THE LAST TIME Patricia had dreamed of the forest, there was a hailstorm, so sharp it nicked your face, and every hailstone was a frozen fish with a look of terror on its face. The razor-sharp fish sliced at Patricia’s skin and tore her clothes until she staggered through the icy woods wearing just her underwear and some cowboy boots. Her blood froze as it came off her. She skittered on the frosty ground, as the hail grew heavier and heavier and fish piled up around her bare ankles. At last she came to the great magic Tree, which was no kind of tree she could identify, and she threw herself on its base, crying for protection as the rain of tiny fish came thicker. She looked out from the shelter of the Tree and saw nothing but skeletons in all directions, not just dead trees but dead creatures of all kinds, animal skeletons and human skulls and leafless petrified trees as far as she could see, the only signs of life herself and the great shape she huddled under.

*   *   *

PATRICIA’S INCREASINGLY UNRELIABLE phone seemed to have lost signal for good once they’d set off on the road, but she could still pull up the cryptic e-mail she’d gotten from Laurence right after Superstorm Allegra, saying only that he had to go off the grid for a while and not to worry about him.

All along the roadside, people stood holding signs that begged for a ride or a job or some food. They passed a mall that looked like it had been burnt and torn apart, and then burnt a second time. Near Vacaville, there was a blocked-off exit where the sign said, “TOWN CLOSED. QUARANTINE.” Patricia glimpsed plumes of smoke off in the distance, coming from a distant hillside where the trees or someone’s fields were on fire. There should not be this many fires so close to Christmas.

The sheer volume of bad news had gotten beyond anybody’s ability to process into a narrative. Everybody knew people back east who had died in the flood or succumbed to diseases in the refugee camps, and a ton of people couldn’t get at the money they’d deposited in one of the banks that had gone belly-up. Almost everybody knew people who were living through the Arab Winter or the Irish famine. Patricia had spent days trying to reach her ex-boyfriend Sameer, to make sure he hadn’t gotten caught up in the violence in Paris.