Midday. The others are out foraging, reflexive. Scouring what’s empty or derelict. Names of the dead or those who moved on scrawled simple in black ballpoint on the opposite wall. A moment to assess yourself, to note new symptoms. The rasping cough won’t go away. But won’t kill you in the moment. Joint pain, headache, the same as always. Nothing beneath that. Not that you can detect. A collection of ills like pots and pans banging together in a jostling van. You fool yourself that the river water is safe, but it’s just safer than what comes out of the tap. Hunger pangs you ignore. Easy after years of it.

The fire in the barrel’s gone out, cars hum and buzz across the bridge above. Sometimes drones take an interest, a different kind of buzz. The forest’s a wall of green on the north end of the tunnel and burnt-out concrete blocks of a strip-mall office complex, heavily tagged, to the south. Just beyond, the dull walls of the main street, the gutters glaring with dirty runoff, the severe shadows, the shuttered doors and windows.

The journal’s hidden good. Beneath a brick beneath a bag of dirty, rotting clothes, amid a pile of soft limestone soggy with water dripping down the underside of the bridge. Lines of lichen and sour gray mold disguise it. You imagine the journal vibrating with the energy of what it contains. You imagine the lichen and moss murmuring to it. Telling the journal to settle, to rest, to sleep. Drawing the demons out of it, to dissipate harmless in the air. But under brick it’s cool and calm as if it’s always been that way. Except for the fox, image like a secret blue sun pulsing at you underneath.

You’re alert for the pale men, for discovery. But there’s only an ancient porcupine noisy in the underbrush. Rustle of needles. No fruit to give him, but even polluted the forest must provide.

The journal still looks abandoned, not stolen. Pages singed by fire, some by rips made in anger. Curling at the edges. Stained. While something gulps and chortles from the river nearby, and you try to ignore that. The sound could mean anything or nothing. Heard the river enough to know it changes, is never exactly one thing. Here, a toxic holding pond. There, a half-built muskrat lodge, home to some other critter.

Your sense of time has faded over the years, but probably you have thirty minutes, maybe an hour before the others return. Don’t want them to think you have anything valuable. A long, hard lesson, that. Need and want were forces like demons.

Maybe it is an illusion of the charred pages, but the journal feels warm. Like it is really something else. Inside the journal, no name, no address. Unreturnable. Two marks that might be the letter C and the letter X or might not be.