I cleared my throat and looked away briefly. There was no need to think about any of this now, during this harrowing, yet temporary circumstance. “What do you think it’s going to be like when we get to civilization?” I asked.

He paused for a moment. “No idea. It’ll depend on how far the outage stretched and whether their infrastructure is back up. But they’ll at least have some information about what’s going on and how long before things are expected to be working again.”

Before I could respond, Charlie came stomping noisily out of the woods and breaking me from my worried thoughts. “Goddammit,” he said. “I think I fell in some poison oak.” He was wiping his hands off, his jacket covered in dirt and pieces of brush.

“I’m sure it wasn’t poison oak.” Charlie had never communed with nature—he probably had no idea what poison oak even looked like. He’d grown up in Bel Air. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I’m fine. Let’s go.” I plucked a piece of leaf out of his hair before we both turned back to the road.

Tuck was already walking. We fell in line behind him just as we had before, continuing down the dirt road.

Eventually the dirt road turned into a stretch of gravel, which seemed like a good sign even if the only thing surrounding us were derelict fields. But as day turned to evening, Tuck slowed, and then came to a stop. I shielded my eyes from the bright horizon, squinting as something up ahead caught my eye and I saw why he’d halted. “Holy shit, it’s a gas station,” I said. My heart lurched toward that beautiful beacon of hope. And of people. And even one of those gas station sandwiches that I would have never touched with a ten-foot pole a week ago. But now…now, I was going to devour every bite of it and lick the wrapper. I’d kiss it before I put it in my mouth. I’d say a prayer of gratitude. Then I’d buy a bottle of cold water and drink every drop. They might have shoes there. Those canvas ones that hang on a rack near the ball caps and playing cards. Neosporin!

“Oh my God, Tylenol,” I almost sobbed.

We all started walking again more quickly than before. We turned onto the paved road that led to the gas station a quarter mile or so up ahead, and I never thought I’d be so excited about asphalt, but I was. Oh, I was. I grabbed Charlie’s arm. “We did it,” I said. “We made it, Charlie. The nightmare is over.”

He grinned at me, but then took out his phone and raised it to the sky as had been his habit since the crash. He was like a man who’d been tossed into the ocean, reaching for an invisible lifeline.