Shaun had a close call today.

He won’t tell me exactly what happened; I wouldn’t even know anything had happened if it weren’t for the glitches in his video feed, the places where the picture cut out and picked back up again a few hundred seconds later. The footage he posts from the field is usually seamless, smooth and easy and effortless looking. Not this. This is amateur-hour stuff, and that tells me more clearly than anything else possibly could that whatever happened out there, it was bad.

He came home stinking like bleach and rank terror-sweat, the kind that comes after the adrenaline fades, and he didn’t stop hugging me for almost ten minutes. I stopped laughing and trying to get away when I felt his shoulders shaking. My own shoulders started shaking when I realized what that sort of fear from Shaun—Shaun! Who once called a zombie in our backyahe best present I’d ever given him—actually meant.

Maybe life was always fragile and easy to lose, and maybe all those people who talk about how good things were before the Rising are full of crap, but we don’t live in that world; we live in this one. And in this world, it takes only one slip, one unguarded moment, to lose everything. I don’t know how close I came to losing him today. He won’t tell me, and maybe this makes me a coward, but I’m not going to ask. This is one truth I have no interest in knowing. There are some truths we’re better off without.

I don’t know what I’d do without him. I really don’t. I’d never tell him to stay out of the field—I know how much it means to him—but one day, the close call is going to cross the line into “too close,” and after that… I don’t know.

I just don’t know.

—From Postcards from the Wall, the unpublished files of Georgia Mason, originally posted June 24, 2041

My parents, Yu and Jun Kwong, are dead.

My brother, Dorian Kwong, is dead.

My colleague, Dr. Barbara Tinney, is dead.

While reports are currently sketchy, it is entirely possible that the state of Florida, and much of the surrounding region, is dead.

Welcome to the end of the world.

—From The Kwong Way of Things, the blog of Alaric Kwong, June 24, 2041

Twenty-three

Yes, I’ll hold,” snarled Mahir, and continued pacing. I barely noticed. I couldn’t take my eyes away from the television, where CNN continued to faithfully record the worst disaster to strike the human race since the summer of 2014, when the dead first decided to get up and nosh on the living.