They sit with this, all of them, for a moment. Annie is the one who asks it first. “Do you think this means that other people survived too?”
“I hope so,” Tasha says.
There is only one way to find out for sure. They do not talk about this, not yet.
The third night they are together, Elyse sits up in the middle of the bed so suddenly Tasha thinks she’s having an attack.
“The creature,” she says. “The creature on the mountain. We can go there, to get food.” She coughs. “I should have told you that first thing.”
“Elyse,” Tasha says, carefully, “what creature?”
“The one I saw by the greenhouse. With Heather. It was part man, part horse.”
Tasha and Annie look at each other over her blonde head.
Annie clears her throat. “Elyse, we’ve all had such a shock. Why don’t you just lie back down and rest—”
“I should have said it first thing,” Elyse repeats, frantically. “It’s just—I was just—I was so tired! I saw Heather, in the forest. Just before the scream came. She was talking to a—a creature. Part man and part horse. I was on my way back to tell you when the scream came.”
“Elyse,” Tasha says. “This has been hard on all of us, and—”
Elyse shakes her head. “I know what I saw. Tasha—remember, the flowers screamed, and vines moved across the ground. You saw it too! Why couldn’t there be such a creature?”
“We all tell ourselves stories,” Tasha says. “Maybe it was just a man, someone who lives near the mountain. Someone we don’t know, someone who’s been living in the forest all this time.”
“I know what I saw!” Elyse cries, again, setting off her terrible wracking cough.
They sit with her, in silence, until the coughing subsides.
“All right,” Tasha says. She looks at Annie, who shrugs a little. “Elyse—okay. Maybe there is someone—some thing—on the mountain. Some person or creature or something that no one else has seen. But you can’t climb the mountain. You wouldn’t have been able to do it months ago—you definitely can’t do it now.”
“Then I’ll stay,” Elyse presses, “and you can go. The two of you.”
Annie shakes her head. Her voice is low and soft. “We can’t leave you alone.”
“I’ll be fine! I was by myself for days before you ca—”
“What would have happened if we hadn’t heard you—if no one had come? You would have died on that floor, Elyse, and you know it,” Annie says.
“So what happens when the food runs out here?” Elyse says. “You survived, I survived—only to shrivel away here in this house? This can’t be how it ends.”
Annie sighs, and Tasha knows what she’s going to say in the instant before the words come out of her mouth. “I’ll go. I can go up the mountain. Tasha—you stay here with Elyse.”
Tasha shakes her head. “No one is going,” she says. “Elyse—there’s no path. We don’t know what might be up there. It’s too dangerous.”
“So that’s it,” Elyse says. “We just stay here, and starve.”
“No one said anything about starving,” Tasha says, and the others look to her. She spreads her hands. “We find whatever food is left in any of the houses, and then we leave this godforsaken city. We go.”
She can’t decide what’s worse—the relief in Annie’s face, or the way that Elyse shuts down in despair.
When Elyse is strong enough to walk, they go outside. Vines crawl under their feet and shift like snakes around the dead people on the road. Most of the corpses—if they see corpses at all—are buried, smooth mounds of green in the roads, the old town square. After a while, they stop noticing.
They search the houses that are still standing, but don’t find much.
“We should go to Heather’s house,” Elyse says. “They might have more.”
Tasha and Annie look at each other.
“Because of the creature?” Annie says. “You think it was bringing her food and Heather kept that a secret all this time?”
“I don’t think,” Elyse insists. “I know.”
They walk to Heather and Brendan’s house, stand silent before the door. Tasha pushes it open. The smell that comes at them is both must and decomposition.
They find the bodies of Brendan and the girls hanging in the kitchen. The green hasn’t yet completed its work here, though it has pushed in around the window frames and the cracked and broken glass. Vines have crawled across the floor and up the chair that sits toppled underneath Brendan, wound around his legs, up to his waist. The girls are small green cocoons with black faces and bright hair. Annie goes to vomit in the corner.
Tasha pulls her eyes away. “Where’s Heather?”
“I told you,” Elyse says. “I told you she was hiding something. Otherwise she would be here.”
“She could be anywhere,” Tasha says. Even as she says it, she’s thinking of their long walks in the forest. The greenhouse. The stories that Heather spun as she walked. “Maybe she was outside when the scream came.”
Elyse crouches in front of the cupboards. She pulls out apples and potatoes, a bag of rice. She reaches into the back and pulls out lentils and beans. There are weevils in some of the bags, but others remain sealed and safe. “Where did all of this come from,” she says, “if not from the mountain?”
Tasha shuts her eyes against her own memories. The flutter of wings against her ribcage. Stories are never only stories, Tasha. “Bags of rice don’t grow on the mountain,” she says.
Elyse sweeps an arm around the room. “Maybe she did this.”
“I know you didn’t trust her, but she wouldn’t do this,” Tasha protests.
“How do you know? Everyone went mad. Annie almost killed you! How do you know that didn’t happen here?”
“I don’t know,” Tasha says, suddenly tired of it all. “I just—I don’t think she could do that. She was already carrying so much.”
Elyse won’t let go. “Maybe that broke her, like it broke everybody else.”
Tasha shakes her head. She looks at Annie, and then Elyse again, and she thinks back to that first day and the dark, bottomless pain in Heather’s eyes. “Something broke her before all of this happened,” Tasha says. “And she put herself back together in a different way. Maybe—maybe that’s how we survived.”
Annie is staring at her, head cocked. Then she takes a step closer to the window. “Heather might be out there.”
The backyard is a jungle—even more so than the rest of the city. The vegetation is more than tall enough to hide a body.
Tasha shakes her head. “If she is, I don’t want to know. We’re done here. Let’s go.” Looking at the food they’ve gathered, she says, “We’ll stay for one more week. Eat, regain some strength. And then we’ll go south toward the water, and then east along the coast. The sea air will be good for Elyse.”
Elyse does not ask about the mountain anymore.
Slowly, their strength comes back. The air begins to carry hints of summer. The plants outside continue to grow—lilies that mushroom into great orange giants, vines that thicken until they’re as wide across as Tasha’s arm. The women stay inside during the day and venture outside in the late afternoons, finding their way into each and every last house. They take what they can and ignore the green mounds that are everywhere. There is no sound, there is no change.
Still.
“Are you sure we’re alone?” Elyse asks one afternoon. “I keep thinking that I hear things.”