Victoria gathered her sons, an arm over each. “Caleb, Luke, Joe and Paul. My four protectors. Now let’s take a peek.”

The walk back to the mouth of the mineshaft didn’t seem nearly as long as the walk in. As they progressed toward the opening, the red glow McCrea thought he might have been imagining turned out to be very real. The distant sky shimmered with it, and the air smelled vaguely like smoke.

“That’s a problem,” McCrea said. “First Sergeant Copley, how far away do you suppose that is?”

“I have no idea, sir. We’re about twenty-five miles away from the nearest city, though I don’t know if Franklin had anything worth dropping a warhead on.”

“You don’t think that’s a forest fire?” Victoria asked.

“I hope to God it’s not,” McCrea said. “Either way, I want to move away from it as fast as we can.”

“Where are we going to go?” Caleb asked.

“I don’t know who you’re asking,” McCrea said, “but I think the first stop should be back at the Suburban. Let’s grab all the maps we can find, and all the ammunition and water, and figure things out from there.”

Victoria had no argument with any of that. The boys switched their headlamps to white light and led the way back down the trail to the SUV they had abandoned. She was startled to see the dome light come on as they opened the door, but then reasoned that a battery connection was hardly a complex circuit.

“Do you think we should try and start it when we get to the truck?” she asked McCrea.

“Oh, you bet your ass we’re going to try.” His words seemed to startle him. “Ma’am.”

Five minutes later, both boys were dead to the world, crashed in the flatbed of the Suburban. McCrea, Copley and Victoria sat on the ground in the middle of the road with the AAA U.S. Atlas spread open on the ground between them.

“This is where we are right now,” Copley said, pointing to a spot in the middle of the West Virginia mountains. “Franklin is here, northeast of us. That’s the direction of the fire we see.”

“We’re moving away from that,” McCrea said.

“I’m happy to hear you say that, sir. If we keep walking south on this road, we’ll get to this spot on the map. Can you read the name?”

“Ortho,” Victoria said.

McCrea recoiled. “You really can read that in this light?” Just in the last couple of years, his close vision had gone to shit.

“What can I say? My mother was an owl.”

Copley measured the distance on the map with his thumb and forefinger and then lay the spread against the legend in the lower left corner of the page. “Looks like about ten miles.”

“Are you sure we want to go to a town?” Victoria asked.