. Guilt flashes like lighting in my mind, then disappears. We’re doctor and patient. No, client. That’s what he said. But I can’t help reacting to him any more than he can help sitting there with his legs apart, hand on his stomach, all but pointing the way to his cock. Our bodies do what they do—sometimes without our permission.

“So tell me: Am I crazy?”

He breathes deep through his nose then laughs. “Here.” The pad flies across the short distance. My insides crackle with trepidation and excitement.

Milk.

Toilet paper.

Call mom after 7.

Renew gym membership.

Oranges.

The words drip-filter into my brain.

“It’s a shopping list.”

“My secret’s out. I need a shopping list. Otherwise I get to the store and forget what I need. Don’t tell anyone my weakness. My reputation’s on the line.”

“You make shopping lists during our session?”

“Not just yours. And not just shopping lists. Sometimes I doodle. Or I make notes for a research project that’s been floating around in my head since college.”

“So you don’t listen?”

“I listen.” His smile unfurls slowly until I’m awash in its beam, but it’s like sunshine on a winter day, impotent to thaw the growing freeze inside me. “I just don’t take notes. Many psychologists don’t. It’s just that clients feel better if we do.”

“The jar is real,” I blurt. “As real as that chair you’re sitting on.” I rub my face in my hands. “It’s not a dream. It’s never been a dream. It just showed up one day out of nowhere.”

My words tear a hole in our rapport. Like shutters closing, his smile, his warmth, his wanting, flip out of sight, leaving the detached doctor in his place.

“It was never a dream?”

“No.”

Tap, tap, tap. Pen on paper. Not making a list this time.

“Tell me about it.”

We hang in a chilly cocoon of silence. I can’t tell if I’m the only one experiencing the freeze. Do you feel it? I want to ask. Do you feel anything? But to be fair, he doesn’t yet know the nature or scope of my lie.

I tell him everything. The facts. He already knows how it makes me feel. In return, he watches me with regard so cold I shiver in the patch of afternoon sun creeping across the building.

“Why now?”

“I had to tell you. I couldn’t keep it in anymore.”

“Why lie to begin with?”

“I didn’t want you to think I was crazy. Or worse: stupid. It snowballed from there. I didn’t know how to untangle the web.”

“I was on your side, Zoe.”

Was.

Tap, tap, plonk. He drops the pen onto the pad, sets it aside.

“I don’t know what I can do for you. You need the police, not a psychologist. Unless you make a habit of lying, in which case I can give you a referral.”

I stand, back ramrod straight, shoulders back, chin up, and tuck my purse up under my arm.

“Not necessary. Thank you for your time, Dr. Rose.”

I’m out in the hall, almost to the elevator, before I remember I’ve forgotten to pay him. Hastily scribbling a check, I try not to care that our time together is over, that I’ve brought this upon myself.

When I slink back into his office, he’s still there, sitting in his chair, forehead furrowed. He doesn’t look at me as I come in. He doesn’t look at me when I stand in front of him. And he doesn’t look at me when I hold out the check and let it flutter to the floor.

He looks at me when I grab the collar of his shirt with both hands and kiss him like I’ll die if I don’t.

And he watches me when I walk away without speaking a word. At least, that’s what I hope as I stride down the hall with my heart in my shoes.

The Swiss catches up to us a mile down the road.

“What’s in Brindisi?”

“A boat.”

“Ah. So there is a man.”

“Sometimes a boat is just a boat.”

“So you’re a doctor?” I ask, sometime later.

“Yes.”

I wait but he doesn’t offer more. “What’s your specialty?”

“Your people would call me a killer, America.”

It takes a moment, but the penny drops and circles the wishing well before clinking onto the pile. “You’re a…” I flail around searching for something not made of blunt, crude edges. “Reproductive health specialist.”

His laugh is a dry hack. “Americans. Afraid to call things what they are. Abortion. Amongst other things. Mostly I am a scientist.”

Don’t do it, I command myself, but my body betrays me. My hand goes to my stomach. Just a tiny movement. Momentary. But the Swiss sees it.

“You are pregnant.”

I neither confirm nor deny.

“You should get rid of it.”

Lisa has lagged behind, her hand resting on the bicycle’s metal tail. The Swiss watches me watching her.

“People are made of dark corners, America.”

“Do you need a break?” I call out over my shoulder.

“It is probably a monster,” he continues, “that thing inside you. Like those creatures in the barn.”

Lisa shakes her head, trots to catch up to the Swiss, curls her fingers around the strap dangling from his backpack. The tap of the broom handle resumes.

“What’s your help going to cost me?”

“I will tell you. When it is time.”

I don’t ask. I don’t dare.

The last time I see Ben, he’s hunched over like he’s waiting on a spinal tap. Of course, it’s not like I know I’ll never see him again. There is no Rod Serling voice in my head. This is it. Say your good-byes. You have now entered the Twilight Zone.

“Man,” Ben says when I inquire after his health. “I need a new bed or something. My back’s killing me.”

He sleeps on a couch in his living room, amongst his precious high-tech setup. Ben’s apartment is the belly of a robot, red and green LEDs announcing the health status of the system at any given moment.

“You could just regenerate.” I point to one of the few organic components in the room, a cardboard mock-up of a Borg regeneration chamber.

“Don’t mock the Borg. One day we’re gonna be living in a Star Trek world. Not in this lifetime. But one day.”

I hold up the bag in my hand. “How does Chinese grab you?”

“Me so hungry. Hope I can keep it down. It’s been a couple of days since…” He points a finger at his open mouth, mimes puking.

We divvy up beef and broccoli, fried rice, sweet-and-sour pork, and some kind of shrimp I can’t pronounce. I’d pointed to it on the menu to save myself the tongue twist. And while we watch his screen saver contort on the triple wide screens, I ask about Stiffy.

“Don’t know,” he says. “Haven’t seen him.”

My chopsticks catch on the box’s flap. A shrimp flies overhead, lands on the couch. Ben snatches it up and crams the naked crustacean into his food-flecked mouth.

“I haven’t seen him, either. Want me to help hand out fliers?”

“Nah. He’ll show up when he gets hungry enough.”

“I’ll have a look for him later.”

“Whatever, man.”

Thirty-seven is the official number of cats in my apartment building. Forty-one if you consider Mrs. Sark on the sixth floor has four more cats than she lets on. It helps that they’re blood brothers and all answer to “Mr. Puss-puss.”

Forty-one cats.

One day they go wandering, as cats are wont to do, never to come home.

SEVEN

Shit, piss, fuck.” The curses fly from the mouth of a lab technician struggling to grow facial hair with more substance than fuzz. His name is Mike Schultz. “All of them.”

The mice are dead. Like he said, all of them. I know because I found them when I came through with the industrial wet vac.

Jorge is standing across from me, arms crossed, a victory dance of string lights illuminating his eyes. He shakes his head as though this is a tragedy, as if dozens of dead mice matter. And they do —just not to him. I’ve seen the stuffed squirrel heads dangling from his rearview mirror.

Schultz rubs his forehead. “Shit.”

“Looks like somebody screwed up.” Jorge stares straight at me when he says it.

“I’m sorry,” I tell Schultz. “They were like that when I got here.”

“Not your fault.” He stabs a button on the wall panel.

We stand there staring at the dead mice, and I try not to care.

A minute later, footsteps knock out a determined beat on the floor. Then the big guy appears. This worries me because George P. Pope never comes down here. I’ve never met him, but his grinning face greets me in the lobby every morning. Choose Pope Pharmaceuticals, he says on the screen, with a smile that’s supposed to be reassuring, fatherly. Pope Pharmaceuticals considers you part of the family. Without it he appears vulpine. Perhaps he really is larger than life, or maybe he’s a physically huge man. I can’t gauge his real size. Either way, we all shrink back to make him fit, even the woman who clings to his heels. She’s a blonde so pale, she blends and swirls until she’s one with her crisp lab coat.

There are rumors about Pope, of hookers and blow and of a wife no one has ever seen or met. Some say she’s a scientist and he keeps her locked away creating the drugs that Pope Pharmaceuticals stockholders love so much. Some say she’s a great beauty who spends her days prowling the streets of Europe for the latest fashions. One thing they all agree on is that no one here has ever seen her.

Jorge and I are invisible for now.

“What have we got?” he snaps at Schultz.

“Dead mice.”

“What, all of them?” Planting himself in front of the cages, he tests Mike’s hypothesis and discovers it holds true. The mice are all dead. Not sleeping. Not faking. Then he realizes Jorge and I exist.

“One of you found them?”

“Me,” I say.

“And you are?”

“Zoe Marshall.”

He weighs my response and finds it lacking. “Did you do anything different in your routine?”

“No.” I run down the list of things to do, which never varies.

“Any new cleaning products?”

I open my mouth to answer, but Jorge leaps in wearing a brown nose.

“No, sir. Same old, same old.”

Pope waits and I know it’s me he wants to speak.

“We’ve been using the same products since I began working here,” I say.

“New perfumes, creams—has anything at all changed? Think hard.”

Only the jar. But that has nothing to do with here and a pile of dead mice.

“No,” I say.

Pope claps once, rubs his hands together as though he’s grinding this incident to dust. “Right,” he says. “Maybe it’s something we’re feeding them, then, eh?”

He strides out, shoulders straight, head up. Fists clenched. Gait absolute. The woman follows. From the bob of her hair I can tell her mouth is busy asking questions his back isn’t answering.

Pope Pharmaceuticals considers you part of the family.

Jorge follows me into the changing rooms at the end of shift. “You don’t need this job.”

I say nothing.

“My cousin coulda had it.”

I keep on ignoring him.

“I know you live in a rich-bitch apartment.”

I don’t bother looking at him. “You went through my employee file.”

“I no say nothing.”

“Then you know my mother-in-law left it to me.”

On the way to the train station I see him zoom away in his battered truck, squirrel heads swinging. The truck’s bumper wears a sticker: Jesus Is My Co-pilot.

We find a car abandoned on the roadside. There is enough gas to take us twenty-two kilometers. The Swiss drives. During that brief journey, I forget what it’s like to be wet.

When the motor splutters and gives its final death rattle, we keep walking and I forget what it’s like to be dry.

“Tell me about your work,” the Swiss says. I am hunkered down under a tree, figuring out how far we have to go. A hundred kilometers, give or take. Best case, five days. It’s March tenth. That means I have nine days before the Elpis will come and go with or without me, not to return for another month. If at all.

I fold up the map, stow it in my backpack. “There’s nothing to tell. I clean. At least, I used to.”

“A cleaner who knows Darwin.”

“I know a lot of things.”

On the other side of the tree, Lisa is opening cans of mystery meat.

My stomach growls.

“What did you clean?”

“Floors. Cages.”

“At Pope Pharmaceuticals,” he says. “This is what you told me at the barn.”

“Yes. Have you heard of it?”

“It is well-known in the medical community. What did you do before?”

“I had a job where someone else did the cleaning.”

He watches me eat.

When we’re moving again he asks, “Who is the father of your child? Do you know?”

“Yes.”

“Too many women don’t.”

Lisa is limping.

“Blisters,” he says. “Tend to them, otherwise she will get an infection and you will have saved her for nothing.”

The envelope arrives on a Friday. It’s clean, white, has my name printed on the front in a masculine hand I instantly recognize.

I place it on the coffee table and stare at it, unopened. The room bulges with elephants: first the jar, now this.

The phone rings. The machine picks up.

James’s voice floods my apartment. “How’s my favorite woman? Listen, Raoul asked me to call. He wants to know if you’ve opened the jar yet. If not, we’ll pick you and it up and X-ray it. What do you think? Say yes. I’ll be your best friend.”

I pick up the envelope. Light. Flimsy. Although maybe it contains the emotional equivalent of anthrax within its paper walls. My finger catches the tacked flap and tears.

Zoe, I can’t accept this, we didn’t finish the session. Whether it’s a dream or not, open the jar. Truth is best.

It’s signed simply: Nick.

My check falls from the envelope, floats and sways to the floor.

James answers on the third ring. “Zoe!” he says; then: “Raoul, he’s not here.”

Raoul calls, “Socrates, Socrates,” from another room.

“Hey, I can call back.”

“No, no, it’s nothing. You know cats. They come home when they’re ready.”

Unless they don’t.

I think of Stiffy, and how he hasn’t shown up yet, and how Ben doesn’t care.

“So you and Raoul…” The question dangles.

“Oh, it’s on. Or it will be once he gets better. That’s why I’m at his apartment. He’s sick so I’m making my fa-a-a-mous chicken soup. So, can we do it?”

“When Raoul’s feeling better, sure.”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“Are you sure no one at the museum will mind?”

“They won’t know. And even if they did, they like a good historical mystery same as the rest of us. If it’s some kind of missing link like Raoul thinks, the board might ask if they can acquire it. Something that important would put us on the map.”

If I give it away, it won’t be my problem. But a problem passed on to other hands makes it no less so.

“Let’s do it, then.”

“Honey?” he calls into the belly of Raoul’s apartment. Raoul’s reply is distant, but moves closer as they play this affectionate game of Marco Polo. “Honey? Zoe gave us two thumbs up.”

“Maybe just one,” I say, and he laughs.

“Just one thumb.”

Raoul snatches up the phone. “We’ll take it.”

“I hope you feel better soon.”

“You’re a peach,” he croaks. “No wonder James adores you. We were supposed to fly to Miami next week but there’s a maybe-hurricane forming.”

Then he retches.

A spider crawls up my spine.

Lisa’s screams jerk me out of a hard sleep. My watch says 2:24 a.m., my body says 8:15 p.m., which is fifteen minutes after I laid my head down on my backpack, beneath the tree’s generous sprawl.

She’s different now. Bits of her have broken off. More than an eye.

I blame myself. My rational self tells me I was exhausted, that sleep was coming for me that night whether I was willing or not. Sometimes the Sandman collects what’s his regardless of the price. But my other self tells me I could have done more to protect my flock of one.

Two.

“What’s wrong?” My throat is thick with sleep fog.

“Just a dream,” the Swiss says. Tonight he keeps watch.

Two. Lisa and my unborn child. Although it’s not really a child yet, is it?

What’s happening in my belly now? I can’t remember. The events between conception and birth blur the harder I try to separate them into their individual weeks. There’s a heartbeat now, I know that. And fingernails. But I remember that from a movie, not from the skeleton crew at the makeshift clinic nor from the book the medic told me to steal because he didn’t know diddly about childbirth. He gave me vitamins and wished me good luck, because that’s all he had to give. Pregnancy isn’t important. Not now. Birth isn’t high on the priority list when everyone is dying. New life does not replace the old.

I could ask the Swiss. He would know which cells are dividing and congealing into organs, the ratio of human-looking to alien. He would know if the tiny flutters are normal.

I consider asking, but the Sandman is coming again. He’s striding across the field, one hand in the sack, digging for dust. He’s here beneath the tree, standing over me. Sleep, he says, and the fog envelops me in its arms. It pulls some of the now along with it. Just words in the Swiss’s voice.

“Stop it, England,” he says. “Dreams are for the weak.”

“Did you plan for your baby?” the Swiss asks. It’s just we two awake, suspended in that slit between darkness and light.

“No. It was a surprise.”

He starts talking then, telling me everything What to Expect When You’re Expecting never had a chance to tell me.

I have questions, fears. The Swiss fills in the blanks with facts.

“Are you sexually active?”

This is not Dr. Scott. It’s an unfamiliar face atop a white coat, which may or may not mean he’s really a physician. He told me his name when I came in, but my brain slipped a gear and cast it to the sterile, air-conditioned breeze.

“No.”

He doesn’t look like a doctor. There’s a briskness to doctors this man lacks. They’re used to running from one emergency to the next. They slip their feet into comfortable shoes, not robust boots with a firmness to the toes that indicates they’re lined with steel. These boots have not seen the inside of an emergency room. Nor have they seen construction. If I knelt, held my face close to the polished leather, I’d see a distorted version of my face. A fun-house hall of mirrors lives on his boots, reminding me that ever since the mice died last week, Pope Pharmaceuticals feels like a dream version of itself. Things aren’t quite where they’re supposed to be—nothing happens quite as it did, and while the faces are the same, the souls behind them are not. Strangers nod, smile, speak to me like they’ve worked with me for two years.

Even George P. Pope’s face in the lobby is altered. Pope Pharmaceuticals considers you part of the family, he says like he always has, but now the words feel like a lie.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. Although I don’t see how it’s any of your—”

“Any chance you might be pregnant?”

“—business. No.”

He looks like security, although I’ve seen most of the security staff around the building and in the cafeteria, and this guy isn’t one of ours. Pope Pharmaceuticals’ security force comprises men used to walking their beat under a fluorescent sun. This guy has a tan. A real one. Hard edges make up his attitude and his face. He hasn’t been counting the minutes between doughnuts.

He makes notes on a clipboard grasping papers a finger deep. Or maybe he’s checking boxes on a quiz: Are you a closet conspiracy theorist? How well do you know your sexual health?

“Have you been sick in the last month?”

“No.”

“What about in the last week?”

“I just told you. No.”

“Have you had any sickness today?”

“No.”

“Has anyone in your immediate familial or social circle experienced any illness recently?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t believe me. It’s Etch-A-Sketched all over his face in long doubting lines. At the edge of his jaw a small twitch appears, ticking in time with his clenching and releasing jaw.

“Are you sure?” He’s a robot, unable to think outside the questions on his list or the responses he’s been given to parrot. In that he is exactly like Dr. Scott.

“Positive.”

“Do you know the whereabouts of Jorge Valdez?”

I can feel my eyebrows rise. “He’s not at work?”

“When did you last see him?”

Not yesterday, because that was my day off. Nor the day before, for the same reason. The two days before those were Jorge’s days off. Last I saw of him was the Jesus sticker slapped on his truck’s rear end as he zoomed into the evening haze.

“Friday.”

No The day you found the mice or That’s interesting. Just another check on the paper.

I sit. I wait. If he touches me I will run screaming, because those are not doctor’s hands. A callus forms a thick smooth cap over his right thumb, as if he’s dipped it in yellowing wax and let it spill into the backwards L it forms with his finger. The pen is alien to his hand because it’s used to holding something designed to make a less fine point. A firearm.

Don’t touch me.

Don’t—

“You can go,” he says, although there’s a kind of calm craziness behind his eyes that suggests he’d like nothing more than to compel me to yield different answers. He reaches out to me with his left hand. We stare at each other until I break. I know he’s not a doctor. And he knows that I know.

The jar has made me paranoid. I’m seeing monsters where there are only men.

The hand stays steady, but I push off the Naugahyde-covered bed without his help. My feet hit the floor like they’re wearing cement shoes.

Ben is dead. I know this because there are people standing outside my apartment telling me so. They have the quiet disheveled appearance of cops who’ve been on their feet too many hours for too many years. I see them mouth their names, but bees have set up house deep in my ear canals. I can’t think—not with this noise.

“How?”

Their lips move in some undefinable shapes.

“Wait.” I shake my head, bend down, grab my knees. And count to ten. When I straighten, the buzzing has subsided enough for me to hear myself. “How?”

“We’re working on it,” the tall one says.

“Did you know him?” The other one is squat, like someone took the first guy and tamped him with a mallet.

“We were friends.”

Their expressions remain steady. “Anything strange about the man? Anything new?”

“He’s been sick. That’s all.”

“Sick how?” It doesn’t matter which of them speaks, it’s all coming out of the same mouth.

I tell them. They swap knowing looks like they’re passing notes in class.

“Any strange habits?”

“He was a computer geek,” I say. “Pick one.”

“Did he like to eat anything… weird?”

“Like stuff that maybe isn’t food.”

Ben snapping up the escapee shrimp replays in my mind. Maniacal? Maybe. But shrimp was definitely real food.

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Like maybe computer parts. Paper. Kitty litter. Weird like that.”

Poker face is my talent show act of choice.

“No.”

We stare at each other for a time. Until they make noises like they’re leaving and I make noises like I’d be fine with that.

No tears. It’s the strangest thing, because I know I’m crying. My body is going through the motions: quivering lips, twitching cheeks, shuddering shoulders. Yet, my eyes are the Gobi.

Nothing feels normal, not even me.

I call James, because I have a sudden need to know he’s okay.

“I’m fine,” he says. “Except for the puking. I think I’ve got what Raoul’s got.” My heart is Icarus, sailing toward the sun in one moment, spiraling to the ground in the next.

“James, do me a favor. Go to the doctor. Both of you.”

“It’s nothing. Just some bad food, probably. You okay?”

“I’m fine,” I parrot. We are liars, the two of us.

We say our good-byes amidst the accumulating doom, but only I can feel its heft on my shoulders, riding me into the ground, because I know Ben is dead.

I wander into the living room to gather my thoughts and my purse. The jar is there. Of course. It’s always there. Omnipresent and omniscient.

Poor Ben. Poor, poor, socially inept Ben. And poor Stiffy, the cat who never came back.

My mind is a millstone churning the grit into a more palatable form. Into something of which I can make sense. One moment Ben cared enough about his cat that he risked the ridicule of strangers, the next he shrugged away the cat’s disappearance over fried rice.

The cat. It started with the cat sitting in my living room, staring at the jar like it mattered. Which means it didn’t start with the cat at all.

I dial the super. When I ask him my question, I can feel him struggling to formulate a number. After a long pause, during which he chews and swallows, he abandons the specific for the facile.

“Half the building, easy. Plumbing can’t keep up. Everybody’s flushing all the time.”

EIGHT

The clouds lift their petticoats for just a short time, long enough for the sun to dazzle us. We three lie spread-eagle in the middle of an arterial road and soak up all she has to offer.

For a moment the world is new and glorious. We forget death. And I forget to keep watch.

That’s when the strangers appear.

At first the shimmer-people don’t seem human. And who knows, they might not be. It’s too late to run now. The bushes are over there, a good sixty-second sprint away, while the open land on the eastern lip of the highway is no friend to a person in need of a hiding place—let alone three.

Their number is also three and they, too, sit beneath the sun, luxuriating in her smile. The road has worn them as it has us, until they’re little more than coat hangers for clothing long past its wear-by date. They’re thin, tired, and when they do notice us it’s with the same measure of suspicion.

I stand and my counterpart rises. My hand lifts in a greeting. As does hers.

“It’s a mirage,” the Swiss says, from his place on the blacktop.

My hand drops. So does my other’s. I feel a fool.

“Oh.”

Lisa covers her mouth with both hands. Her good eye crinkles at the edges like what she would call crisps, but what I remember as potato chips.

I strip off my coat, my shirt and spread them out over the dry asphalt. Then I lie beside my clothes and imagine I’m on a beach with a bed of hot sand to cradle me.

The next time we see a person, he is not a mirage, although at first I mistake the disembodied head for a basketball. The ball bobs along the horizon until shoulders appear, and a body below that.

Italy is known for its leather, and this man’s face is a testament to that: brown and smooth, baked by decades of sun. Patina, the salesperson would brag if he were trying to sell me a leather chair. His skin is stretched over a lean, muscular frame, suggesting he was fit even before the end. He takes long, purposeful strides. This is a man who knows where he is going or at least presents the illusion of being on the right path.

“There’s one of him and three of us,” the Swiss says.

The man draws closer. A cupped hand shades his eyes. His feet lose their certainty.

“Ciao.” He halts, cocks his head as though he expects the words to echo back.

“Hi,” I say.

He raises both hands and gives a smile made of shattered piano keys.

The Swiss calls out, “Parli Inglese?”

The newcomer stops, holds up his index finger and thumb, presses them together.

“Little.”

He’s military. Or was. Or knew someone well enough that he borrowed their uniform. Or killed for it. But his boots, though battered, cling to his feet like a second skin, which leads me to believe he served.

“Hello, friends. I am come from Taranto.”

“Is it bad there?” the Swiss asks.

The soldier shrugs. “Is bad everywhere, friend.”

As it turns out, his idea of a little is my idea of a lot. The gaps in his English he fills with Italian.

“A ship came in a month ago full of dead mans. It crashed into the port. Boom.” His hands draw a fireball in the air. “There was one still aboard. He was crazy. He stands on that ship and laughs while the dead mans burn. I never see such a thing.”

“Were you in the war?” I ask.

“No. I was here. I helped guard our enemies in the…”

“Concentration camps,” the Swiss supplies.

The soldier’s nod is weighted down by his former job. “Yes. We put our enemies there when the war started. When the disease came…” He draws a grisly line across his throat.

Dusk arrives while we talk, and with it, dinnertime.

“Is he cute?” Lisa asks.

I look at the soldier so I can tell her the truth. “He might have been, once. He has a nice face, though. Kind eyes.”

“Do you think he’s married?”

“He’s not wearing a ring.”

Lisa feels her way up the bicycle’s skeleton; it’s leaning against a tree. Her lips move slightly as she counts the supplies by touch. The too-small number draws lines on her forehead.

“Do we have to feed him? We don’t have much.”

“He eats with us,” I say.

“Why?”

“Remember what I said about holding on to what makes us human?”

“Yes.”

“That’s why he eats with us.”

The men are talking some distance away while Lisa and I pick through our canned goods. The Swiss breaks away, pulls a small box from his hand, and places it in my palm.

“Matches?”

“It’s dry enough for a fire tonight. Make one.” He and the soldier melt into the oncoming night before I have a chance to ask questions.

I’ve never made a fire before, not like this, out in the open. But I know I can do it.

“Let’s take the wrappers off the cans,” I say to Lisa. “We need the paper.”

“Where did they go?”

“They didn’t say.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know much. Not as much as him.”

“That’s true enough. A few months ago I was living a normal life, doing a whole lot of not much, and a couple weeks ago I was stopping a rape in progress so that a young woman might have a chance at survival. Who knows what he was learning during that time.”

“Thanks,” she says. “I don’t think I ever said that.”

“You’re welcome. I’d do it again.”

“Because you have to?”

“Because it’s the right thing. And because I like you.”

“Even though I’m stroppy and ungrateful?”

I manage a laugh. “You’re stroppy, ungrateful, and prettier than me.”

“Am I really?” Her face glows with pleasure.

“Much prettier.”

“Do you think he could love me?”

“The Swiss?”

She nods.

“If he can’t, it’s not your fault. We’re all different now.”

“I can fix him,” she says. “And he can fix me.”

If only wishes weren’t white-colored horses.

An uncomfortable silence choke-holds us. The Swiss is no prophet, and yet, Lisa still faces the direction in which he disappeared as though she can bring him back with sheer wanting. Man as Mecca.

The fire sputters, limps across still-damp limbs until the residual moisture sizzles to steam. I sit back on my haunches, satisfied and worried. Stare into the flame as though it can foretell the future.

A crack whips through the night.

Lisa leaps from her invisible prayer rug. Hugs the fire.

Another crack.

I know the sound. I’ve heard it on television and in the streets after the war and disease struck. Gunshots.

The soldier must have a gun. That’s not unreasonable. It’s a tool of his trade, just like a mop was mine. At least, I hope it’s him and not some unnamed foe.

What if he is the enemy?

“We should hide,” I say. If that’s not them, we’re sitting here with a beacon, announcing our position. My cheeks flush hotter as my ire rises. We’re two little sitting ducks, Lisa and I, rendered helpless because two men told me what to do and I followed orders as though their will was more substantial than my own.

Lisa won’t come. “He’ll come back for us.”

“We have to rescue ourselves.”

“Go, then. I’m staying.”

“If there’s something out there, it’ll come straight for us. The fire has made sure of that.”

“I don’t care.”

We stay, Lisa hugging her knees by the fire and me staring into the dark, keeping the monsters at bay with the sheer force of my will. The minutes slouch by. The night settles into its easy chair for the duration. I lean against the tree’s stiff bark.

“If you want to sleep, I’ll keep watch.”

Lisa stares blindly at me through the flames. The fire is a thin mask concealing her emotions. I never noticed before, but fire is not constant. It’s a shifting landscape of peaks and valleys. Mountains rise and fall only to soar again before sinking. When one flame dies, another surges and takes its place. This topographical dance takes place on Lisa’s face. From here she appears to be melting upwards, rivulets of her pouring into the gradient. A possible future has slipped through some crack in time to taunt me. I see Lisa’s skin shrivel away like celluloid, what little fat she has bubbling until it’s nothing more than a residue in the air, in my lungs, on my skin.

A memory chooses that moment to step forward, as though it’s been waiting a lifetime for this. The voice belongs to Derek Keen, back row, ninth-grade science.

If you can smell a fart, it means you’re breathing in molecules of the farter’s shit.

That one earned him a detention, but more important it won him a grudging Technically you’re correct, Mr. Keen from a teacher rarely pleased. Mr. Crane. I wonder if he died from White Horse. Surely not. He was an artifact from antiquity even then. James, in later years, used to joke about how he wished he could carbon-date Mr. Crane’s face.

I don’t want Lisa to burn. Not in the future and not now. I don’t want to suck molecules of her into my lungs, where they’ll mingle with me.

The crunch of boots on grass drags me from my morbid fantasy. The soldier emerges first.

“We bring food,” he declares. When he grins it transforms him. This man is proud to provide. He’s a trained protector, although from the victory in his eyes it’s clear this is not simply a learned skill but part of his fabric. For this I must thank him in his own tongue.

“Grazie.”

He laughs, hugs me, slaps my back. “Good, good.”

The Swiss melts into the golden aura wearing a dead goat across his shoulders like a biblical portent of evil. The beast’s head hangs at an unnatural angle, its throat a gaping second mouth. When he drops it at the fire’s edge, I see where the bullets have punched through its hide.

“You already shot it. Did you have to cut its throat, too?” I ask.

“How else do you expect the blood to drain? Cook it.”

Lisa leaps up, stumbles from the circle. The sound of her retching drowns out the insect cries.

“My experience with meat is limited to what’s in the supermarket in neat packets,” I say. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not willing to learn.” From my backpack, I draw out the cleaver with its honed edge. My hands shake.

The soldier takes the Swiss’s rope. “I will help.”

Though there is abundant light, the Swiss’s eyes remain hard and dark. He crouches by the fire. “It is women’s work.”

We do what we must. The president’s words, just before anarchy squeezed the government from its fortresses of power. We do what we must. I’ve done that. I’m doing that. Because if I don’t, I’ll topple into the remnants of my life where I’ll languish and turn to dust.

We do what we must. The words give me no comfort as I peel the goat’s skin like it’s a bloody banana. The guts spill at my feet; I tell myself it’s just Grandma’s sausage stew heaped upon the grass. When the goat no longer looks like an animal but like a random slab of meat hanging in a butcher’s window, I wipe my eyes with my sleeve and find it wet.

The soldier appears at my elbow. “Show me.” He holds out his hand and I give him the knife.

“Where you go?”

“Brindisi.”

“Ah. For the boats, yes?”

“Yes.” The blade gains confident speed in his hands. “Have you done this before?”

“Yes. My family, they have a farm with…”

He stops, pushes his nose flat.

“Pigs?”

“And chickens. I learn very young to cut meat for my family. My father he teach me.”

“Is your family still alive, do you know?”

“They are dead. My sister… maybe. She lives in Roma with her family. And you?”

“Gone.”

His eyes are soft with empathy. “But we are here, yes?”

“For now.”

“You must have the hope.”

“Sometimes it’s hard.”

“Yes, is hard. Maybe hardest the mans and the womans have seen. But we are here.” He holds up two goat’s legs. “And tonight we have food.”

Soon we are satiated in a way none of us have known for weeks. The goat is tough, stringy, overcooked, but I don’t care. As each hot bite slides down my throat, I lose myself in a fantasy where I’m in a fine restaurant devouring a steak, and a wine waiter hovers nearby, eager to refill my glass.

The soldier tears into his portion, ripping away the fibrous tissue. “Sorry,” he says when he realizes I’m watching.

I stop chewing long enough to answer. “Don’t be. It’s good to enjoy food with friends.”

He toasts me with his canteen.

Friends. Is that what these people are to me? Lisa withdraws further daily, and the Swiss is incapable of anything warmer than a snarl. Only the soldier, the newest of our group, feels like someone in whom I could confide. Even now they remain in character. The Swiss gnaws at the meat, gaze darting around the group as though someone will wrestle him for his prize. Beside him, Lisa carves her meal into doll-sized pieces with my paring knife. Her hair is a limp greasy waterfall concealing her face as she chews and swallows.

Soon my belly swells with food, and I feel that now-familiar flutter.

Stabbing his knife into another chunk of meat, the soldier smiles and offers me the handle. “Eat, eat.”

“I can’t. Too much food.”

“You are too skinny.” He laughs. I laugh, too, because we are all too thin, and we’d need more than just this meal to regrow our padding.

“You’ll be fat soon enough,” the Swiss says abruptly. “If that monster inside you does not die.”

I chew, swallow, wonder if the Swiss ever had manners or if this world snatched them away. The soldier looks at me.

“I’m pregnant.”

Lisa stares through the fire with her one eye, her mouth no longer moving.

“You didn’t say,” she says. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because we’ve had other things to worry about.”

“I thought you were my friend.”

The Swiss laughs. It’s not a happy sound. “Women.”

Afterward, when we’ve buried the scraps and settled around the fire, the Italian inches closer to me.

“You have bambino? I will come with you to Brindisi, make sure you are safe. My country, my people are…” He makes a motion like snapping a twig in two.

“Thank you.”

He’s a hero. Streets all over the world are littered with people just like him.

I dream of mice and broken men and all the promises I couldn’t keep. They hound me until I wake. The ground where the soldier had lain is empty. Beneath the tree’s rim of drooping branches, the Swiss stands watching the night. Although he’s not facing me, can’t know my eyes have opened, he speaks.

“The soldier left.”

“Where did he go?”

“I told you, he left.”

“Just like that? Without saying good-bye?”

“He said ciao.”

“In the dark.”

“The man changed his mind and said he wanted to find his sister, if she is still alive. I saw him back to the road and pointed the way.”

When he turns, I see he’s holding something in his hands. An icy glove grabs my heart, squeezes until I ache from the cold.

“That’s his gun.”

“He gave it to me. A gift.”

I don’t believe him. But suddenly he’s the one holding a gun and I’m holding nothing as a shield. So I say nothing. I curl up close to the fire’s humble flicker and watch as he polishes the weapon with the flap of his shirt.

I don’t say what I think. I don’t dare speak the words for fear that utterance will lend them the spark of life.

The soldier is dead. The soldier is dead. The soldier is dead.

“Raoul is gone.”

James is leaning against my apartment door, his skin on loan from Madame Tussaud’s, his breathing labored as though he’s trying to inhale soup.

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.”

We’ve been here before, one or both of us heartbroken. The evening usually ends with too many drinks and morbid tales of other past loves, but not tonight. On this night James looks as though he’s clawed his way out of a coffin. “What happened? I thought you guys really hit it off.”

“He didn’t leave.” James spits out the words like olive pits. “He’s dead. Dead. Dead.” His lanky frame folds up on itself as he sinks to the floor. “Dead.”

“Dead?”

I can’t believe it, and yet, I’m not surprised, but I can’t explain why. Only that somewhere deep, I know something I wish I didn’t.

“That’s what I said,” he cries. “I was going to fall in love with him. Maybe I already was in love and that’s why this hurts so bad. We’d already talked about getting a place out of the city eventually. Having a family.”

“What happened, baby?”

“He just died. He got sick and then he stopped breathing. Then he got cold like his fucking potsherds.”

“I’m so sorry, James. So sorry.”

“That’s not the worst of it.”

I crouch beside him, encircle his shoulders, pull him close until his head tucks into my neck’s curve. “Tell me.”

He looks up, the fine threads in his eyes blazing red. “I think I’ve got what he’s had. I think I’m going to die.”

My mouth opens but the words don’t come. And then I find them hidden in that place where you store the lies you tell the people you love so you can protect them from the world’s hard truths.

“You’re not going to die, James. I’m taking you to the emergency room, okay?”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I am, I promise. Let me get my keys.”

“I mean I don’t believe I’m not going to die. I can feel it, Zoe, waiting for me. When I fell asleep last night, Raoul was there. Only, it wasn’t my Raoul. It was Death wearing his face, same as in that new exhibit we’ve got from Africa. He loved that exhibit. He said it made him feel good to know that there was a time and place where it was socially acceptable to wear a mask.”

“I want you to show me the exhibit when you’re feeling better.” His head sags, sinks to his chest. “James?”

Eyes closed, he smiles at the ground. “Still here. You haven’t got rid of me yet.”

My shoulders sag. “You scared me.”

“Ha-ha.”

Then he slumps over. Shudders wrack his body. He claws at his throat, body flopping on the ground. He’s having a seizure and I can’t remember what to do. Put something between his teeth so he doesn’t swallow his tongue? Or is that something they only do on TV, something completely useless in real life? I roll him onto his side and hold him as steady as I can in the recovery position while he shakes like the earth’s plates are colliding inside him. Everything scatters when I upend my purse on the floor. I scramble for my cell phone and dial 911.

The line rings out. Rings out again. I redial just in case I messed up those three easy digits. Nothing. Just the huff of frustration that escapes my lungs.

James falls still. I wait for the aftershocks, but there is nothing but the sound of the operator picking up.

“What is the emergency?”

My fingers search for his pulse, but there’s nothing beneath the clammy wax that just a few moments ago was his skin. I must be wrong. There’s a pulse. There has to be.

“Hello?”

I’m looking in the wrong place, that’s it.

“James, wake up,” I say.

I press a hand to his chest and feel for the bump-bump, bump-bump. And wait while my lips give out my address by rote.

“What is your emergency?” repeats the tin woman.

“Just hurry. Please.” The phone flies across the room, gently persuaded by my fist.

“James? Get up now.” I slap his chest. Slap his face so hard it jerks to the right. “James?” Louder now, like’s he’s old and deaf and not—

Don’t say it. If you don’t say it, it isn’t true.

—dead.

Don’t. Just don’t.

I need to will him back to life. I throw my weight into pumping his heart, force my breath into his mouth, and… nothing. His heart rejects my touch, his lungs my breath. His soul cares nothing for my will. But I keep going until I realize there’s a thin noise coming from his throat.

No, not his throat exactly. Further back, a direct drop from his ears.

It looks like my mother’s roast lamb when she cuts deep slits into the meat and forces a garlic clove into each gash. Only, his neck’s covered with paper-thin flaps—

I breathe into James, press his chest with both hands.

—that quiver as air tags them on the way out.

I’ve seen these before, in aquariums and seafood restaurants. Gills. James has gills.

It’s the noise that wakes me, small and secret and hidden. Some sounds belong to misdeeds, and when we hear them we know something is wrong.

I keep still, eyes tight, suppressing one sense so the other can requisition its strength. The fire is dying; I no longer feel its heat raging, although there is still a gentle warmth kissing my skin that tells me not all is lost. By dawn the fire will be gone, and, soon after, so will we.

With my vision restrained, I pick through the night’s sounds for the anomaly.

Dark is louder than light. Under the guise of night, the underbelly of nature reveals itself. Creatures slither and slink so as to not attract the attention of their natural foe. Predators are less cautious. They flap and soar until some meat-object takes their fancy. Then they dive and snatch up what they can. There are the desperate cries of prey in those final moments as death rattles their bones. Chirps and clicks herald a desire to mate. And there’s the musical tinkle of water wending through the land, searching for its source… or leaving home.

Even without these things, darkness has a sound of its own that has nothing do to with silence in the same way that space has nothing to do with emptiness. That’s an illusion that fools us all until we really pay attention.

My mind drifts until it catches on that noise that doesn’t belong. A whimper with a whisper chaser. Is it crying? Because that’s what it sounds like. There’s that same hitch between breaths.

I slowly sit, pull my body together in case I need to spring up in a hurry. Push off the ground until I’m standing.

I’m alone. Lisa and the Swiss are missing. But not for long. I find them underneath the stars and it is here I discover the source of the anomalous sound.

Even with his back to me, I know. I’ve been there. I’ve been her. The Swiss stands while Lisa kneels before him, servicing him with her mouth. I’ve seen how she turns to him with reverence and adoration, a twisted cousin to Stockholm syndrome. Worshipping a savior who is also your subjugator. He knows I’m there. He always does. He laughs at my shock. I am no prude and yet, there is a crudeness, an obscenity about him, that goes far beyond the bounds of love and sex and porn.

“Watch if you like.”

“You’re a pig,” I say. The girl tries to pull away at the sound of my voice but he holds her fast by the hair until she gags. He releases Lisa, steps back so she falls onto her hands, retching into the grass. She crawls further into the scrub, until she fades to a heaving silhouette.

“She’s sick.”

“Morning sickness.” He zips up, tucks the gun into the back of his pants like they do in the movies.

“How do you know it’s not White Horse?” I ask.

“She was stupid enough to have unprotected intercourse. Recently.” His stare is cool and laced with triumph. “She told me freely, without my asking. In a few months she will be cured. Do not think I’m the father. I’m not.” He swaggers like he has a secret worth keeping.

I know you’re not. I keep that thought safe and sound in my head. My instincts tell me not to speak.

“It could still be White Horse.”

“She showed me her breasts. They look like road maps. Have you seen your own recently? Are the veins not more prominent? Are your breasts not fuller when the rest of your body is slackening and growing thinner each day?” He draws up level to me, his lips curled into a cruel sneer. “You can raise your children together without fathers. Bastards.”

He can never know who the father of Lisa’s baby must be. Ever. Because behind his eyes, just beyond the cold crust he wears as a protective shell, sits a pile of broken hinges; there’s no way to gauge which way his sanity will swing.

“You’re only with us because three is safer than two,” I say.

“I’m with you because I choose to be. Whether you and that little whore like it or not.”

“Keep on thinking that.”

“You’ll die without me. Like your stupid friend almost died.”

Lisa’s shoulders heave. Not White Horse. Not going to die. Pregnant. Just like me. I know the Swiss is right; once again, I was too busy watching for death to recognize the signs of new life. Relief mixes with my fear and coagulates to the point where I can no longer distinguish the two.

What a pair we are.

The chain-link fence wears a razor wire crown, a tiara a former beauty queen has cast aside. Its tarnish and regret do not stop it from maintaining its dignity; once upon a time, it stood for something.

We stand on the road, watching it turn to rust. After one perfect day, the rains have come again, more vengeful than ever.

“I’m going there,” the Swiss says. There’s a capillary road that bleeds off this one and walks right up to the structure’s front door.

I turn away, pick up my stride. “We don’t have time. The land is completely flat. That could be miles away.”

“Maybe in America, but not here. Italy is made of mountains.” He waves a hand at the landscape. “In Italy, spaces do not go on forever.”

I stop, sit on the blacktop with the rain forming shallow puddles around me.

“Go, then,” I tell him. “But if you’re not back in an hour I’m leaving.”

“What is it?” Lisa asks.

“It looks like a military facility,” I say.

She aims her question at the Swiss. “Is that true?”

No answer. He stands there, legs spread, arms folded, maybe daring the fence to come closer, or—more likely—trying to choose the perfect insult for this occasion.

“Stay or go, it makes no difference,” he says.

Her body coiled in tense knots, Lisa trembles as she struggles to choose a side of the fence. Stay or go. With me or with him. She’s going to be a mother, forced to choose between far more dismal options than this. I cannot help her with one so simple. Questions form on her face, fall away, form anew. She’s a desperate kaleidoscope searching for a pattern that both asks her questions and answers them with words that will yield comfort.

Stay. Lisa decides to stay. So we stand together as I watch the Swiss trash-compacted by distance.

“I’m not pregnant. I’m not.”

“If you are, at least you know that’s why you’ve been sick.”

“I’ve got White Horse. I’m gonna die.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I do. I am.”

“Were you on birth control?”

“I’m going to die. You’re wrong.”

“He says you are. You believe him, don’t you?” It’s cruel but necessary. Denial won’t do anything but damage.

She stares sightlessly.

“I didn’t want to believe it, either, when I found out about my baby. There was a war limping along and half the world was already dead. Old life was disappearing and there I was with the nerve to create new. Like getting a new puppy too soon after your old dog dies.”

“Are you happy?”

Happy. What does that even mean? I can’t recall, but I think it has something to do with ice cream cones hastily licked at the beach before the butter pecan melted all over my fingers. Once your fingers get ice-creamed, they’re done for. All the rinsing in the world doesn’t wash away those last vestiges of stickiness. But you smile because the ice cream taste still lingers, reminding you that happiness comes in double dips pressed into a sugar cone with a wet metal scoop.

But am I happy because I’m carrying a child? My hand rests on my abdomen. It’s a shadow of its preapocalyptic self, but there’s a fullness there now, like I’ve indulged in a too-big meal.

Am I happy? Even the sound of the word rolling around in my head sounds foreign. More than anything, I’m scared. Terrified we won’t make it. Horrified at the possibility that I won’t be able to protect my child from the monsters that cling to the shadows. Happy is for when I reach my destination. Then and only then.

“You can’t tell him, you know,” I say gently. “Who the father is.”

She stares straight ahead. Her cheek twitches.

“Don’t let him take advantage of you. He’s not—”

“He’s not like them.”

“You don’t—”

“He’s not like them.”

“You’re right. He’s something else. There’s something inside his head that’s not right. I don’t know if it’s from before or after all this, but it’s there. He’s dangerous, Lisa. Be careful.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she says.

“Then what?”

She’s done talking, at least about this.

“I’d be happy,” I say, “if I could stop being terrified.”

An invisible force jerks Lisa’s head up. The Swiss walks this way.

“I’m sorry,” the woman says. “I don’t know who you are.” She’s a pencil wrapped in a black nylon tracksuit. She has Raoul’s look, only on her his strong jaw looks heavy.

Over her shoulder, I see Raoul’s apartment is inexpensive chic. He likes beige, although that’s probably too generic a term. He’d probably call it toasted almond, ecru, potsherd powder. Something more interesting than beige, which implies a lack of imagination.

When I tell the woman who I am, her kohl-rimmed eyes sink further into her skull and harden.

“My brother was not homosexual. He was a good man.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say. “I liked your brother.”

“Nobody knew him better than me. Nobody. He never told me about this person.”

“James. My friend’s name was James.”

“James.” She says it like his name is a disease. “Did your friend leave something here? What do you want?”

So I explain.

“I gave it away. Filthy animals spreading disease.”

“To who?”

“The animal shelter. It’s their problem now. I have to deal with burying my brother.”

“James died, too,” I say quietly.

The animal shelter has never heard of Raoul’s sister, nor have they seen the cat.

“Probably she let him go. People do that all the time. Sometimes they move and accidentally on purpose forget to tell the cat or dog, if you know what I mean,” they tell me.

I do. I wish I didn’t.

There are many noises that cause a human heart to want to gallop up and out of the throat: a child’s scream, the one that play cannot evoke—only pain; unexplained mechanical noises on a plane thirty-five thousand feet aboveground; the screech of wheels seconds before a concrete median leaps up to kiss you; the wail of an ambulance too close to your home.

Ambulances are nothing new around here. Typical for a healthy-sized city. But my building is filled with people too proud to announce sickness. They drag themselves to the next block instead and suffer quietly outside the apartments there, where they are surrounded by fast-walking strangers instead of familiar faces. They wait for the paramedics where they are not known. Such is life—and death—in the apartment Sam and his mother left to me.

It’s after ten. Just me and the jar watching each other. Ben is dead. Raoul is dead. James is dead. That can’t be a coincidence. I can’t be that unlucky. What are the odds?

Three people dead. All three the only ones who came into contact with the jar. All three with cats. A building with forty-one cats, none of them seen for days. The natives have been whispering in the corridors. It’s that Chinese restaurant down the block, they say. No, it’s that Indian place, says another. Hell, maybe it’s that barbecue place with the ribs everyone goes crazy for. No one can agree on anything except that their cats have disappeared into the ether and no amount of rattling a spoon inside a tin can rally their interest.

Then there’s me. I’m fine. Physically fine. Not even a blip of nausea. Shouldn’t I be dead, too?

My hands shake as I flip through a magazine. Buy me and your life will be prettier, the ads whisper like would-be seducers.

In some dark distance, an ambulance announces its search. I picture it hurtling through the city street until it nears its destination, slow crawling as it ticks off the addresses: Not you, not you, nope, not you, either. Ahhh, there you are. Found you. Until the relentless wah-wah, wah-wah cuts mid-wail. The dead siren leaves an empty space my heart hurries to fill because it’s stopped on my street, on my block, on my front doorstep. I imagine Mo, the night doorman, setting aside his Reader’s Digest, the one he keeps open on his lap while he watches Nick at Nite, shambling to the front door, where he’ll open it just a crack and say, “What can I do ya for?”

Blood rushes through my ears. They’re hot to the touch, which strikes me as odd, because I’m shivering.

Curiosity slithers through my fear. Who’s dead? I need to know. I snatch up my keys and phone and bolt down the stairs. The only thing faster than my heart is my feet. When I throw open the lobby door, I know how I must look: the wild-eyed woman obviously too crazy to bother with polite accoutrements like shoes or a coat thrown over my pajamas.

Mo is already back behind his desk, book in lap, eyes fixed on the small screen. The ambulance loiters at the curb, blocking the entire front view.

“Miss Marshall,” he says. “What can I do—”

I slap my hands on the counter. “Who are they here for?”

“Who?”

I want to reach over the counter and shake him until the answers spill out his mouth.

“The paramedics. They stopped here. Who for?”

He grunts as he sits upright, reaches for the leather-bound ledger that holds the names of guests. He makes a Busby Berkeley production of running his thick ink-blackened finger down and across the page until it sticks on the final entry. Clears his throat.

“Mrs. Sark in seventy-ten.”

The woman with four cats masquerading as one. My fingernails are cut back to the quick, so there’s just a soft pat-pat-pat as my fingers drum the polished countertop. It’s do this or scream, and I don’t want to scream.

“Do you know why?”

He shrugs. “Who knows? A lotta people here been sick lately. Porkchop was telling me how the Jones boy painted the door with his lunch last week. Waste of a good Reuben.”

Porkchop is the day doorman, real name Jimmy Bacon.

Three hard knocks on glass end our conversation.

“What can I do ya for?” Mo says when he gets around to opening the door. Whatever he’s hearing, it must be okay, because he opens the door and the two cops who aren’t cops step inside. Ben’s still dead, I want to tell them as their gazes latch onto me.

They take the elevator up, and when they come back down, they’re accompanied by two paramedics and Mrs. Sark. At least, I think it’s her, but it’s hard to tell through the thick yellow body bag.

“I guess seventy-ten will be available now.” Mo sighs like his world is ending. “More work for me, with all the prospective tenants traipsing through.”

NINE

Post-man, pre-man, the countryside knows not the difference. Its beauty flourishes for as long as it can hold progress at bay, which may be forever. We gorge ourselves on grapes meant for high-priced wines and carry as many as we can with us.

We rest, but not for long. Time is running short. Sometimes I wonder why the Swiss is so eager to accompany us. I should ask, but I don’t. His insanity is a cold and quiet one, and I know he’d kill, not to save us, but to eliminate any threat that would cross our path. It’s best he stay with us, not exactly on our side but at least not fighting us. Where I can watch him.

He uses Lisa as he pleases now, often stopping to take her between the fruit trees in some verdant orchard. The smell of spoiled fruit is the scent of his lust, and to smell that oversweet perfume turns my stomach. Lisa is complicit, or maybe just compliant. She goes to him, her expression half-triumphant, half-bewildered. That he wants her thrills her, but she doesn’t understand why he does. She walks quietly afterward, and I know she’s asking herself: Is this love? When we rest, she hangs her head low.

I don’t judge her. She’s just a kid.

“Do you want to watch?” he asks.

“Screw you.”

I don’t need to taste rotting meat to know it’s no good.

“Do you think it’s true?” Lisa asks.

“Is what true?”

“Is there a monster inside me? Inside you?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“But you don’t know.”

“No.”

“I don’t want to give birth to a monster.” Lisa faces straight ahead with her one blind eye. “I don’t want to give birth at all.”

The shadows don’t make sense in my dimly lit apartment. They seem to have chosen to lurk where they please rather than follow physics’ dictates. I could turn on more lights, shoo them away, but I don’t because there’s a part of me that believes they’d cling to the walls, refuse to let go. And there’s another piece of my mind that doesn’t want to know what they’re concealing.

I don’t hide in the shadows. I pick the center of the kitchen to make my phone call. From here I can see the front door and the jar. From here I can tilt my head an inch or two to the left and make them disappear.

The line rings. My hope diminishes as each note fades. Then voice mail answers and I hear an imprint of Dr. Rose’s voice speaking to me from the past.

I’m glad he didn’t answer. It’s easier like this, talking to a computer that’s converting my words into a sound file stored on a server somewhere, probably in the Midwest or maybe in India. This way I can talk to him and still be heard without being listened to.

“Hi, it’s Zoe Marshall.” The words snag on my tongue as though they’re aware of their triteness. “I don’t really know who else to call. My family would think I’ve lost it and my two best friends are dead. Which means they’re great listeners now, but lousy as far as support goes. Since support and listening is your thing, I thought of you.”

I pull my knees up tight against my chest, rest my chin on the cartilaginous curves.

“I think… I think the jar’s bad luck, or maybe it’s killing people. I know you think I should open it but I can’t. It’s like that whole Pandora’s box story. What if I open it and the world goes to hell? What if all the ills of the world really do pour out? People around me are dying. That’s not normal. I don’t want to be Pandora or Typhoid Mary. I just want to be me. I’m sure you’ll think I’m nuts when you hear this, but… forget it.”

I kill the call.

Just me and the jar chilling in my apartment. The green glowing numbers on the oven flick away the minutes. When my life is seventeen minutes shorter, my phone rings.

“I want to see you,” Nick says. Nick. Not Dr. Rose now. Nick. Thinking his name makes my cheeks warm as though that particular arrangement of letters weaves some kind of aphrodisiac voodoo spell on me.

“Do you still have Friday afternoon open?”

“I don’t mean professionally.”

“Oh.” Then: “When?”

“Soon. But give me a few days.”

There’s a note in his voice, a kind of tension that tells me there’s an obstacle not easily moved standing between us.

“What’s wrong, Nick?”

I know it. I know it even before he says it.

“Nothing serious. Just a stomach flu.”

Welcome to Brindisi. Have a nice day. Enjoy the sights. Eat good food, drink our wine. Relax.

That’s what I like to imagine the sign reads. But friendly greetings aren’t usually accompanied by a skull and crossbones. Weathered words on old wood stabbed into the ground serve as a warning that this place is unholy. They needn’t have bothered: carcasses and rusting vehicles litter the streets, making it difficult to find a pure path.

The sea is near, which is why the metal falls so easily to rust. Salt air whisks away some of the decomposition smell and leaves behind a familiar briny tang. I am ten again, on the boardwalk with my ice cream cone. Fifteen, swimming with my friends. Twenty-three, falling into the sand with Sam, where we make something that isn’t yet love.

We cut through the dead city in a malformed triangle formation: Lisa and I out front, while the Swiss hangs back with the weapon he stole from a dead man. I imagine him fantasizing about where he’d put the bullets. Through my kidney or shoulder, maybe. He’d know where to cause the greatest, slowest hurt.

Brindisi is a city of peaks and lows. Whitewashed houses stare down from their perches, clean and bright from the relentless rain. As we walk on, the city thickens with towers filled with abandoned office furniture. Like all cities, it needs people to thrive. Without citizens scurrying about their business, dodging cars and chattering into their phones, the air is flat and lifeless and Brinidisi becomes a city without a soul. Every so often a face peers at us from behind a filthy window, only to dissolve back into the shadows. There is life here, but for now it wants to go unacknowledged.

The arrow on my compass shivers and settles back on North. We are going east. The sun passes overhead, glares through the clouds, continues her journey west. Our constant companion is the rain.

We walk until the buildings part and then we see her: the Mediterranean. This is not the sparkling blue sea in travelogues but a dull gray cummerbund concealing the seam between a dismal sky and a cement floor. She’s no longer herself—but then, neither am I.

I would to run to her but I can’t, because I’m too busy leaning against a parking meter weeping.

“Women,” the Swiss says. “You are weak.”

I turn around and look at him, one hand still on the meter.

“Just die, would you? Just die in a fucking fire.”

He strikes me.

Something about a wet hand facilitates a slap: it provides the blows with extra sting. I don’t care that’s he’s hit me, even though my cheek burns, because I’ve put the words out there, given my wish power.

I don’t care, because I’m here.

The port of Brindisi is a graveyard. Great steel whales hunker low in the tide, abandoned by their crews. Some languish on their sides, doomed to sink into the sea as their insides fill with water. Other, smaller boats are corks bobbing as they please. The tide washes them in then pulls them out like a child doing a gravity pull with a yo-yo. Accompanying the motion is the gentle slap of water against the docks. Salt is thick in my nose and coats my tongue with its alkaline taste.

“Where now?” the Swiss barks.

I cup a hand over my eyes to shield them from the rain. Being in a city is a visual overload after weeks of avoiding them; I can’t yet see the details within the big picture. The city cups the harbor in a concrete palm. I pace along the water’s edge and try to break the panorama into palatable pieces.

I know nothing about the boat I’m supposed to meet besides her name. Frustrated, I trek back and forth, try to pick out words. Too many are in Cyrillic lettering or Greek. Not enough English.

He’s pacing, too, peering inside the empty terminal behind us.

“Where?”

Lisa splits the difference between us, stands in the rain instead of taking advantage of shelter.

“I don’t know.”

“You brought me here knowing nothing.”

“I didn’t ask you to come.”

“You would be dead without me. Stupid, both of you. Stupid, stupid women.”

I walk away. I have to. Otherwise I’ll do something I won’t be able to live with. And that’s important to me, being able to live with my actions. My thoughts are a different story. They’re my own and they don’t hurt anyone but me. In the real world I smash open a vending machine in the terminal using a chair and empty it of all its worldly goods. Three small piles. One for Lisa, one for the Swiss, and one for me. I take mine and sit on the dock cross-legged, not caring about the rain. All I care about is that boat and will she be here like she promised?

They wait, too, but not with my dedication. The Swiss drags Lisa into the terminal and she does not complain. Late in the evening, we sit together and eat chips and drink warm soda.

“Just say the word and I’ll make him stop.”

“I have to do it.”

“There’s no have to. Not even now.”

“What if I never get to fool around with anyone else?”

“You might get a chance to with someone you love.”

“You don’t know that.” She empties the can. “Do you?”

“No, I don’t. But I hope.”

She points to her missing eye. “Who could love me like this?”

“England,” he calls out, and just like that she turns to him. I pick up her trash and mine and drop the refuse in the half-full trash can inside the terminal. Two steps; that’s how far I go before I’m drawn back to the container by some ancient hoarding instinct passed down by ancestors who knew a thing or two about survival. Using both hands, I dig through the trash looking for anything useful, some tool or trinket that might make a difference. But there’s nothing. Just empty packets and old papers with words I can’t read anyway.

A few days come and go and then they multiply into a full week. That week doubles and still I don’t hear from Nick. But I pick up the phone every night and dial half his number before dumping the phone into the cradle.

He has my number. He can call me.

It’s a stupid rule and one I’ve never subscribed to, and I don’t believe in it now. It’s just the story I tell myself to cover up my real fear: Nick is dead.

I pick up the phone, dial four of the seven digits, hang up.

He can call me.

One day bleeds into two and still I keep vigil. The Elpis will come. I know she will. She has to. I need something to give all this meaning. I can’t have come all this way for nothing.

The Swiss swaggers out, stares out to sea, his face harder than the ground we’re standing on.

“Your boat isn’t coming.”

“It will.”

“You are a fool. A dreamer. I suppose you believe in things like love and morals and valor. Women like you sit and they wait for men to come and rescue them from the unspeakable horrors of the world. You like nothing more than to sit at home, getting fat, while you cook and eat and create more mouths the world cannot hope to feed. And for what? Some misguided belief that you are special, that you are loved, that you matter to someone. You do not matter, America. You are ultimately nothing. Dust.”

“It will be here.”

Spit flies from his mouth: a wet, clear blob with a yellow center. Egg-like.

The thought comes before I can stop it: I hope he’s sick.

The Swiss correctly interprets the expression dancing across my face.

“I am not sick. Disease is for the weak.”

I walk away in search of Lisa. She’s up in one of those lifeguard towers, the bare metal frames with a seat on top.

“Listening for Jaws?”

“No. There’s a boat coming.” She points the way, my broken, blinded beacon.

At first my longing to believe is so great that I can’t bring myself to trust in her words. I’ve wanted this too much. Then I bolt, boots pounding along the water’s edge, peering between the gaps, desperate for a glimpse. Then I see her. She rolls into port, an old, cold tomb. The Elpis. The Hope is my only hope.

All my strength evaporates. My infrastructure collapses in on itself and I have no choice but to crouch down, one hand reaching out in front to steady me like I’m an unwieldy tripod.

The Swiss’s jaw ticks like a time bomb.

“I told you,” I say. “I told you so.”

The jar resists me,

but not the borrowed hammer.

Cracks, splinters, mess. Bones.

She’s nothing to look at, the Elpis, with her ruby-red rivets and her pointed bow carving the sea into foamy slices. She needs no introductions, no elaborate adornments to announce that the harbor is hers and she has come for it, for she is the only vessel that displays signs of life. There are passengers on that boat, and they wait on the deck and watch. I cup my hand over my eyes and scan them for friendly faces, but see nothing but my own sadness reflecting back at me.

The captain comes ashore, the gangplank shaking with his heavy steps.

“You coming to Greece?” His mustache leaps as the words battle their way through the hairs.

“Please,” I say.

“Okay. But you must pay.”

What once passed for currency is now worthless, and I have no money anyway. What I have to offer is peace of mind, relaxation, and escape, all in a tiny white pill. He knows what they are; the greed in his eyes betrays his hunger when I pull the blister packs from my pocket and offer him payment for me and for Lisa.

He nods. Our transaction is complete. I snatch up my things so I can run, run, run to find Nick.

The Swiss and I face each other.

“Here we say good-bye. Lisa?”

“I am coming,” he says.

“No.”

“The world is free. I can go where I choose without even a passport. Who are you to tell me what I can do or not? You are a nobody.”

We stare each other down. In his eyes, I see a wasteland where nothing can survive. I am the first to break and glance away.

“You have to pay your own way,” I say.

He makes a deal with the captain but I do not see how he pays the ferryman for his passage. When they’re done, I pull the captain aside. I tell him who I’m looking for, describe him in detail. The captain chews on my request. The fisherman’s cap shakes with his head.

“I see no one like that. Each time is just a few people. But none like that.”

“Are you sure?”

“Eh. Who knows? Everyone looks the same now. Like you. Tired. Hungry. Dirty.”

The weight of the world shifts from my shoulders to my head, drags it low.

“We go now,” the captain says.

“He’s dead.” The Swiss is behind me. Privacy means nothing to him. “I knew you were coming for a man. Why else does a woman do anything?”

“He’s not dead.”

“Is he the father of your bastard?”

“Mind your own fucking business,” I say.

The captain waits.

My reflection in the terminal window is me without all the baggage. Maybe it’s me as I used to be, or maybe it’s me as I wish to be. I appear strong, determined, resolute. I believe Nick is alive and made it to Greece safely. He’s gone via some other road. I won’t believe anything else. If he’s there, then nothing will stop me moving on.

“I’m coming,” I say. Forward is the only way.