“Do you think it matters that you say the actual words? I think God gets it.” But, man, was He asleep at the switch a little while ago.

“I wonder if my family is still alive,” Adam mused aloud.

“I was just thinking the same thing. It’s like I can’t wrap my head around it all. It’s so . . . huge.”

Adam wanted to cry, knew he should be crying, but it wasn’t there. Nothing was there. He felt as if all the emotion had been carved out of him. Jesus, how many millions of people had just died? And he didn’t feel anything. Did that make him a monster?

“What about the radiation?” Emma asked.

“Radiation is what it will be,” he said. “If you can’t do anything about it, it’s not worth worrying about.”

“More wisdom from your mother?”

“Yep. But it’s logical, too. God grant me the serenity, and all that.”

They lay back on the ground and Emma put her head back on Adam’s chest. As the fireballs and their aftermath dissolved into the atmosphere, it was almost impossible to look away. “You really trained for nuclear attacks?”

“Yep. Well, all kinds of disasters, really. Tornados, wars, armed rebellion, pandemic, whatever.” He took a deep breath. “Like I said, everybody’s going to want to head to the rural regions when the cities are on fire. When my brothers and I went through all the bullshit drills with our mom, we would march into the woods and hunt and fish and learn to live off the grid. Mom wanted us to be among the lucky few who knew what we were doing.”

“Did she think you’d have to actually do it?”

“Knowing my mom, yeah, probably.”

“She’s that cynical and she’s a member of Congress?”

He opted not to answer that. Tonight had been a pretty vivid demonstration of a cynical outlook proving to be a realistic one.

“The radiation terrifies me,” Emma said. “I know, Serenity Prayer. But still.”

“I get it,” Adam said. “I don’t know if this makes you feel better or worse, but look at it realistically. We’ve already been hit with the worst of it. Bang. Just that fast. What happens next, happens next.”

Emma’s head rolled to look at him. “I don’t believe how okay you are with all this.”

Time for honesty. “I’m scared shitless, Em. So what? Being scared doesn’t make anything better. In fact, it makes pretty much everything worse. You can’t think straight when you’re panicking. Mom even used to train us for managing panic.”

“Bullshit. How?”

“We did crazy shit.” He allowed himself a laugh. “One time, we were in a shopping mall—I was maybe nine years old—and I guess I wandered off. Or maybe they wandered off.”

“They?”