This neighborhood got hit with the sewer explosion too. Flames leap above rooftops and trees even before I reach Shanwtelle’s street. Heat turns the cab of Paul’s RAV4 into a furnace. I roll forward slowly, until my body can’t bear it anymore. Several hundred yards away, in the middle of the burning block, Shawntelle’s house is an inferno. The windows have blown out. Flames lick the window frames. Black smoke pours from a hole in the roof.

“C’mon, Shawntelle,” I whisper, feeling like a coward for not going any closer.

I imagine her running out the door and I shout to her to get in the car and we hug and hug, and then we drive away to safety.

Sparks shoot up in the air as Shawntelle’s roof collapses. The front wall of her house gets pushed out into the street, blocking the road completely. No one comes running out of her house or any other.

Everyone in this part of town is dead.

I back up, the air cooling with every car length. I make a three-point turn and drive away, tears blurring my sight of the rearview mirror. Because I’m still watching for Shawntelle to come running down the street. I watch and watch and watch until I turn the corner toward the highway, when I finally tell myself my best friend was definitely dead of the sickness before that explosion hit, because that would be so much better than burning alive.

The onramp to Highway 315 is blocked by orange cones. One has fallen over, which gives me just enough room to maneuver the RAV4 through them. I crane my neck as the ramp rises toward the highway. I’m not sure what I’m hoping to see. A moving vehicle, maybe. A view of the city. Any sign of human life. I would prefer soldiers with gas masks and machine guns to this emptiness clawing at my chest.

But as the RAV4 crests the shoulder, all that greets me is desolation, broken up by scattered bits of strangeness. There’s a Mercedes, pulled almost-but-not-quite off to the side of the road. A shape hunches over the steering wheel, but my view is blurred because the windows are slimy.

Farther on, a skeleton lies broken and sprawled in the middle of the highway, its flesh picked clean. The bones are muddy brown, which surprises me. I thought bones would be white. I steer around it, peering over the dash, wishing the skeleton could tell me what happened, what it’s doing in the middle of a once-busy highway.

Cars are scattered along the way, some off to the side, some stalled out in the middle of the asphalt. A few have bodies inside. Others don’t, or at least not that I can see.

Nothing moves. Even the birds have shunned this place.