“Leave him alone, Makayla,” Jaden said. He had backed away. I wanted to. Who was this kid to me? I just wanted to get to the shelter, and then, when the water went away, get my grandmother. But I just kept staring at his shoes. Somebody had bought him those shoes, somebody had loved him enough to want to give him something that would make him happy like that. And that person was gone now. I remembered the things I had kept after my parents checked—my mom’s hair scarfs and my dad’s old flannel. Things that brought comfort and pain every time I looked at them. I wondered if this boy was feeling those feelings as he looked at the shoes someone who had loved him gave him. I sat down next to him. I didn’t reach out for him again, but I stayed there.

With the roar of the motor behind us, we began making our way down the waterway that used to be a street. I knew these streets, but now they looked like an alien landscape. Trees were torn down, windows broken, bodies floated in the water, bloating. In the wake of our boat I saw the wet fur of a drowned street dog, wrapped up in a downed electrical wire. What had killed it, the water or the electricity, I couldn’t say.

I smelled smoke, and up ahead of us I saw the dancing orange of a fire. I wondered how there could be fire in all this water, but, as we pulled up, I saw an old factory building blazing, black smoke billowing out of it in clouds so thick they were almost solid. It looked like something out of a movie, like the kind of thing you don’t see in real life. I had barely started taking in that scene when I heard a steady pop pop pop off to our right. I knew gunshots when I heard them.

“What the hell?” I said aloud. Jaden didn’t even look at me. He was looking out back behind the boat, watching all the garbage that was going up and down in our wake. The man at the front of the boat answered me.

“Oh, it’s worse than that,” he said. “We’ve seen women who were raped, people beaten within an inch of their lives. Some people take the worst and they make it even worse than that.”

The man at the back of the boat made a noise in his throat. “Fucking animals. You people who stayed here are all like animals.”

“What the fuck did you say?” I asked, breaking my resolve to keep my mouth shut. “Say it again, go ahead.”

“When you get thrown in the with rest of the animals, don’t blame anybody but yourself.”

I took a step toward him, my hands balling up into fists at my sides. I hadn’t been in a fight in I don’t even know how long, and the guy had a gun. I was ready to jump him, though, and hodder whatever happened after that.