“YOU’RE NOT SLEEPING,” MAX SAID. “YOU’RE STILL HAVING nightmares about the car. When you’re awake, it’s what you think about. I’m right, Cody, aren’t I?”

“Mostly,” I told him, and then neither of us said anything else for a while. We sat together and stared at the ugly red river. It was Max finally spoke up and broke the silence.

“Well, I was thinking,” he said, “maybe if you were to write it down. That might help, I was thinking.”

“It might not, too,” I replied. “I already saw Dr. Lehman twice. I did everything he said, and that didn’t help. How’s writing it down supposed to help?”

“Well, it might,” he said again. “You can’t know until you try. Maybe you could get the bad stuff you saw out of your head, like when you eat spoiled food and throwing up helps. See, that’s what I’m thinking.”

“Maybe you ought to think less, Max. Besides, where am I supposed to get anything to write it on?”

He promptly handed me the nub of a pencil and some paper he’d torn out of the H–G volume of an encyclopedia in the Sanctuary library. I yelled at him for going and ruining books when there aren’t so many left to ruin.

“Cody, we can always put the pages back when you’re done,” he said impatiently, like I should have thought of that already without him having to explain it to me. “Only, they’ll be better than before, because one side will have your story written on them.”

“Who’s gonna want to read my story?” I asked.

“Someone might. Someday, someone might. Anyway, that’s not the point. Writing it’s the point.”

Sitting there on the riverbank, listening to him, it began to make sense, but I didn’t tell him that, because I didn’t feel like letting him know I didn’t still think he was full of shit, and because I still don’t think I can do this. Just because it’s my story doesn’t mean I can put it into words like he wants.

“At least try,” he said. “Just you take a day or two and give it a go.” I told him I had too much to do in the greenhouses, what with the beans and corn coming on ripe, and he said he’d take my shifts and no one would even care because there’s so little work right now at pumps and filters in the hydroplant.

“Oh, and while you’re at it, put in how things went wrong with the world, so when things get better, people will know how it all happened.”

I said that was just dumb. Other people have already written it down, what went wrong. The smart people, the people who weren’t four years old on the first day of THE END OF THE WORLD.

I stared at the shiny encyclopedia pages in my hands. If they’d been ripped out of a real encyclopedia, words would already have been printed on both sides, but they were just copies got made right after THE EVENT. See, that’s how the olders always talk about it, and they say certain words and phrases like THE BEFORE and THE AFTER and THE EVENT and THE GOO as if they were being said all in capital letters. I stared at the pages, which were at least real paper, made from real wood pulp, and I told him if I do this I get more than a kiss. Max said sure, why not, so long as you’re honest, and he kissed me then and told me I was prettier than any of the other girls in Sanctuary (which is bullshit), and then he left me alone at the edge of the river. Which is where I’m sitting now. Sitting, writing, stopping to toss a rock that’s still a rock into the sludgy crimson river that isn’t still a river because most of the water went FACSIMILE twelve years ago.

The river moves by about as slowly as I’m writing this down, and I count all the way up to fifty-three before the rock (real rock) actually sinks out of sight into the not-water anymore. At least the river still moves. Lots of them went too solid. I’ve seen rivers that stopped moving almost right after THE EVENT. These days, they just sit there. Red and hard. Not moving, and I’ve even walked on a couple. Some people call them Jesus Streams. Anyway, I walked all the way across a broad Jesus Stream on a dare. But it wasn’t much of a dare since I got a good dose of SWITCH OFF in me right away, back when I was four.

Okay. Fine, Max. So I’m doing this even though it’s stupid. And you better not welch on that bet or I’ll kick your ass, hear that? Also, I’m not writing much about what happened. I shouldn’t waste my time writing any of that stuff. I don’t care what Max says, because that’s all down on paper somewhere else. I don’t even know most of it, anyway, that EVENT three-quarters of my whole life ago. What I know for sure doesn’t take long to set down. I learned what they bother to teach about THE GOO in classes. They don’t teach all that much because why bother telling us about THE BEFORE and WHAT WENT WRONG so we got THE EVENT, when what we need to be learning is how to run the hydros and keep the power on, horticulture, medicine, engineering, and keeping the livestock alive (Max’s dad used to oversee the rat cages before he was promoted to hydro duty, or Max would still be feeding pellets to rats and mice and guinea pigs). But, okay, Max:

THIS IS WHAT THEY TEACH YOU

Twelve years ago, in THE BEFORE, there were too many people in the world, and most of them were starving. There wasn’t enough oil. There wasn’t enough clean water. There wasn’t enough of much of anything because people kept having babies almost as fast as the rats do. They’d almost used up everything. There were wars (we don’t have those anymore, just the rovers and sneaks), and there were riots and terrorists. There were diseases we don’t have anymore. People started dying faster than anyone could hope to bury them, so they just piled up. I can’t imagine that many people. Ma’am Shen says there were more than nine billion people back then, but sometimes I think she surely exaggerates.

Anyway, in the year 2048, in a LOST PLACE called Boston, in a school the olders call MIT, scientists were trying to solve all these problems, all of them at once. Maybe other scientists in other parts of the world at some other schools and some of THE COMPANIES were also trying, but SWITCH ON happened at MIT in Boston, which was in a place called New England. SWITCH ON, says Ma’am Shen, started out in a sort of bottle called a beaker. It gets called THE CRUCIBLE sometimes, and also SEAL 7, that one particular bottle. But I’ll just call it the bottle.

Before I started writing this part, I made Max go back to the library and copy down some words and numbers for me on the back of one of these pages. I don’t want to sound more ignorant than I am, and it’s the least he could do. So, in the bottle, inside a lead box, were two things: a nutrient culture and nano-assemblers, which were microscopic machines. The assemblers used the culture to make copies of themselves. Idea was, make a thing you could eat that continuously made copies of itself, there’d be plenty enough food. And maybe this would also work with medicine and fuel and building materials and everything nine billion people needed. But the assemblers in the bottle were a TRIAL. So no one was sure what would happen. They made THE GOO, which Max’s notes call polyvinyl chloride, PVC, but I’ll call it plastic, ’cause that’s what it’s always called when people talk about it. People don’t talk about it much, though I think they might have back before the SWITCH OFF really started working.

Okay, lost my train of thought.

Oh, right. The bottle at MIT. The bottle that was supposed to save the world, but did just the opposite. The assemblers (or so say Max’s notes, and I can hardly read his handwriting) during the TRIAL were just four at the start, and four of them made four more of them. Those eight, though, because the production was exponential, made eight more assemblers. Thirty-six made seventy-two made 144 made 288 made 576 copies, then 1,152, 2,304, 4,608, and this was just in one hour. In a day, there were…I don’t know, Max didn’t write that part down.

The assemblers went ROGUE and obviously the bottle wasn’t big enough to hold them. Probably not after a few million, I’m thinking. It shattered, and they got out of the lead box, and, lo and behold, they didn’t need the culture to make copies of themselves. Just about anything would do. Glass (the bottle). Stone. Metal (the lead box). Anything alive. Water, like the river. Not gases, so not air. Not water vapor, which is one reason we’re not all dead. The other reason, of course, is SWITCH OFF, which was made at another lab, and that one was in another LOST PLACE called France. People got injected with SWITCH OFF, and it was sprayed from the air in planes, and then bombs of SWITCH OFF were dropped all over. THE EVENT lasted two weeks. When it was more or less over, an estimated seventy-eight percent of the global biomass and a lot of the seas, rivers, streams, and the earth’s crust had stopped being what it was before and had become plastic. Oh, not all crimson, by the way. I don’t know why, but lots of different colors.

I didn’t know all these numbers and dates. Max’s notes. What I know: my parents died in THE EVENT, my parents and all my family, and I was evacuated to Sanctuary here in Florida on the shores of the St. Johns crimson plastic river. I don’t think much more than that matters about THE EVENT. So this is where I’m gonna stop trying to be like the vandalized encyclopedia and tell the other story instead.

The story that’s my story.

Isn’t that what Max wanted me to start with?

MY STORY
(CODY HERNANDEZ’S STORY)

I’m discovering, Max, that I can’t tell my story without telling lots of other little stories along the way.

Like what happened the day that’s still giving me the bad dreams, that was almost a year ago, which means it was about five years after most of the Army and the National Guard soldiers left us here because all of a sudden there were those radio transmissions from Atlanta and Miami, and they went off to bring other survivors back to Sanctuary. Only, they never brought anyone back, because they never came back, and we still don’t know what happened to them. This is important to my story, because when the military was here with us, they kept a checkpoint and barricades on the east side of the big bridge over the St. Johns River, the Sanctuary side. But after they left, no one much bothered to man the checkpoint anymore, and the barricades stopped being anything more than a chain-link fence with a padlocked gate.

So, the story of the Army and National Guard leaving to find those people, I had to get that out to get to my story. Because I never would have been able to climb over the fence if they hadn’t left. Or if they’d left but come back. They’d have stopped me. Or I’d probably never even have thought about climbing over.

Back in THE BEFORE, the bridge was called the Mathews Bridge. Back in THE BEFORE, Sanctuary wasn’t here, and where it is was part of a city called Jacksonville. Now, though, it’s just the bridge, and this little part of Jacksonville is just Sanctuary. About a third of the way across the bridge, there’s an island below it. I have no idea if the island ever had a name. It’s all plastic now, anyway, like most of the bridge. A mostly brown island in a crimson river below a mostly brown plastic bridge. Because of what the sunlight and weather do to polyvinyl chloride—twelve years of sunlight and weather—chunks of the bridge have decayed and fallen away into the slow crimson river that runs down to the mostly-still-crimson sea. The island below the bridge used to be covered with brown plastic palmetto trees and underbrush, but now isn’t much more than a scabby-looking lump. The plastic degrades and then crumbles and is finally nothing but dust that the wind blows away.

I wanted to know what was on the other side. It’s as simple as that.

I considered asking Max to go with me, Max and maybe one or two others. Maybe the twins, Jessie and Erin (who are a year older than me and Max), maybe Beth, too. There are still all the warning signs on the fence, the ones the military put there. But people don’t go there. I suspect it reminds them of stuff from THE BEFORE that they don’t want to be reminded of, like how this is the only place to live now. How there’s really nowhere else to ever go. Which might be why none of the olders had ever actually told me to stay away from the bridge. Maybe it simply never occurred to them I might get curious, or that any of us might get curious.

“What do you think’s over there?” I asked Max, the day I almost asked him to come with me. We were walking together between the river and some of the old cement walls that used to be buildings. I remember we’d just passed the wall where, long time ago, someone painted the word NOWHERE. Only, they (or somebody else) also painted a red stripe between the W and the H, so it says NOW HERE, same as it says NOWHERE.

“Nothing,” he replied. “Nothing’s over there anymore,” and Max shaded his eyes from the bright summer sun. Where we were, it’s less than a mile across the river. It’s still easy to make out where the docks and cranes used to be. “You can see for yourself, Cody. Ain’t nothing over there except what the goo left.”

Which is to say, there’s nothing over there.

“You never wonder about it, though?”

“Why would I? Besides, the bridge ain’t safe to cross anymore.” Max pointed south to the long span of it. Lots of the tall trusses, which used to be steel, have dropped away into the sludgy river a hundred and fifty feet below. Lots of the roadway, too. “You’d have to be crazy to try. And since there’s nothing over there, you’d have to be extra crazy. You know what suicide is, right?”

“I think about it sometimes, is all. Not suicide, just finding out what’s over there.”

“Same damn difference,” he said. “Anyway, we ought’a be getting back.” He turned away from the river and the bridge, the island and the other side of the river. So that’s why I didn’t ask Max to cross the bridge with me. I knew he’d say no, and I was pretty sure he’d tell one of the olders, and then someone would stop me. I followed him back to the barracks, but I knew by then I was definitely going to climb the chain-link fence and cross the bridge.

Oh, I almost forgot, and I want to put this in, write down what I can recall of it. On the way home, we came across Mr. Benedict. He was sitting on a rusty barrel not far from the NOW|HERE wall. In THE BEFORE, Mr. Benedict—Mr. Saul Benedict—was a physicist. He’s one of our teachers now, though he isn’t well and sometimes misses days. Max says something inside his head is broken. Something in his mind, but that he isn’t exactly crazy. Anyway, there he was on the barrel. He’s one of the few olders who ever talks much about THE GOO. That afternoon, he said hello to me and Max, but he had that somewhere-else tone to his voice. He sounded so distant, distant in time or in place. I don’t know. We said hello back. Then he pointed to the bridge, and that sort of gave me shudder, and I wondered if he’d noticed us staring at it. He couldn’t have overheard us; we were too far away.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said.

“What doesn’t make sense?” Max asked him.

“It should have fallen. Steel and concrete, that’s one thing. Iron, steel, precompressed concrete, those materials, fine. But after the bots were done with it…that bridge, it should have collapsed under its own weight, even though, obviously, its not nearly as heavy or dense now as it was before. Plastic could never bear the load.”

This is the thing about Saul Benedict: he asks questions no one ever asks, questions I don’t understand half the time. If you let him, he’ll go on and on about how something’s not right about our understanding of THE EVENT, how the science doesn’t add up right. I’ve heard him say the fumes from the outgassing plastic should have killed us all years ago. And how the earth’s mass would have been changed radically by the nano-assemblers, which would have altered gravity. How lots of the atmosphere would have been lost to space when gravity changed. And how plate tectonics would have come to a halt. Lots of technical science stuff like that, some of which I have to go to the library to find out what he means. I’m pretty sure very few people bother to consider whether or not Mr. Benedict is right. Maybe not because they believe the questions are nonsense, but because no one needs more uncertainty than we have already. I’m not even sure I spend much time on whether or not he’s making sense. I just look up words to see what the questions mean.

“But it hasn’t fallen down,” Max protested, turning back toward the bridge. “Well, okay. Some pieces broke off, but not the whole bridge.”

“That’s just the problem,” Mr. Benedict said. “It hasn’t fallen down. You do the math. It would have fallen immediately.”

“Max is terrible at math,” I told Mr. Benedict, and he frowned.

“He doesn’t apply himself, Cody. You know that don’t you, Max? You don’t apply yourself. If you did, you’d be an exemplary student.”

We told him we were late for chores, said our until laters, and left him sitting on the rusty barrel, muttering to himself.

“Nutty old fart,” Max said, and I didn’t say anything.

Before I went to cross the bridge, I did some studying up first. In the library, there’s a book about the city that used to be Jacksonville, and I sat at one of the big tables and read about the Mathews Bridge. It was built in 1953, which made it exactly one hundred years old last year. But what mattered was that it’s about a mile and a half across. One morning, I talked Mr. Kleinberg at the garage into lending me his stopwatch, and I figured out I walk about three miles an hour, going at an easy pace. Not walking fast or jogging, just walking. So, barring obstructions, if I could go straight across, it would only take me about half an hour. Half an hour across, half an hour back. Maybe poke about on the other side (which, by the way, used to be called Arlington) for a couple of hours, and I’d be back before anyone even noticed I’d gone. For all I knew, other kids had already done it. Even more likely, some of the olders.

I picked the day I’d go—July 18, which was on a Friday. I’d go right after my morning chores, during late-morning break, and be sure to be back by lunch. I didn’t tell Max or anyone else. No one would ever be the wiser. I filled a canteen and I went.

It was easy getting over the fence. There isn’t any barbed wire, like on some of the fences around Sanctuary. I snagged my jeans on the sharp twists of wire at the top, but only tore a very small hole that would be easy to patch. On the other side, the road’s still asphalt for about a hundred yards or so, before the plastic begins. Like I said, I’d walked on THE GOO before, so I knew what to expect. It’s very slightly springy, and sometimes you press shallow footprints into it that disappear after a few minutes. On the bridge, there was the fine dust that accumulates as the plastic breaks down. Not as much as I’d have expected, but probably that’s because the wind blows it away. But there were heaps of it where the wind couldn’t reach, piled like tiny sand dunes. I left footprints in the dust that anyone could have followed.

I glanced back over my shoulder a few times, just to be certain no one was following me. No one was. I kept to the westbound lane. There were cracks in the roadway, in what once had been cement. Some were hardly an inch, but others a foot or two across and maybe twice as deep, so I’d have to jump over those. I skirted the places where the bridge was coming apart in chunks, and couldn’t help but think about what all Mr. Benedict had said. It shouldn’t be here. None of it should still be here, but it is. So what don’t we know? How much don’t we know?

I walked the brown bridge, and on either side of me, far below, the lazy crimson St. Johns River flowed. I walked, and a quarter of a mile from the fence, I reached the spot where the bridge spans the island. I went to the guardrail and peered over the edge. I leaned against the rail, and it cracked loudly and dropped away. I almost lost my balance and tumbled down to the crimson river. I stepped back, trying not to think about what it would be like to slowly sink and drown in that.…

And I thought about turning around and heading back. From this point on, I constantly thought about going back, but I didn’t. I walked a little faster than before, though, suddenly wanting to be done with this even if I still felt like I had to do it.

I kept hearing Max talking inside my head, saying what he’d said, over and over again.

Since there’s nothing over there, you’d have to be extra crazy.

You know what suicide is, right?

Ain’t nothing over there except what THE GOO left.

It took me a little longer to reach the halfway point than I thought it would, than my three-miles-an-hour walking had led me to believe it would. It was all the cracks, most likely. Having to carefully jump them, or find ways around them. And I kept stopping to gaze out and marvel at the ugly wasteland THE GOO had made of the land beyond the Mathews Bridge. I don’t know if there’s a name for the middle of a bridge, the highest point of a bridge. But it was right about the time I reached that point that I spotted the car. It was still pretty far off, maybe halfway to the other end. It was skewed sideways across the two eastbound lanes, on the other side of the low divider that I’m sure used to be concrete but isn’t anymore.

But all the cars were cleared off the bridge by the military years ago. They were towed to the other side or pushed into the crimson river. There weren’t supposed to be any cars on the bridge. But here was this one. The sunlight glinted off yellow fiberglass and silver chrome, and I could tell the nano-assemblers hadn’t gotten hold of it, that it was still made of what the factory built it from. And I had two thoughts, one after the other: Where did this car come from? And, Why hasn’t anyone noticed it? The second thought was sort of silly because it’s not like anyone really watches the bridge, not since most of the Army and National Guard went away.

Then I thought, How long’s it been there? And, Why didn’t it come all the way across? And, What happened to the driver? All those questions in my head, I was starting to feel like Saul Benedict. It was an older car, one of the electrics that were already obsolete by the time THE EVENT occurred.

“Cody, you go back,” I said out loud, and my voice seemed huge up there on the bridge. It was like thunder. “You go back and tell someone. Let them deal with this.”

But then I’d have to explain what I was doing way out on the bridge alone.

Are you enjoying this, Max? I mean, if I’ve let you read it. If I did, I hope to hell you’re enjoying it, because I’m already sweating, drops of sweat darkening the encyclopedia pages. Right now I feel like that awful day on the bridge. I could stop now. I could turn back now. I could. I won’t, but I could. Doesn’t matter. I’ll keep writing, Max, and you’ll keep reading.

I kept walking. I didn’t turn back, like a smarter girl would have done. A smarter girl who understood it was more important to tell the olders what I’d found than to worry about getting in trouble for being out on the bridge. There was a strong gust of wind, warm from the south, and the dust on the bridge was swept up so I had to partly cover my face with my arm. But I could see the tiny brown devils swirling across the road.

Right after the wind, while the dust was still settling, I came to an especially wide crack in the roadway. It was so wide and deep, and when I looked down, the bottom was hidden in shadow. It didn’t go all the way through, or I’d not have been able to see down there. I had to climb over the barricade into the eastbound lane, into the lane with the car, to get around it. I haven’t mentioned the crumbling plastic seagulls I kept finding. Well, I figured they’d been seagulls. They’d been birds, and were big enough to have been seagulls. They littered the bridge, birds that died twelve years ago when I was four. Once I was only, I don’t know, maybe twenty-five yards from the car, I stopped for a minute or two. I squinted, trying to see inside, but the windows were tinted and I couldn’t make out anything at all in there.

The car looked so shiny and new. No way it had been sitting out in the weather very long. There weren’t even any pieces of the plastic girders lying on it, no dents from decayed and falling GOO, so it was a newcomer to the bridge, and I think that scared me most of all. By then, my heart was pounding—thumping like mad in my chest and ears and even the tip ends of my fingers—and I was sweating. Not the normal kinda sweat from walking, but a cold sweat like when I wake up from the nightmares of this day I’m writing about. My mouth was so, so dry. I felt a little sick to my belly, and wondered if it was breathing in all that dust.

“No point in stopping now,” I said, maybe whispering, and my voice was huge out there in all the empty above and below and around the Mathews Bridge. “So when they ask what I found, I can tell them all of it, not just I found a car on the bridge.” I considered the possibility that it might have been rovers, might be a trap. Them lying there in wait until someone takes the bait, then they ask for supplies to let me go. We hadn’t seen rovers—looters—in a year or so, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still out there, trying to get by on the scraps of nothing they found and whatever they could steal. Lower than the sneaks, the rovers. At least the sneaks never kill anyone. They just slip in and rob you when no one’s looking. Ma’am Shen says they’re all insane, and I expect that’s the truth of it. I wished I’d brought a knife (I have a lock-blade I keep in my footlocker), but that was dumb, ’cause rovers carry guns and bows and shit. What good’s a knife for a fifteen-year-old girl out on her own, so exposed she might as well be naked. No chance but to turn around and run if things went bad.

I shouted, “Anybody in there?” At the very top of my voice I shouted it. When no one answered, I shouted again, and still nobody answered me. I hadn’t thought they would, but it didn’t hurt to try.

“You don’t need to be scared of me,” I called out. “And I ain’t got nothing worth stealing.” Which I knew was dumb because if it was rovers they wouldn’t be after what I had on my person, but what they could get for me.

No one called back, and so I started walking again.

Pretty soon, I was close enough I could make out the plates on the front of the vehicle—Alabama, which we all thought was another LOST PLACE, since that’s what the Army guys had told us. On the map of what once was the United States hanging on the wall in the library, Alabama was colored in red, like all the LOST PLACES (which is most of the map). But here was a car from Alabama, and it couldn’t have been sitting on the bridge very long at all, not and still be so shiny and clean. Maybe I counted my footsteps after shouting and not getting an answer, but if so, I can’t remember how many I took.

There was another southerly gust, and more swirling dust devils, and this time the bridge seemed to sway just a little, which didn’t make my stomach feel any better.

Then I was finally at the car. Up close, it was a little dirtier than it had seemed from far away. There were a few dents and dings, a little rust, but nothing more than that. None of the tires were even flat. I stared at the tinted windows and waited for rovers to jump out and point their weapons at me, but that didn’t happen. For the first time, I considered the possibility that the doors might all be locked, and I didn’t even have anything to break out the windows. I looked past the car at the ruins of Arlington, and considered just sticking to my plan, forget the car for now, poke around over there a bit, then head home again. And yeah, tell the olders about the car and take whatever punishment I’d have coming.

I leaned forward, peering in through the glass, but the tinting was too dark even right up on it like that. I gripped the driver’s side door handle, and it was very hot from the Florida sun. It was hot enough I almost pulled my hand back, but only almost. Instead, I gave it a quick twist to the left, and the tumblers clicked. Which meant it wasn’t locked after all.

I took a deep breath and pulled up on the door. It came open easy as pie—like the olders say. It lifted, rising above my head, above the roof. The hinges didn’t even squeak. There was only a soft whoosh from hydraulics and pistons. Scalding air spilled out of the car.

You know exactly what I found in there, Max? It seems wicked to write it down on these “borrowed” encyclopedia pages. It seems wrong, but I’ll do it anyhow. Just in case you’re right, because yeah, I want the dreams to stop. Dead people don’t have dreams. Dead people probably don’t have anything at all, so it’s stupid me worrying like this, hesitating and drawing it out.

The door opened, and there were two people inside.

There was what was left of two people.

Like the might-have-been seagulls, THE GOO had gotten to them, and they were that same uniform shade of bluish green all live things go when the nano-assemblers get hold of them. I stepped back immediately and turned my head away. I even thought I might puke. It’s not that I’d never seen a person who’d died that way; it’s just I hadn’t seen any in a long, long time, and you forget. Or I’d forgotten. I covered my mouth, not wanting to be sick and have to see my half-digested breakfast spattered all over the road at my feet. I leaned forward, hands on knees, and took deep breaths and counted to thirty. Someone taught me to do that whenever I’m afraid I might be about to throw up, count to thirty, but I can’t remember who it was. Not that it matters.

When I felt a little better, I looked again. The woman was sitting with her back to the door, and her arms were wrapped tightly around the girl. The woman’s fingers disappeared into the girl’s hair—hair and hand all one and the same now. I figured they drove as far as they could, drove until they were too far gone to keep going. It takes hours and hours for the infected to die. Like the seagulls, the weather hadn’t been at them, and the woman and the girl looked like they’d just been popped fresh out of a mold, like the molds they use in the machine shop to turn non-GOO plastic into stuff we need. Every single detail, no matter how fragile, was still intact. Their plastic eyebrows, each hair, their eyes open and staring nowhere at all. Their skin was almost exactly the color of Ma’am Lillian’s teal-zircon pendant. Only completely opaque instead of translucent.

Their clothes and their jewelry (I noticed the woman’s silver earrings), those hadn’t changed at all. But it didn’t strike me odd until later, like the car being okay didn’t really strike me odd, though it should have.

I still felt dizzy even if the first shock of seeing them was fading. Even if I was just seeing them now, not seeing them and wanting to run away. I reached inside the car and touched the back of the woman’s neck. I shouldn’t have, but I did. It was just a little bit tacky from the heat, a little soft, and I left fingerprints behind. I thought, You leave them out here long enough, shut up and baking inside that car, they’ll melt away to shapeless globs long before the plastic has a chance to get brittle. I thought that, and pulled my hand back. I was relieved to see none of the PVC had come off on my fingers. But I rubbed them on my jeans anyway. I rubbed until it’s a wonder my skin didn’t start bleeding.

They looked like dolls.

They looked almost like the mannequins in the busted shop windows inside Sanctuary.

But they’d both been alive, flesh and bone and breathing, and it couldn’t have been more than a few days before. A week at the most. I stared at them. I wondered which of them died first. I wondered lots of stuff there’s not much point writing down. Then I glanced into the backseat. And right then, that’s when I thought my heart my might stop, just stop beating like the girl’s and the woman’s had finally stopped beating. There was a cardboard box in the back, and there was a baby in a blanket inside the box. I don’t know how the hell it was still alive, how it had been spared by THE GOO or by the heat inside the car, but it was still alive. It looked at me. I saw it was sick, from the broiling day trapped in the automobile, but goddamn it was alive. It saw me and began to bawl, so I rushed around to the other side of the car and opened that door, too. I lifted the cardboard box out careful as I could and set it on the bridge, and then I sat down next to it. I screwed the lid off my canteen and sprinkled water on its forehead and lips. I finally pushed back the blanket and took the baby in my arms. I’d never, ever held a baby. We don’t have many in Sanctuary. And the ones we do have, the dozen or so, not just any kid can go picking them up. Just the mothers and fathers, the nurses and doctors. The baby’s face was so red, like she’d been roasting alive in there, so I sprinkled more water on its cheeks and forehead. It’s eyes were glassy, feverish, and it didn’t cry as loudly as I thought it should have been crying. I sat there and rocked it, shushing it, the way I’d seen people do with babies. I sat there trying to remember a lullaby.

No need to draw this part out, Max.

The baby, she died in my arms. She was just too hot, and I’d come along too late to save her from the sun. Maybe me sprinkling the water on her had been too much. Maybe just seeing me had been too much. Maybe she just picked then to die. And I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. I don’t know why. I knew I ought to, and I still know I ought to have, but I just sat there holding her close to me like she wasn’t dead. Like she was only asleep and was gonna wake up. I sat there staring at the blue-green plastic people in the front seat, at the sky, at the car.

In my bad dreams, there are wheeling, screeching gulls in that blue-white sky, and it goes on forever, on out into space, into starry blackness, down to blue skies on other worlds without women and men and youngers, where none of these things have ever happened and where THE EVENT hasn’t occurred and THE GOO will never reach. Where it’s still THE BEFORE, and will never be THE AFTER.

God and Jesus and angels and a day of judgment of wicked men, they all live and breathe inside the Reverend Swales’s black book, and in the songs we sing on Sundays. Many other gods and devils live in other holy books. But on the bridge that day, there was no god. In my dreams, there is no god. And I don’t pray anymore. I don’t think much of those who do.

You’re saying, Now that’s not what happened, Cody. I can hear you, Max. I can hear you grumbling, plain as day, “Cody Marlene Hernandez, you’re mixing it all up, and you’re doing it on purpose. That wasn’t the deal, you welcher.”

Fine, you win.

I scrounged about and found a couple of other things inside the cardboard box. I hardly looked at them, just stuffed them into my pack. Carrying the dead baby in her blanket, I walked back across the bridge, quickly as I could, quicker than I’d come. It was a lot harder getting over the fence with her in my arms, but I managed. I didn’t drop her. I’d have fallen before I ever dropped her.

I spent a week in quarantine, just in case. Five men went out onto the bridge and brought back the plastic woman and the girl and buried them in the cemetery. They buried the baby there, too, after Doc Lehman did his autopsy. No one ever scolded me or yelled or revoked privileges for going out there. I didn’t have to ask why. You get punished, you don’t have to get punished all over again.

WHAT I’M WRITING DOWN LATER

Me and Max sat between the crimson river and the NOW|HERE wall, and I let him read what I wrote on the back of the torn-out encyclopedia pages. He got pissed near the end, and just like I thought he would, called me a welcher.

“The baby always dies in my dreams,” I told him, when he finally shut up and let me talk again.

“I didn’t say, ‘Write what’s in your dreams.’ I said, ‘Write what happened.’”

“It seemed more important,” I told him, and tossed a piece of gravel at the river. “What haunts me when I sleep, how it might have gone that day, but didn’t. How it probably should have gone, but didn’t.”

“Yeah, but you went and killed that baby.”

“No I didn’t. My nightmares kill the baby, not me. Almost every time I sleep, the nightmares kill the baby.”

He chewed his lip the frustrated way he does sometimes. “Cody, I just ain’t never gonna understand that. You saved the baby, but you go and have bad dreams about the baby dyin’. That’s stupid. You waste all this energy gettin’ freaked out about something didn’t even happen except in a dream, and dreams ain’t real. I thought writin’ the truth, that would make you better. Not writing down lies. That’s what I don’t understand.”

“You weren’t there. You didn’t hold her, and her so hot, and you so sure she was already dead or would be dead any second.”

“I just won’t ever understand it,” he said again.

“Okay, Max. Then you won’t ever understand it. That’s fair. There’s a lot about myself I don’t understand sometimes. Doesn’t matter the dreams don’t make sense. Only matters it happens to me. It’s all too complicated. Never black-and-white, not like SWITCH ON and SWITCH OFF, not like THE BEFORE and THE AFTER. I fall asleep, and she dies in my arms, even though she didn’t.”

He glared at the pages, chewing his lips and looking disgusted, then handed them back to me.

“Well, you don’t win,” he said. “You don’t get any more than kisses ’cause you didn’t even talk about the map or the book, and because you killed the baby.”

“I don’t care,” I replied, which was true.

“I was just trying to help you.”

“I know that, Max. Don’t you think I know that?”

He didn’t answer my question. Instead, he said, “I’m going home, Cody. I got chores. So do you, welcher.” I told him I’d be along soon. I told him I needed to be alone for a while (which is when I’m writing this part down). So I’m sitting here throwing gravel at the sludgy crimson river people used to call the St. Johns River.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED (FOR MAX)

Outside my dreams, the baby didn’t die. The olders figured the car had only driven through Arlington and out onto the bridge the night before I found it. They guessed the girl and the woman got sick a couple of days before that, probably before they even got to Florida. They figured, too, the baby would have died of heat prostration and thirst if I hadn’t found it when I did. “You did right,” Ma’am Shen whispered in my ear when no one was watching or listening in. “Even if that wasn’t your intent, you did right.” We never found out the baby’s name, so they named it Cody, after me.

The olders found something in the baby’s blood. It’s like SWITCH OFF, they say, but it’s different. It’s like SWITCH OFF, but it works better. You breathe it out, and it shuts off the nanoassemblers all around you. Maybe, they say, that’s why the car didn’t change, and why the woman and the girl’s clothes and jewelry wasn’t converted, too. But these new bots, they can’t turn stuff back the way it was before.

And yeah, there was a map. A map of the United States and Mexico and Canada. Most of the cities had big red X’s drawn on them. Montreal, up in Canada, had a blue circle, and so did San Francisco and a few little towns here and there. A red line was drawn from Birmingham, Alabama all the way to Pensacola. Both those cities had red X’s of their own. I found the red pencil in the box with the baby. And I found pages and pages of notes. In the margins of the map, there was a list of countries. Some in red, some in blue.

Turns out the woman was a microbiologist, and she’d been studying when the sanctuary in Birmingham was breached. That’s what she’d written in her notes. They read us that part in class. “The containment has been breached.” I also know the notes talk about the nanites evolving, and about new strains the SWITCH OFF doesn’t work on, and new strains of SWITCH OFF that shut down THE GOO better than before, like what kept the baby alive. They know the scientist also wrote about how THE EVENT isn’t over because the bots are all evolving and doing things they weren’t designed to do.

Of course, they also weren’t designed to eat up the whole world, but they did.

Saul Benedict still frowns and asks his questions, and he says everything’s even more uncertain than it was before I found the car.

But me, I look at that baby, who’s growing up fine and healthy and breathing those new bots out with every breath, and sometimes I think about going out onto the bridge again with a can of spray paint and writing HOPE HERE in great big letters on the side of the car. So if maybe someone else ever comes along, someone who isn’t sick, they’ll see, and drive all the way across the bridge.