We started walking, and Emily took my hand. “Are there gangs in your uncle’s neighborhood?” she asked. But she must have figured there were after the stories I’d told her about who I’d fallen in with when I’d moved here. I just nodded.

“Gangs will want to take over the areas that have the most resources though, right?” she asked. “Once the police aren’t an issue and alarms no longer work, they’ll target the wealthy.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “The power structure has flipped. But still, anyone who has anything at all is a target at a time like this.”

“Even that man with the bird,” Emily murmured.

On the outskirts of that neighborhood, the smell of death rose again, so strong and abhorrent that we were both forced to take an item of clothing from our backpacks and cover our faces. “It’s a hospital,” Emily said, her voice muffled. “Oh God, Tuck, I can’t. We have to go around.”

I took her arm and pulled her toward another street so that we could round the area and come out on the other side. I looked over my shoulder once when we got to the higher ground of the other block, and caught sight of a huge hole to the side of the building where bodies were piled. I swallowed down the vomit that rose in my throat and looked away, walking faster and pulling Emily with me. They’d created a mass grave beside the hospital for all the people they couldn’t save. But what else were they going to do? There was no one to pick up the bodies, certainly no one who was going to expend energy digging graves. Maybe some of the families had done that somehow, but most simply wouldn’t be able to. Jesus fucking Christ.

I had this intense urge to pull Emily somewhere and curl my body around her, to protect her from the sights and sounds and smells and anything that might threaten her in this hellscape, of which the possibilities were countless. But we only had a little ways to go, and so we moved forward, at a faster clip this time.

It was late afternoon when we finally entered the neighborhood where my uncle had taken me in when I was just a kid. The streets were trashed, corpses lying here and there. We looked at them vacantly, even if Emily still let out a small moan each time we came upon one. They no longer made us jump or cringe and that was a horror in itself.

“Hey, hello,” a man said, coming out of an alleyway and rushing toward us. I pulled Emily and jumped back, holding my hand out, demanding he halt.