She can tell there are people in the room.

“Mom?”

It’s Tom. Tom is here.

“You can open your eyes.”

It’s Olympia. Olympia is here.

But when Malorie does open her eyes, the first face she sees is her father’s.

“Oh…Dad…”

The vision of him is blurred by sudden tears. A joy she once believed impossible.

“Hey,” he says. But his eyes are wet, too.

He looks older, but good. White hair. Bright eyes. The same smile she remembers from before the world went mad. His clothes are different; a flannel shirt and sweats. Clothes she doesn’t remember him ever wearing. He looks like someone who has walked instead of driven for seventeen years. Like someone who hasn’t seen a television, hasn’t used a computer, hasn’t eaten at a restaurant for that time, too.

There’s something else in his eyes. Malorie can see enormous emotions, memories, knowledge, there.

She looks to Tom. Because she remembers now. His name cheered by a lunatic crowd. Olympia saying her brother’s eyes were open.

Facing a creature.

“Tom…”

She makes to sit up but doesn’t get very far.

Tom is watching her. Sane.

Olympia. Sane.

“Your kids are amazing,” Sam says.

Malorie looks to him and can barely get the words out through fresh tears. “Your grandkids.”

“I’ll get you some water,” Olympia says. Then she’s up and out the door.

Malorie looks about the room. Blankets over the windows. Wood-paneled walls. She’s in a small bed in what feels like a guest bedroom.

It’s clean. It’s nice.

Dad is here.

Malorie looks to Tom again.

“What happened?”

Tom looks older, too. But not in the same way Dad does. Her son has the tranquil look of someone who has achieved something he set out to do.

The look of success, possible even here in the new world.

“Seems my grandson invented a way to look at them,” Sam says.

Malorie starts to sit up again, but Sam is up and out of his chair, kneeling beside her.

“You don’t have to hear it all at once,” he says. “But you definitely have to hear it.”

“Where are we?”

Sam smiles.

“It’s what I’ve called home for a few years now. Your mother and I worked our way south after they arrived. I have enough stories to fill a library.”

Malorie smiles. But while Tom may have invented a way to look at the creatures, some still roam the horizons of her mind.

“Oh, Dad…me, too,” she says.

“We’re in a house about as far from the maddening crowd as you can get,” he says. He looks to the blanketed window, and Malorie easily remembers him doing the same in her youth. Only then he looked pensively out at the world. And now? “Mary insisted you’d come here. I can’t tell you how often we argued this.”

“And she’s…?”

“Yep.”