The path, yes. One Malorie has never seen, of course. A path that school buses no doubt once used to deliver campers for the summer. It’s not hard to imagine a bus appearing, suddenly, now, ahead, taking a turn too tightly, barreling down upon them.

But old-world fears are silly out here. Malorie’s ear is on the creature the kids said was outside the cabin.

“The road isn’t far,” Tom says.

Malorie is past asking how they can hear these things. She’ll never rid herself of the image of them as babies, sleeping, blindfolded, under chicken-wire cribs covered in black cloth. She’ll never forget the two of them seated at the kitchen table, age three, their tiny heads cocked toward the amplifiers that delivered sounds from outside the house.

They haven’t used amplifiers in years.

“Hang on,” Tom says.

“No,” Olympia says. “It’s nothing.”

“Hang on,” Tom repeats.

Malorie remains still. The bag is tight to her back. It feels light enough to carry thirty miles. She can do it. And she’ll need all the energy she can get. She doesn’t want to begin to guess what shelters, what abandoned edifices, what people they will encounter on their way.

“Cover your faces,” she says.

She covers her own with gloved hands. The black leather presses against the black fabric of the fold, layering the darkness.

“Don’t let it touch you,” she says.

She doesn’t know what it means for one to touch a person any more than she knows if one can be touched at all. But the image of Annette turning the corner in the hall at the school for the blind is as present as the images of her and Shannon at the county fair.

“There’s nothing,” Olympia says.

“There’s something,” Tom says. “Whether it’s a creature or not, I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Malorie asks. This scares her. Do they move differently now? Do they move at all?

Something crashes through the bushes, and Malorie cries out. She reaches for the teens, instinctively, before covering her chin and mouth with the black gloves.

“A deer,” Tom says. Malorie hears defeat in his voice. His sister was right. “If I was allowed to build my sound meter, we would’ve known that right away.”

The “sound meter” is a failed invention of Tom’s, an idea he had for verifying what moved in the woods around camp. He believes it could’ve worked with minor tweaks, but Malorie destroyed it before he could try.

“No talk like that now,” Malorie says, lowering the gloves at last. “Was the deer sane?”

She thinks of Victor the dog, chewing his own legs.

“Yes,” Olympia says.

Still, ten years deep, and no complete knowledge of which animals go mad, which don’t, and why.

Malorie wonders if there’s more information about this in the census pages she carries in her bag.