Manny had seen similar sights before, when his parents had fled the DFW area for Austin’s relative safety. Here and there, on and in the cars behind them, he saw small figures that had to be children. Kids like he’d been, fleeing the same city he’d had to flee for the same basic reason. Manny’s stand-out memory from that time wasn’t the terror of seeing a mortar land for the first time, or anything about their flight out of the city at all. Instead, it was from the next day, at their first refugee camp, when he saw his father in line for their daily ration of food. A journalist had passed by, taking the sort of pictures Reggie’s lapel camera now snapped mindlessly. Manny’s dad had been crying, ashamed that he’d needed “charity” and even more ashamed to have fled the family home.

More than anything about that time, Manny remembered how his father had hidden his face from the photographer. The gesture had told Manny more about their new status in the world than anything an adult had actually said. Behind him now were cars full of mothers and fathers and children, who were about to have their own searing experiences. Manny hated how familiar this felt to him. He hated that, for Reggie, it counted as the adventure of a lifetime.

Manny looked at the journalist, at the awe and innocent excitement in his eyes, and tried to imagine Reggie’s life back home. None of the individual pieces of that life would be new to Manny. His world also had bars and parties and apartment leases and term papers. The thing he couldn’t imagine was the sense of security. Living life without the constant threat of war.

He’d been so close to securing that life for himself. If they’d only waited six months. But they hadn’t. And now Manny had a choice to make: stand and fight, or run with what he had and hope for the best. Manny leaned back, as much as his precarious seat allowed, and stared out at the burning city that had once been Dallas.

“Goddamn,” he muttered to himself, “I gotta get the fuck out of Texas.”

Chapter 5

Roland.

Twenty years ago Camelback Mountain had towered over a wealthy suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. Then had come the civil war. Power, food, and water shortages made the city’s 130 degree summers insufferable for all but the hardiest or most chromed. Millions fled for less vicious climates, or simply died from exposure and starvation. Now Phoenix was a looted, crumbling ghost. But Camelback Mountain still hosted a version of human civilization.