“R, WAIT!”

I pause in the plane’s doorway but I don’t turn. I can feel Julie’s fear tickling my neck.

“You can’t do anything for them! You don’t even know how to shoot that!”

I look down and notice that I’m holding M’s AK-47. I must have grabbed it off his chair in an unconscious reflex, and I appear to have chambered a round and switched off the safety. I’m not sure either of us knows what I know how to do. But the tremble in my hands is even more pronounced than usual; I’m practically spasming. I let the gun clatter to the floor and stride into the boarding tunnel.

“R!” she shouts, running after me. “There’s a thousand of them down there. One more isn’t going to make a difference.”

“Joan and Alex,” I say without stopping.

The gunfire is continuous, like a roll of firecrackers, and I imagine each and every shot ending the budding life of one of these potential people.

I hear Julie’s footfalls behind me as I rush down a staircase to the ground level; she has given up arguing and is racing to join me, with M’s rifle like an oversized toy against her tiny frame. I stop at the exit door and turn to her.

“Stay here.”

“Fuck you, you’re not going out there alone.”

Crack. Crack. Crack-crack-crack-crack.

“Please,” I say to her, imagining those shots aimed at her instead of the anonymous mob and feeling my fear spike tenfold. “I’m asking you to stay here. I’ll be right back.”

I don’t wait for her response. She’ll respect my wishes or she won’t. I’ve said everything I can say, short of “good-bye.” I burst through the door into the blinding sun.

•  •  •

It’s not quite the massacre I was anticipating. The soldiers appear to be conserving ammo, taking methodical head shots instead of spraying into the mob. They have the luxury of doing this because the mob is not attacking them. The Dead are agitated, swaying and groaning loudly, but their faces still display recognizable human emotions. Fear, confusion, grief. They seem utterly perplexed by what is happening to them.

But as the trucks slowly advance, as row after row of the Dead drop to the pavement and the rows behind them wipe their friends’ liquefied brains off their faces, something begins to change. So close to the end of their climb, just a few steps from the summit, they stop. They stumble backward. They fall.

The indeterminate hue of their eyes flashes silver, and their faces lock into the murderous blankness of the All Dead.

I want to roar and cry at the same time. The stupidity of it. The relentless razing of every green shoot. As the Dead surge forward in a wave and begin to overrun the trucks, I try not to take pleasure in the soldiers’ shrieks. But I do.

My family is revealed in the rear of the crowd as everyone else advances to attack. I run to their side and grab the kids’ hands. “Come on.”

The nearest truck disappears under a pile of Dead. A few of them pull the gunner out through the sunroof and tear him apart while a few more crawl inside to deal with the driver. What did these men expect? Twenty or thirty of them against several thousand Dead? How can anyone be so fully grafted to a system that they would obey such mad orders?

Their desperate shots shatter windows and kick up puffs of dust on the concrete around my feet. I start to pull the kids toward the terminal door, but when I look back to make sure my wife understands the agenda, she is not there. I glance around the tarmac and find no sign of her. I stand in the shadow of the 747, holding the kids’ hands and staring at the mob, knocked off balance by an emotional sucker punch. It never occurred to me that my wife would relapse with the rest of the horde. I thought she had climbed too high to fall back into this feral frenzy. But more importantly, I thought I didn’t care what happened to that nameless, voiceless woman, and I am dismayed to find that I do.

The Dead set to work on the next truck. The men in the other four jump out and take defensive positions behind their doors. Despite streams of bullets ripping into the Dead from four directions, this venture is going to prove unprofitable for the Axiom Group. The third truck goes under. Then the fourth. But as the horde—reduced by a few hundred but still overwhelming—sweeps over the last two Escalades, I notice a familiar drone in the air. My hair begins to flutter back from my face, and I have just enough time to register dread before a helicopter—not some repurposed local news chopper but an actual military aircraft—swoops over the roof of the terminal building and hovers directly overhead, eclipsing the noonday sun.

Somewhere inside its cockpit, a soldier swivels the nose-mounted chain gun and begins to cut splattering swaths through the mob. He is too late to save the men in the trucks, but with all the airport’s inhabitants gathered in the open with no way to fight back, he can at least take this opportunity to clear out this hive. One less unknown to threaten the natural order.

The Dead make a noble effort. They climb onto the roof of the nearest vehicle and swipe for the chopper’s landing gear. Some of them even attempt to jump. But the pilot keeps it hovering just out of reach, lower than he actually needs to, perhaps taking pleasure in their desperate efforts as his gunner mows them down. I catch his face in the windshield, the sadistic smirk of a child burning ants.

A higher pitched rattle of gunfire joins the heavy thump of the chain gun and I see Julie standing behind a second-floor window, firing M’s AK-47 through the glass. She probably knows this is useless against an armored attack chopper, but these are the gestures we make when useful actions run out. Her bullets chip the chopper’s paint and make white spots on the windshield, damaging its resale value but little else. The gunner ignores her until she manages to ping a shot off a rotor blade, then the chain gun rises and Julie runs for cover as it strafes across her floor, filling the air with broken glass and upholstery fluff. Satisfied that he’s made his point, the gunner returns his attention to the Dead.

I drag my kids toward the safety of the terminal door, determined to save at least these two, and just as I’m reaching out to open it, I hear a cry. A raw, plaintive noise almost like the howl of a dog, inarticulate but trembling with emotion. I look up.

My wife is on the control tower balcony, directly above the helicopter, leaning against the railing. Her eyes are on me, and I realize the noise I heard was her calling to me, the sound of a person trying to reach another person without words or a name. But she doesn’t need words now. She cries out again, and the anguish in it makes the meaning clear.

Good-bye.

She jumps off the tower. She falls facedown, arms spread wide, hair fluttering up toward the clear summer sky, and when she hits the blurring disc of the rotors, she vanishes. Lukewarm liquid sprays across my face. I hear the wet slap of heavier bits raining down all over the tarmac, but the sound is mercifully muffled by the screech of the helicopter tearing itself apart. Its bent rotor rattles horribly for an instant, then something snaps. The chopper flips and twists and flings itself into the concrete base of the terminal building. It doesn’t explode. Its impact is less than satisfying. It hits the wall with a dull crunch, then falls to the pavement in a mangled heap.

Everything goes silent. The fury abruptly drains out of the remaining Dead, their shoulders falling back into their customary slouch. But while their rage sags, mine swells, stretching my seams to bursting. My eyes take in the carnage around me, flicking from corpse to corpse, their gazes fixed on the dreaded mouth of the sky as their brains ooze through the backs of their heads. All their struggles disregarded, all forward steps ignored, erased in a few minutes by a few little bits of lead. And scattered all around them, on the ground and on my clothes and in my eyes, the remains of a woman who never told me her name. A woman I bumped into in a dream and married without ever exchanging a word, paired as a unit by the decree of a formula that neither of us understood. She should mean nothing to me. I knew nothing about who she was behind her blank stare or who she would have become if given the chance. And perhaps that’s it. She was trying to become something beautiful, and these cruel and stupid children have cut open her chrysalis simply because they could.

I run to the helicopter. I wrench open the cockpit door and seize the pilot by his jacket, pulling him against his seat straps. “Why?” I growl, inches from his face.

His eyes take a moment to focus on me. In my periphery I see a twisted piece of steel sticking out of his side and his copilot dead in the other seat, but I’m focused on the pilot’s face, mostly blank now but still retaining the lines of that smirk I saw through the windshield as he savored the killing of weaker things.

“Why are you doing this?” I say from some hot, dark boiler room in my mind. “Why won’t you stop?”

He opens his mouth. A ragged wheeze comes out. His eyes seem to be looking past me.

“Why?” I shout, shaking him against the seat. “What’s your goal? Who are your leaders?”

I feel something beyond rage thrumming inside me. The noise from the basement. The rattling door.

“Where is Atvist?” I scream into his face and grab the piece of steel and rip it out of his chest. The door in me is straining against its locks, and through the crack I can see fire and burnt flesh and squirming masses of worms.

I thrust my hand into his gaping wound and dig until I find his lung. “Tell me!”

I squeeze his lung, forcing puffs of air through his throat.

“Tell me!”

I hear footsteps behind me, and the burning red murk clears from my vision. I become aware that I am screaming at a dead man, and my fist is inside his chest, and my friends are watching in horrified silence.

I drive the piece of steel into the dead man’s skull, then slowly stand up and turn around, wiping my hand on my pants. Julie, M, and Nora stare at me with wide eyes. Abram waits in the terminal doorway with his daughter, looking more impressed than disturbed. I feel an urge to apologize, to offer some unlikely excuse for what they just witnessed, but I’m too full of disgust. Some for myself, but more for everything else. My disgust for the world is so deep, my own portion sinks into it with barely a ripple.

“We need to go,” I say, staring at the ground.

There is a long silence, broken only by the soft groans of the Dead. They shuffle around like sleepwalkers, eyes on the pavement and the carpet of corpses that covers it, seemingly unaware of our presence, stuffed back into some deep hole where not even the smell of life can reach them.

“Go where?” Julie asks quietly.

“Out into the world. There’s nothing left here.”

“What’s out in the world?”

“We don’t know. That’s why we need to go.”

Without meeting their eyes, I push past my friends and stop in front of Abram. “Axiom owns the coasts. What’s in between?”

He looks me up and down for a moment as if debating how seriously to take me. “Not much,” he says. “Exed cities. Empty territories. A few struggling enclaves, probably.”

“Probably?”

“It’s been a few years since I’ve heard any reports. Axiom mostly sticks to the coasts these days. But everyone knows—”

“No one knows anything,” I snap. “The world has grown. A city’s a country and a country’s a planet. There has to be something out there.”

They all watch me, taken aback by my sudden verbosity, but I’m so focused I forget to feel self-conscious.

“Something like what, exactly?” Nora says.

“People.” I finally allow myself to make eye contact, first with her, then Julie, then Abram. “Help. Maybe even answers.”

Julie begins to nod. “Axiom has our home and everything around it. They plan to keep spreading, and we can’t stop them ourselves.”

“I wasn’t planning on stopping them,” Abram says.

“Oh right, your cabin.” She holds his gaze with that eerily mature steel that lurks beneath her youthful flippancy. I feel a little thrill whenever it emerges. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe if you hide out long enough, Axiom will burn itself out. But my guess is they’ll burn the rest of the continent first. Is that what you want to give Sprout for her eighteenth birthday when you finally come out of your bunker? A scorched Earth run by madmen?”

“I’m not seeing many alternatives,” he says under his breath.

“Are you looking for them? There could be rebel armies, thriving enclaves, people spreading the cure . . . We have no idea what’s out there.”

Abram meets her steel with his own. He is looking at her so intently that he doesn’t notice Sprout wandering off.

“Daddy,” she says, climbing onto the 747’s tire. “Let’s go somewhere.”

“Mura, get down!” He rushes over and pulls her off. My own kids stare at the young girl, recognizing one of their own, though their eyes are still wide with the shock of seeing their mother aerosolized in front of them. I note with another pang of sadness that the blood spattered across their faces is red. Dark red, almost purple, but not black. She was so close.

“What are you even proposing?” Abram says without turning around. “Go exploring? Take a road trip? Are you forgetting that Axiom is right behind you? You got lucky twice but the minute we find out—” He stops, releases a weary breath. “The minute they find out what happened here, they’re going to get a lot more serious. We can’t run much longer.”

“Need to run faster,” I say.

He points to the wreck of the chopper. “That’s one of maybe ten helicopters remaining in America, and you know who has the rest.”

“How about a jet?”

He opens his mouth to scoff at this, then glances back at the enormous tire that his daughter is climbing again.

“You said you were a ‘large transport pilot,’ ” Julie says. “Can you fly a 747?”

His eyes travel up the landing gear and over the clownishly bulbous nose of one of the largest commercial airliners ever built. He chuckles. “Fucking thing’s so big I forgot it was a plane.”

“Can you fly it?”

He studies it for a moment, mumbling to himself. “Looks like civil-military . . . late model . . . probably close enough to the C-17 . . .” He glances sideways at Julie. “I can fly it if it flies, but that’s a big ‘if.’ Everything else here is wrecked or gutted.”

“It has power,” I offer.

“There’s fuel in the Iceland Air hangar,” M says, then puts a hand to the side of his mouth and whispers to Nora, “I used to huff it.”

Nora smiles. “Good shit?”

“Good shit.”

Abram watches the Dead stumble over the corpses littering the tarmac. He looks at the two fresh ones in the helicopter, wearing the same beige jackets he is. He looks at his daughter, sitting eye level with him on the tire, her worried face showing a rare glow of excitement.

“I’ll give it a preflight check,” he says, keeping his voice carefully neutral. “But don’t get your hopes up.”

•  •  •

While Abram inspects the plane’s vital organs, M leads me to his secret stash: a pyramid of fuel drums hidden under a tarp, though I doubt it was the tarp that kept his treasure safe. The airport in general has been largely untouched by post-apocalyptic desperation, still lush with low-hanging fruit like solar panels, cars that run, and perhaps a plane that flies. I suspect it was me and my fellow Dead, gathered here in such uncommon density, who kept the looters away all these years. Thousands of security guards working around the clock—with occasional lunch breaks.

We load as many barrels as we can onto a luggage transport and drive them to the plane. Abram is crouched on the wing, inspecting the flaps, and we watch him for a few minutes before he notices us.

“Is it stabilized?” he asks, clearly grasping at straws. The world had decades to prepare for the apocalypse and preserving the fuel was priority one. Finding perishable gas is about as likely as finding whale oil.

M jabs a hand at the label on the barrels: a clock encircled by spinning arrows.

“How many more are there?” Abram says.

M shrugs. “A lot.”

Abram stares at the barrels with his mouth slightly open, searching for an argument. Then he sighs. “Get them. We’ll need every drop.”

The emergency-exit door bursts open and Julie steps out onto the wing. “Does that mean it works? It’ll fly?”

“It’s the 2035 model,” Abram replies wearily, “about as new as airliners get, and it looks like everything important is intact.” He wipes sweat off his forehead. “Needs a little service, but I think I can get it in the air.”

A look comes over Julie that I haven’t seen since that day on the stadium rooftop, when she saw that the corpse she just kissed was alive, and at least one thing in her dark world could change. She doesn’t say anything. She just stands there on the wing, bathing me in a luminous grin, and for a moment, as her hair flutters over her face and the sun turns her skin gold, all her scars and bruises are gone.

“I can get it in the air,” Abram cautions, “but I don’t know how long it’ll stay there.”

Without a word, still grinning, Julie pirouettes back into the plane and slams the door.

“I need about three hours,” he says to M and me, and we both blink away the hypnotic effect of Julie’s happiness. “Which is about how long it’ll take for Axiom to realize their pursuit team failed and send another one. So this might get sticky.”

“How can we help?” I ask, feeling Julie’s excitement and Abram’s fear mixing inside me like a bad drug interaction.

“We’re taking the world’s biggest gas hog on a cross-country joyride,” he says. “We need to lose as much weight as possible.”

M glances down at his massive girth. “I’ll . . . go get those barrels.”

“Take the seats out?” I ask Abram as M lumbers off.

“If we have time. But you can start by clearing all that shit out of the cabin.” He finally looks up from the panel and turns his inspection to me. “So you were a zombie. And you lived in this plane.”

I nod.

“What’s a zombie do with paintbrushes and books?”

I look down. “Didn’t do anything. Just didn’t want to forget.”

“Forget what?”

“That there used to be more than this.”

He looks at me blankly.

“And that maybe there can be again.”

He offers no reply or reaction to this. He turns away and resumes his work. I return to the plane and start cleaning.

•  •  •

I’ve never explained to Julie what all this junk means and she’s never asked, but she doesn’t move to join me as I shove piles of it out the emergency exits and watch it shatter and smash on the tarmac. She watches from a distance, as if afraid of interrupting a personal moment.

“It was an anchor,” I say as I toss an armful of snow globes and watch them burst like big raindrops. “Helped me hold on to the old world.” I pick up a heavy box of comic books, the closest I ever got to reading before I remembered how words work, and I pause to examine the top issue’s cover. A hardy gang of survivors surrounded by a horde of zombies, carelessly drawn ghouls distinguishable only by their wounds. A thousand individuals with histories and families, reduced to props for the dramas of a few attractive humans. I drop the box and watch the pages flutter, comics mixing with newspapers and fashion magazines, muscular men and skeletal women, monsters and heroes and increasingly hopeless headlines. “I don’t need it anymore.”

Julie moves to my side. She turns my face toward her and kisses me. Then she kicks an old computer monitor out the door and hoots “Woo!” as it explodes with a pleasant pop.

•  •  •

Nora offers to help us but I politely decline. Clearing out my former home is an emotional process and Julie is the only one I trust to treat my trash with respect. Nora shrugs and takes Sprout outside to watch her father while we dig through my surrogate memories, placeholders for my absent past.

We attack the mess with an everything-must-go gusto, but when I pick up the record player, Julie slaps the back of my head. “Are you crazy? Put that down and turn it on.”

“It’s heavy.”

“We’ve spent the last five days listening to nothing but military strategy, gunfire, and our own screams. I want to hear some music.” She puts on a record from the overhead bin. The opening horns of Sinatra’s “Come Fly with Me” burst onto the speakers and Julie beams. “I never thought we’d get to play this unironically.”

She DJs with dedication while we work, doing her best to keep things upbeat despite the general joylessness of my record collection. Without being conscious of it, I seem to have gathered two distinct genres in my musical salvages: warm, comforting relics from a simpler time, and bittersweet melancholia from the edge of the end. And since most of the classics are unplayably scratched, we quickly exhaust my supply of house-cleaning jams.

“I guess it’s back to Sinatra,” she says when Sgt. Pepper slips into its inner groove loop, howling its indecipherable incantations.

“Wait,” I say as she stops the record. I pull one of my old favorites from the pile and hand the sleeve to her as I slide the record onto the turntable.

“Elbow?” Her grin fades as she reads the back of the sleeve. “I remember them. One of my mom’s favorites.” I hesitate with the needle hovering over the groove, but she waves away my concern. “It’s fine. Play it.”

I lower the needle. The song is gentle and full of yearning, and it drastically alters the mood. I give her a tentative smile, hoping this is okay. “Wanted to hear something new.”

She reads the fine print on the sleeve. “2008? That’s not new, R. I’m newer than this.”

I shrug. “I’m . . . a little delayed.”

She smirks, then looks at the ceiling as the first verse begins.

We had the drive and the time on our hands

One little room and the biggest of plans

The days were shaping up frosty and bright

Perfect weather to fly

Perfect weather to fly

“Okay,” she says, nodding. “Okay, this is good.”

A throat clears behind us.

“Sorry to interrupt your little listening party,” Abram says, standing in the doorway, “but I did mention that people are coming to kill us, right?”

Julie looks around at the cabin, empty except for a few baseball cards and worthless dollar bills under the seats. “We’re done.”

“That turntable looks heavy.”

“If it comes down to a few pounds, Abram, I’ll cut off my arm. Deal?” She closes her eyes and sways to the music. “God, this is pretty.”

Abram gives her a thoroughly unenthused stare and slips into the cockpit to begin powering up the plane. No sooner has he left the doorway than Nora steps into it. “R?” she whispers, glancing after Abram to make sure he’s not listening. “You might want to come up here.”

I follow her through the boarding tunnel into the waiting area of Gate 12. Several carry-ons lie open and emptied on the floor, and while the toiletries and computer gear have been ignored, the clothes have been put to use. Between two rows of seats is a huge fort made of dresses and robes draped over mop handles. The engineering is impressive.

“We need more mops,” says a small voice from inside. “Go get some mops.”

Julie and I exchange a glance. We duck down to peek through the entrance. Abram’s daughter appears to be having a tea party with my two Dead children, still sticky with their mother’s blood.

Sprout turns, grins, waves. “Hi! We’re building a building!”

I realize that the items on the floor between them are not plates and silverware but notepads and compasses. Sprout seems to have found an architect’s drafting kit. But I’m less concerned about the girl’s impractical career goals than I am about her choice of friends. Joan and Alex kneel under the fort’s colorful ceiling of luminous cotton, staring at Sprout with a dreamy disorientation in their dull gray eyes. I see no signs of hunger or aggression. They seem to have witnessed both the massacre of their neighbors and the liquefaction of their mother without succumbing to relapse, but I remember them running through the airport, laughing and playing like something very close to normal children, and I also remember them picking up a man’s severed arm and sharing it between them like a jumbo hot dog. The plague is uncertain of its welcome. It circles their hearts, tapping on windows. I can’t trust it or them.

“Come out,” I tell Sprout, and her smile fades.

“Why?”

“You can’t be around those kids.”

“Why?”

Behind us, the plane’s engines sputter to life. They rev and chug for a moment, then settle into a steady hum.

“Sprout, honey,” Julie says, “it’s time to go. But Joan and Alex can come with us.”

I look at her sharply. “They can?”

She looks back even more sharply. “Were you planning on leaving them here?”

“Well, I—”

“R,” she says, horrified. “Axiom’s going to cut through this whole hive looking for us. You want to leave your kids to be mowed down with the others?”

“No, but . . . they’re dangerous.”

“Who’s dangerous?” Abram says, stepping out of the boarding tunnel. “What’s going on?”

Sprout peeks shyly from under a silk negligee. “Hi, Daddy.”

Abram crouches down. He sees my kids staring at his daughter. “Jesus,” he spits and knocks the roof off the fort, grabs Sprout and carries her clear while my kids watch mutely.

“You broke it!” Sprout cries. “You broke my building!”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he says, glaring at all the adults in the room.

“We were watching them,” Nora says. “They weren’t doing anything.”

“They’re fucking zombies, for Christ’s sake.”

Julie stands up. The steel returns. “They’re coming with us.”

“You are out of your fucking mind.”

“We’ll tie them up and keep them in the back of the plane. They won’t be able to hurt anyone. They’re the closest thing R has to a family and we’re not leaving them here for your friends to butcher.”

I hear a new tone mixing into the hum of the engines. A lower-pitched drone like an ugly harmony.

“Using a jumbo jet as a getaway car is already the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” Abram says. “If you expect me to—”

“Quiet,” I snap, holding up a hand and tilting my head, listening.

Abram looks like he’s about to hit me, then he hears it too. He runs to the window and peers out at the northern horizon. Two black specks mar the blue sky. Three. Four.

The argument is over. Without further comment, Abram carries his daughter into the boarding tunnel. Julie and Nora look at me with wide eyes.

“Go,” I tell them. “I’ll be right behind you.”

Nora runs into the tunnel and pokes her head through a broken window. “Marcus! Get your beefy butt up here! Flight six-six-six is now boarding!”

Julie hesitates just a moment, then follows Nora.

I look at Joan and Alex. They look at me. I hope what I see stirring behind the dullness in their eyes is understanding, maybe even forgiveness, as I tie belts around their wrists.

•  •  •

There has never been a more efficient departure in the history of commercial air travel. The moment I lock the door behind me the plane shudders away from the gate. No searching for seats, no wrestling with the overhead bins, and certainly no safety demonstration. While I lock my kids in the bathroom—they seemed comfortable enough when I found them there—Abram races onto the runway like the plane is a sports car. The black specks behind us have grown into black lumps. Their warbling drone fills my ears like angry bees. I almost tumble down the aisle when Abram guns the engines and the plane surges forward.

“R!” Julie calls to me from business class. “Get up here!”

I fight my way forward while inertia drags me back. By the time I reach Julie, the plane is shuddering and shaking like we’re driving on a country road.

“Marcus!” Abram calls back to M, who’s sitting in the back of business class, several seats removed from the rest of us. “You cleared the runway, right?”

“Yes,” M says through gritted teeth, gripping the armrests so tight his fingers tremble.

Nora drops down next to him and smiles. “Scared of flying?”

His eyes are wide. Beads of sweat glisten on his forehead. “Little bit.”

“I’ve never flown before. I’m excited.”

“Happy for you,” he growls, and Nora laughs. She reaches over and puts a hand on his forearm.

“Marcus. After everything we’ve lived through, we’re not going to die in a damn plane crash.”

M takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. Nora pats his arm and settles back into her seat.

I fall into mine next to Julie and brace myself as the plane threatens to tear itself apart. She reaches out and grabs my hand, and I see no fear in her eyes. Despite everything, despite the many possible deaths circling our heads at this moment, the rattling of the plane and the choppers behind it and the unknown wilderness we’re flying into, her eyes are full of hope. It’s so bright that for a moment I swear there’s a glimmer of gold in their icy blue.

“Here we go,” she says, and with a final lunge, the plane leaves the ground. The shuddering stops. The only sound is the engines. We are gliding through space.

“Wow,” I hear Abram gasp to no one in particular, and I realize how little he actually expected this to work.

I scan the windows behind me until I find our pursuers. They are plainly visible now, but they have stopped growing. If they were equipped with missiles, or even high-caliber cannons like the last one, we might be in trouble, but these are not gunships. They are light craft salvaged from news stations and corporate buildings, and as we climb rapidly and they shrink away beneath us, the distant flashes of their rifles and handguns become less and less frightening. Finally, a towering cumulus welcomes us into its cottony bosom, and the world goes white.

A tightly held breath bursts out of M in the form of incredulous laughter.

Nora stares out the window, awestruck.

From the cockpit, I hear Sprout giggling and clapping in the copilot’s chair.

Julie squeezes my hand, and I realize it’s her left hand. Either she’s ignoring the pain in her finger, or she’s forgotten it.

The record player is still on. In the relative quiet of our ascent I can hear it popping and skipping on an inner groove. Then a gust of turbulence rocks the cabin, and the needle scratches back a few songs, landing almost exactly where we left it in that bittersweet melody of slow-boiling beauty.

So in looking to stray from the line

We decided instead we should pull out the thread

That was stitching us into this tapestry vile

And why wouldn’t you try? Perfect weather to fly

The fog around us flickers a few times, and suddenly we’re above it. An impossible fantasy landscape of creamy white towers stretches out before us, and here and there, in holes and gaps below, the real world peeks through, full of unknown threats and promises, shouting at us to come back and fight.

We’re coming, I tell the world, squeezing Julie’s hand harder. We’re ready for you.