The fastest way out of town was a railroad track, which cut across the river highway in a straight line south-southwest, high on an elevated beam that kept them well above the worst of the flooding. They followed it for miles, past rail yards and schoolyards and old, sagging houses, past flooded churches and fallen buildings and across an overflowing river. The train tracks were straight and the way was mostly dry, but it was rocky and slow going for the horses, and they hadn’t even made it to the freeway when it grew too dark to travel. They took shelter in a crumbling public library, letting the horses graze on the tall, marshy grasses outside before leading them carefully up the access ramp to the dry floor inside. Kira checked Afa’s bandages, shot him full of painkillers, and cleaned his wound while he slept. Heron caught frogs and lizards in the bog outside and roasted them on a fire made of old chairs and magazines. The books in the library were old, rotted, and there was no one left in the world to read them, but Kira made sure that none of them went into the fire. It seemed wrong.

In the morning they found that they were just a short walk to Interstate 80, the same massive road they’d been following since Manhattan, but nearly a hundred miles farther west than where they’d left it at the eastern edge of Chicago. They got back on it, finding it higher and dryer than the railroad and much easier for the horses to walk on. The followed it all day, the city sprawling out endlessly on every side: building after building, street after street, ruin after ruin. Subcities came and went—Mokena, New Lenox, Joliet, Rockdale—their meaningless borders blurred together into a single, unbroken metropolis. When night fell again they reached the edge of Minooka, and the road curved south around it, and Kira looked out for the first time on open grassland stretching far into the west. The horizon was flat and formless, an ocean of dirt and grass and marshland. They slept in a giant warehouse, in what Kira assumed was an old break room for cross-country truckers, and listened as a rainstorm drummed furiously on the broad metal roof. Afa’s wound was no better than the previous night, but at least it was no worse. Kira curled up on her bedroll and read by the light of the moon, a thriller novel she’d picked up in the library. Sure this guy’s being chased by demons, she thought, but at least he has a warm shower in the morning.

She fell asleep with her nose in the book, and woke up wrapped snugly in a blanket. Samm was staring out the window as the sun rose over the cityscape, and glanced at her a moment before turning back to watch the sky grow light.