“She was a human being,” Victoria said.

“So are you, Mrs. Emerson. And so are your boys. Even First Sergeant Copley is a human being, or so I’ve heard.”

“That’s not funny,” Victoria snapped.

“It’s a little funny,” McCrea countered. “The choices only get tougher from here, ma’am. Death is the new normal. God only knows how many millions or hundreds of millions were killed last night, and there will be more. For the immediate future, there’s no room for pity. Hard stop. Until we know how bad things really are, we need to assume the worst. We need to assume that the resources we currently have on hand are the only ones we will ever have access to. That means we conserve and preserve.”

“Joe is right,” Caleb said, startling his mom. “Robin was going to die, anyway. There’s no way we could have saved her. Joe did the right thing.” Something had changed in the boy. Between glances, he had aged five years. “It’s like you always told us, Mom. Concentric circles, remember?”

Victoria didn’t like hearing her own words. Since forever, she had preached the concentric circles theory of self-defense. Each of us stands in the center of our own circle, surrounded by immediate family. Everyone and everything else is sacrificial to the inner circle. Close friends and distant relatives can belong to the next circle, and together you fight and survive. As circles expand, they grow larger and are populated by more people, but the outermost circle is always the first to be sacrificed if survival of an inner circle is jeopardized. In her youth, she had always assumed that everyone lived by concentric circles. Maybe they didn’t recognize that they were doing it, but that kind of prioritized survival seemed instinctive to her. Primordial.

And perhaps at one time it was, a time when kids settled disputes on their own, sometimes drawing blood, yet no one sued anyone. Self-sufficiency used to be encouraged. Maybe it was a rural thing, but when she was growing up, neither she nor her brothers nor any of their friends had time for the video games that had begun to consume her generation, let alone the money to invest in them. Horses didn’t feed or groom themselves, after all, and hay needed to be baled and crops needed to be cared for and harvested. All while getting homework done, lest Dad wear her out for getting a grade lower than a B.

“Concentric circles,” Victoria said. “So, do we just leave the bodies?”

“We have to,” McCrea said. “We’ll grind the shovel blade to nothing if we try to bury all the dead we’ll be seeing.”

They moved in unison as they climbed back up the embankment toward the road. When they were halfway, Luke pulled his hand out of Victoria’s grasp and stopped. “I need to go back and look,” he said.