Aisha says, “We don’t need them anymore.” She flings a hand at the landscape as if it’ll hide her shaking. “We’ve got—we’ve got all this. Fuck the Vanguard. Condescending, cowardly pieces of shit!”

It’s a glorious roar, and it sets off every living soul standing in the wasteland of blood and mess. We’re screaming at the Vanguard, at the Angels, at every motherfucker who has done anything to us. Erin flings her arms around my neck and staggers, squeezing her eyes shut. Across campus, Graces wail in so much pent-up anger that I can feel it flowing through my veins, a flood, a real flood, and we are alive.

We are alive, we are alive, holy shit, we are alive.

We decide we’ll search a few buildings for supplies to bring back to the ALC, to tide us over until we decide what to do. Everyone but me, that is. I said I’d deal with the bodies alone. Nobody argues, because nobody wants to deal with the blood, organs, and limbs. I don’t either, but I’m the one who can stomach it.

I need to see the dead.

Reverend Brother Ward and my engagement ring are stamped into the dirt. Sister Kipling’s corpse curls around the wound in her chest as if she could survive if she held it tight enough. I find every soul I know and then some, and I press my face into the dirt and breathe in, breathe out the stench of Judgment Day.

I find Mom.

She bled out from a hole in her face. The bullet went in by her nose and came out by her ear, but she’s recognizable the same way Dad was. How fitting that she went out like her husband did. To lose both of my parents to the same senseless war. We will return to the earth for out of it we were taken; for from dust we were made and to dust we will return.

Maybe it would be better if I did believe in God, in Heaven, in Hell. If I could believe she’s going somewhere that will punish her for what she’s done. But I can’t. When I pick up her body—a sad, limp bundle of meat and bones—I can’t believe that. Maybe I’ll change my mind eventually, maybe something will happen, and I will finally feel that push, that call to faith, but until then, I’m okay not believing in anything at all.

I find Theo.

His body is the one that makes me stop. He looks like me, kind of, but what my corpse would look like after days of decomposition. A version of me long dead.

…Is that what he was? A queer boy like me who rotted under the weight of what happened to him?

How easy would it have been for me to end up just like him?