I took up the shovel and filled the hole.
When it was done, I stumbled and fell back onto the ground. A new swirl of snow appeared out of the gray, lightening sky. It seemed like the body of a great white bear tumbling down onto me, its claws outstretched.
I shut my eyes, and let it have me.
PART THREE
TWENTY-SIX
There was a crash as I fell into one of the gaming tables that littered the casino floor. How did I get here? I wondered distantly, then Jenny’s hands dug into my shoulder and pulled me up. She threw my arm over her shoulder and pushed me blindly through the dark. My bones ached from the cold. My skin burned. I couldn’t stop shivering. I remembered kneeling by the grave in the snow. I told her to leave me with Dad, but she wouldn’t listen. I wanted to tell her again, but now I couldn’t speak.
Jenny dropped me down on the bed in the back room and covered me up with all the blankets we had, tucking them tight around my body like a cocoon. I lay there in the absolute dark and quiet of the room. The blankets had my arms pinned to my sides. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t see. It was like being a thousand miles under the ocean with the immense weight of it pressing down on my chest.
But I wasn’t afraid. I was relieved. Finally, after all my running, I had arrived at the place I was meant to be, at home, at peace, in the nothingness and the dark and the cold.
The door opened and Jenny was at my side again, leaning over me.
Was it hours later? Days? I didn’t know. I couldn’t see her, just feel her arms digging under my shoulders and lifting me up.
I groaned, struggling against her touch, trying to keep still. “I’m fine. Leave me alone.”
“Stephen, you’re freezing to death. Now move!”
Jenny managed to get me up from the bed and out of the room, shoring me up with her shoulder and driving me down a long hallway. I couldn’t fight. I faltered along beside her, my legs stiff and awkward as a foal’s. We moved deeper into the casino toward a distant light. A fire. Jenny had built it in the center of a tiled atrium. Its smoke twisted upward to the shattered remains of a skylight.
She dropped me within inches of it. Its brilliance made my eyes ache, but I couldn’t feel its warmth. It reached out but couldn’t touch me. Jenny wrestled me up into a sitting position and arranged the blankets over my shoulders. I tried to push her away, but I was too weak. All I wanted to do was lie down. All I wanted was to sleep, to be in the quiet and alone in that black nothingness, but Jenny wouldn’t let me go.
There was a crash somewhere out in the casino, then the sound of shattering glass. Jenny stiffened. Dad’s knife appeared in her fist as she crouched beside me like an animal, peering into the dark, listening for more.
“There’s no one out there,” I said thoughtlessly, my head lolling onto my chest.
“Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Will and them aren’t done with us. They could still come.”
“They’re dead.”
Jenny’s eyes left the empty dark and fell back on me.
“What? Who’s dead?”
I looked up from the tiled floor. Jenny’s face, streaked with ash and pockmark burns, was framed in fire.
“Everyone,” I said, my voice rising up from the deep in a cold rasp. “Marcus. Violet. Dad. My mom. Even you and me. We thought the Collapse was over but it’s not. It just keeps going. It doesn’t matter where we go or what we do. We’re all dead. All of us. We just don’t know it yet.”
Jenny said nothing. She eased down beside me, bringing her body alongside mine. She brushed my hair aside with the tips of her fingers. When I flinched away from the warmth of her lips on my cheek, she wrapped her arms tight around me and leaned me in toward the fire, rocking us back and forth.
The heat from the fire pounded against my skin, but it was useless. My body was a gate of iron and I would not let it pass.
All that night, she left my side only to get more wood for the fire or to dart out into the darkness to check on the crashes and groans that seemed to be our constant companions. She was sure that each one was Will or Caleb or some faceless mob with torches in hand, ready to burn us down. But each time it was simply the old building settling into the brunt of winter. Broken glass. Creaking walls.
“We can’t stay here,” she said.
It had stopped snowing. A thin, watery light began to show through the clouds. The first traces of dawn.
“It isn’t safe.”
I turned toward the dim outline of the casino’s front door. Outside, across the parking lot and through the trees, was the clearing where Dad lay, buried deep underground. There was no cross. No marker. Jenny had pulled me away before I could make one. If we left, I knew I would never be able to find him again.
“You can go,” I said.
“I’m not leaving without you.”
Somewhere behind us, the roof of the casino groaned under the weight of the snow. I traced my finger along the hills and valleys of the wrinkled blanket piled up in my lap, marking out a meandering path on its folds. Never the same path twice, I thought. That way you’re safe. That way no one finds you. I saw myself on the trail. I saw worn ground and the mall and the neighborhoods, crumbling and covered in vines. I could hear Dad, his shuffling footsteps, his bright babble like water coursing over smooth river rocks. I saw his hands so clearly — long-fingered and strong, a hairline scar running down the index finger of his right hand.
“Steve?”
Jenny laid one hand over mine, blotting out the trail. She used the other to lift my chin up to her, so I couldn’t look away, couldn’t not see her.
“Maybe there isn’t anything better out there, but… your dad and your grandpa handed you this life, right? Just like Marcus and Violet handed me mine. This is your name. This is where you live. This is who you are. We never chose any of it. So whose lives are we living? Ours or theirs? Haven’t you ever thought about that? Don’t you, just once, want to choose something for yourself?”
I pulled my chin out of her hand and looked deep into the darkness of the casino.
“I have,” I said.
Jenny stared at me, her eyes wide and hurt, waiting for more, but I said nothing. She let go of my hand.
“I’m sorry about your parents,” she said. “But at least they died while they were trying to live. They didn’t just sit around waiting to die.”
Jenny pushed herself back from me and stood up.
“It’s not safe for us here, Stephen. I think you know that. There’s an old hospital a few miles west that’s still pretty intact. I’m going to leave for there today. I want you to come, but even if you don’t, I have to go.”
Jenny waited for a response, and when there was none, she walked away from the fire and was gone.
Without Jenny, the immensity of the casino’s silence was overwhelming. This was what I wanted, wasn’t it? On my own in the dark. I sat there while the fire died out, then stumbled back to our room. Before I drew the curtains shut, I surveyed my little world. I had shelter. I could find food and water easily enough. I had everything I needed.
My eye fell into the corner of the room by the window, to a large white square. I didn’t recognize it at first, but I moved closer and saw that it was Jenny’s sketch pad. It fell open to the end as I lifted it, to the last picture she had drawn.
It was like a small, soft hand had reached inside of me and pulled the air out of my lungs.
It was the picture Jenny drew our first morning together as I huddled, freezing, under the blankets. All the details of the barn were there: the patched-together plank walls, the early morning sunshine, the rumpled bed. You could almost feel the chill in the air. I was staring up into the rafters and my feet were sticking out of the cover, hanging slightly over the edge of the mattress. I smiled despite myself.