She had been released from the hospital, and now Nephy was bringing her home. A small crowd had gathered around Cyrus’s truck. Izzy got out and began to limp inside, leaning on Nephy for support.

Alma from Slab City took off her straw hat and wiped sweat from her brow with a bandanna. “Are you all right?”

“What can we do?” someone else asked.

“So awful about Cyrus.”

“It’s effed up is what.”

“Something’s afoot,” Alma said. She grimaced, showing her small, brown teeth.

Nephy asked them to leave.

A woman with plastic curlers in her hair came toward Izzy then, pushing an empty stroller. The woman’s face looked swollen and blotchy. “Nothing’s changed,” she said, grabbing Izzy’s arm. “It was all for nothing.”

“Get the hell away!” Nephy said.

“If he was going to die, at least we could see the change.”

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Nephy opened the front door of the shack, and Dog ran to Izzy, began rubbing frantically against her. She could not find the strength even to touch him. Instead, she stood there, frozen, looking around the room. Cyrus’s chewed-up black sneaker was gone. Izzy hadn’t been able to touch it. Someone—probably Nephy, maybe Leanne—had cleaned for her.

“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” Nephy’s eyelids, usually smooth, maybe slicked with gold or silver shadow, looked red and puffy. Strands of black hair, long, the way Izzy’s had once been, hung disheveled around Nephy’s face. The bruise on her cheek still showed, somewhat paled now, not hidden with makeup.

She put her arms around Izzy. Nephy’s skin pulsed, warm and smooth, and her hair, scented with coconut oil, tickled Izzy’s skin. She could sense Nephy’s baby sleeping like a cherished secret between them, and Izzy closed her eyes. Then the two of them were crying. It sounds like birds, Izzy thought, more like avian shrieks than human cries.

“Shhh. Rest now, my queen,” Nephy said, finally, stroking Izzy’s head. “You have to rest.”

Before she fell asleep, she saw the two of them—Nephy and herself—circling above the desert on tapered wings.

Beneath them stretched an uncanny valley of decedent-sketch zombies. They stared up empty-eyed, and waved their hands above their heads as if they had no shoulder or elbow joints. They wore the clothes they’d been found in—the bathing suits, flowered dresses, jeans, boots, belts with heavy buckles, T-shirts with pictures of New York and Los Angeles. Their hands were full of chunks of minerals, green and blue as Cyrus’s eyes, black as his hair, gold as his skin.

◆◆◆