There was just a lot of nothing out here. A lot of woods, but nothing else. They’d been marching for nearly two hours and they hadn’t passed a single building. It felt weird to be walking in the middle of the road. He kept expecting a car to come around a curve at them, but there were no cars to come. If cars were still a thing, they’d be in one now.

He was pissed at himself for puking back there. That was a pussy thing to do, but he couldn’t help it. He’d never seen brains before, and the way they were just hanging out of that guy’s face triggered an instantaneous barf. That probably had something to do with why he felt so hungry now.

But food needed to be conserved. He got that. The dried shit they were all carrying in their go bags was all the prepared food that they’d get, and it needed to be preserved. The rules were simple, but hard to take. If you have a successful hunt, or if you catch a few fish, you can eat until you’re stuffed. But if you’ve only got emergency rations, you only eat enough to keep the body’s lights on and the engine running. Five hundred calories in a pinch, though that wouldn’t be sustainable for more than a couple of days.

Caleb wasn’t sure what he thought about Major McCrea. About Joe. He didn’t like the way he spoke to Mom, but he had to admit that she was being kind of a pain in the ass. He got that Mom was worried about her babies—God, he hated it when she called him her baby—but she needed to understand that even Luke was old enough to cowboy up a little. For all those years, she’d embarrassed them with her bug-out drills and survival adventures, but let’s be real here. She’d never had to do any of the stuff she’d been talking about. She read a lot of books about survival, and she’d gone to conferences, but she’d never had to, you know, survive.

Joe, on the other hand, and maybe Paul Copley, too, had walked the walk. At least they’d come closer to walking it than Mom had. Caleb thought maybe she should back off a little on the badass congresswoman bullshit.

Caleb felt bad for not feeling sadder about all the people he knew had been killed last night. All of his friends back home were probably dead. Every building, every everything back in Arlington was probably crushed flat and burned black, but it was as if all of it were a movie. Maybe it was too much to think about. Maybe that’s what PTSD was all about.