“Here,” he said. “I think you should keep this with you. Life is different now.”

“I don’t think I can do that again,” Emma said.

“And I hope we don’t have to find out. Better to have it and not need it than the other way around.”

“I don’t want to wear it.”

“That’s fine.”

His last stop was to kick out the remains of the fire. A forest fire was a scenario he could do without repeating.

Finally they were ready to go. In addition to the pistol on his hip for protection, he decided to keep his M4 in the front, too. It took some maneuvering to arrange the muzzle so it was free of the steering wheel and didn’t pose a risk to either of them, but he got it settled.

As he drove away, he cast a glance at Bubba’s body. In the glare of the headlights, he could see a halo of blood around the dead man’s head and torso.

Adam considered driving with the lights off to avoid calling attention to themselves, but he couldn’t. The postwar night was far too black, and the canopy of foliage made the darkness even deeper. As it was, the road was barely a road to begin with. He’d never clocked the distance to the main highway, but he imagined it to be more than a mile—though it was so hard to tell when the driving was so difficult.

“Is this what it’s going to be like from now on?” Emma asked.

“Not everybody is homicidal,” Adam said, though he knew his mother would vehemently disagree. “We’ve just got to find the nice people.”

“Or no people at all.”

In the short term, maybe that was the best solution. The problem was, Adam didn’t know this part of the state. He’d lived in West Virginia his whole life, but it’s a big state, and there were parts of it where he just didn’t want to be. He knew where Top Hat Mountain was, and he knew the route from the house he grew up in, in Charleston, but other than that, not much. He also knew the route back to Mountain View and the academy, but that was out of play.

So was Charleston . . . because it probably wasn’t there anymore.

When they got to the main road, he would need to choose a compass direction and head that way. Right would be roughly north, and left would be roughly south. They’d come from the north, so the choice had to be the other way.