Her flesh crawled as she carefully picked her way through the thick carpet of vegetation. The ghosts did not bother her as they had her father, but there would be snakes. And possibly packs of feral animals. The army patrols probably shot any they came across, and laid bait for the others, but still, with no way of defending herself, the teenager felt terribly vulnerable. That was why she had to push on. She stopped when she reached a bare concrete patch of driveway in front of a large church. The area was big enough that it hadn’t been colonised by the vegetation like elsewhere.

Checking the old pre-Wave street map of Temple she had picked up in Ardmore, Sofia located herself near the intersection of Avenue L and South 49th Street. She frowned, not really sure of her bearings. It was always like this in the ghost towns – so easy to get turned around and lose your sense of direction. At least it wasn’t dark now.

Sofia planted her feet as though she meant to take root in the concrete. She held the map in both hands, angling it so as to catch the faint grey light leaking into the day. After a short while looking from the map, to the crossroads, to the steeply pitched roof of the Heights Baptist Church, she was reasonably sure she needed to backtrack two or three blocks, west and south. She really could’ve used a machete, and resolved to get one as soon as possible. There had been a rack full of them in the federal depot at Ardmore, but she’d had no plausible story to explain why a fifteen-year-old girl might need one in Fort Hood.

At least this car park beside the church was relatively open ground. She jogged across it, her progress slowed as she hit the next avenue and another catastrophic confusion of decaying wreckage. The vehicles were piled up so badly here that she wondered whether the federales had used this particular road as a dumping ground. The obstruction forced her another block south, where she got lost for a couple of minutes before backtracking along George Drive and up into West Avenue North. There, she found what she was looking for: the store-front of JM Firearms.

It was obvious this had been a small, single-operator gunsmithing business, and not the sort of big-box artillery warehouse to attract the attention of looters or the authorities. Papa had taught her to seek these places out while they’d been running north to escape the road agents. At establishments like this, inventories often remained completely intact, and weapons and ammunition were almost always stored properly. And she was more likely to find the singular sort of item she needed in a small, bespoke gunsmithing house than at some haunted Walmart store.

*