“My uncle’s house is closer,” I said, glancing toward the west where Emily lived. It was also where the majority of the smoke was rising from, and where I could hear engines gunning. My best guess was that it’d been taken over. “Plus, you don’t have the keys to your condo, and we can’t scale the building.”

“It’s all electronic,” she murmured. “I don’t know if that means it’s wide-open, or inaccessible.”

“Either way, we’d be shit out of luck.”

We put our hands over our noses again as another block of bodies stretched before us. Goddammit, these poor people. They’d lived desperate lives on the streets, and then been the first ones left to die. Next to me, Emily swiped her eye and looked away. “What’d they die from?” she asked.

“Most lack of water, probably. Some needed medication. Violence. No way to tell.”

The farther we walked, the more people we saw, some rooting through overflowing trash cans of food that—if there was any there—would be long-rotted by now. Just like Hosea had said, disease was going to spread quickly in a landscape like this, if it wasn’t already. Awful scents of death and garbage and pungent, smoldering fires assaulted our noses and the sound of children and babies crying made us both wince.

“Tuck, look,” Emily said, grabbing my arm as she stopped and pointed to the end of a wide street. I stared, taking a moment to make sense of what I saw. It was a pile of wreckage sitting in the middle of the road, a crumpled helicopter with a news logo barely visible that had obviously crashed onto the tops of several cars.

“Jesus,” I muttered, wondering again how many aircraft had been in the sky when the solar flare hit and whether all of them had crash-landed like ours had. How many survivors were there and how many hadn’t had pilots as good as ours?

We walked through a neighborhood of small family homes, where there were red and blue X’s on many of the doors. I remembered back to news footage I’d seen of Hurricane Katrina and the houses with the X’s spray-painted on them indicating a dead body was inside and wondered if that was the case here too. But authorities had marked the houses then; there were no authorities anywhere in sight now.

A man walked by us with a dead seagull in his hands and when I turned toward him to ask about the x’s, he pulled out a knife as he whipped the dead bird behind him and screamed, “Get back!”

I raised one hand and grabbed Emily’s arm with the other. “We don’t want your bird,” I said. “I was just wondering why there are x’s on the doors.”