“I thought I was,” said Donny, fighting to pull his foot free. When it finally came out, half expecting to find a skeletal hand wrapped around his ankle, he just saw his naked white foot.

“Crap.” He squatted down, reluctantly reached into the hole, and fished out his boot with an airy slurp. The sock was dripping over the side.

“Up here,” said Percy, looking back and laughing, then pointing at a little hill made from rubble. “You go first.”

Donny climbed up there, holding the boot in his hand and favoring the other foot.

It wasn’t especially high, maybe fifteen feet. But it was a good perch, complete with a big curb cut that served as a nice place to set your butt down and stare out at the beautiful postapocalyptic swamp with your feet dangling off the edge.

They sat there and soaked it in.

Percy pulled out an orange, and began to peel it. It was a lot bigger and healthier-looking than the one Lecker had shared.

Donny took off his other shoe and emptied the water over the edge. He wrung out his socks and laid them in the sun. The fear of corpses had left him for the moment, superseded by anxious thoughts of Thelen’s deadline. But even that stress seemed to bleed off in the moment.

“You know we’re going back the same way, right?” said Percy.

Donny shrugged. “I’ll be more careful. Or I’ll do it again.”

“Nice toes,” she said, laughing.

“They don’t get out much,” said Donny.

Donny pointed to the east. The area north of the Quarter had been mostly razed, and you could see a long way from their perch. In the distance were fields of green.

“Are those the farms?” said Donny.

Percy nodded. “Some of them.” She put her hand to her ear.

He listened along and heard the bugs. A cacophony, when you really paid attention. Thousands of them singing at one another. Maybe tens of thousands, maybe more.

A huge heron was there in the water, dinosaur strutting through the shallows like some predatory supermodel.

“Should have brought my fly rod,” said Donny.

Percy didn’t say anything. She just handed him some of the orange.

It tasted good.

“They say the first human settlements were at places like this,” said Percy.

“In the ruins of the future?”

“In the wetlands of the past. Like in the ‘fertile crescent.’ Biodiverse swamps, full of all sorts of self-replenishing foods.”

“Makes sense. If you can stand the bugs.”

“They would drain them. Once they stopped moving, and started harvesting from one place, growing the population, pressures would build to focus on one or two grain crops. Easier to manage the group, and grow it, around a food that could also serve as a medium of exchange. Pretty soon, they were making people work the fields. People who had just wanted to roam free, the way nature meant.”