Was Tuck planning to go to battle for a collapsing society in honor of the deaths he felt responsible for? Or was he using that calling as a way to avoid staying with me? Or a vague combination of both even he couldn’t separate or explain? Suddenly, the words I’d spoken to him while standing at that substation weeks ago, before we had any real idea that we were walking into a changed world came back to me. I’m standing here too, Tuck, among the ashes. I’d meant it figuratively then, but it was literal too, wasn’t it? And something I’d experienced before.

And once again, I was losing my best friend. But this time, I was also losing the man I’d fallen deeply in love with. Once again, his pain was bigger than his love for me.

chapter thirty-nine

Tuck

Day Seventeen

We left the laundromat behind as soon as the sky had gone from black to platinum gray. The sound of engines roared in the distance followed by a pop, and a chill shuddered through me when I thought of what might be happening in all those downtown hotels that apparently had been taken over. Was anyone being helped or taken in? Or had those buildings all become magnets for crime and brutality?

“What are they doing down there?” Emily asked, obviously having heard the same distant sounds.

“They’re surviving the same way they always have,” I murmured. “Only now, the rules favor them.”

Dogs howled, and my heart gave a sharp knock when I wondered who was feeding them. Even people who loved their pets were going to prioritize their human family. Dogs can hunt if they need to, I told myself. There was only so much I could worry about at the same time. If I let my mind run away from me, I’d reel off into Crazytown.

“Fuck,” I hissed when we heard noise up ahead and looked around the corner. We’d taken this route here just the day before, but now part of it was blocked off by two cars parked hood to hood and a bonfire behind it where men with guns were conversing loudly, a cackle rising here and there. Beside me, Emily jumped when one of the men threw a bottle he’d been drinking from, and it shattered on the pavement.

“What will they do if they spot us?”

Maybe nothing. Maybe we’d get robbed. Or worse. “I don’t want to find out.”

Her eyes met mine. “We’ll have to travel around.”