“Don’t forget to help me watch the sky,” I warn them both.

We roll along a few more miles, the stench getting worse and worse. My eyes are starting to water; the back of my throat stings like we’re traveling through noxious gas.

“We may need to find . . . ,” Trey chokes out. “Another route—”

“There!” Tanq points out the window toward something on the left.

A steel fence hems in sprawling acres of black, churned-up mud. In the distance, low, metal-roofed buildings stretch long and narrow. Then I see it. A dead Holstein cow, on its back just inside the fence, belly bloated to an impossible girth, swarming with flies. Her four legs stick straight out, stiff as posts.

Trey says, “That smell couldn’t come from just one cow.”

“It doesn’t,” Tanq says in a squeaking voice.

A massive blanket of flies lifts into the air, darkening the sky, and suddenly the churned-up mud clarifies into corpses. Hundreds—no, thousands—of decaying cows. Dead from starvation or thirst or cold or even trampling? There’s no way to tell. All I know is that are so many.

Trey stares out the window, a look of sick fascination on his face, but I can’t stand to see any more. I stare straight ahead, but tears blur my vision. “Eyes to the sky,” I say, because I need a little help right now.

“It’s probably like this all over the country,” Tanq says, ignoring me. “All over the world.”

“Dairy farms like this one, chicken farms, meat-packing plants,” Trey says.

“Every single one a sea of rotting corpses,” I say.

“Maybe not,” Trey says, and I’m relieved because he finally tears his gaze away from the dairy farm and starts watching the sky again.

“What do you mean?”

“If you were a farmer with a chicken coop, and you knew for a fact that you and your family were all going to die and no one would come to take care of your farm, what would you do?”

“I’d let out all the chickens,” Tanq said. “I mean, the coyotes would probably get them, but at least they’d have a chance.”

“Exactly,” Trey says. “I bet more than a handful of ranchers let their cows and horses loose. I bet some pet owners even left windows open for their pets.”

The thought fills me with light and hope, because I know for a fact some people used their last moments to do something caring. Something good. Like my mom, who daisy-chained multiple IV bags together before she died, just to give me a fighting chance.

“If we’re all alive in a couple of years,” Trey continues, “don’t be surprised if the earth is covered in flocks of wild chickens and sheep.”

I think of the huge dog that took a bite out of my foot. “Apex predators will make a comeback if that happens,” I point out. “Wolves, the big cats.”