Malorie thinks of the people like the woman from Indian River. The people who populate the papers in her bag.

Those people are unsafe. For that, every decision they make is coming from an unsafe place.

But Malorie, now, out in the world again, must trust herself. She must believe in her own rules and the lifestyle she has forged for her teens.

“Hoods up, cover your faces,” she says. “And keep walking.”

EIGHT

The teens sleep, but Malorie can’t do it.

They walked thirteen hours today, and the map tells her they’ve only gone nine miles. It’s daunting. It’s overwhelming.

Malorie doubts herself.

They’re in what was once a bait and tackle shop. The map tells her the names of the nearby lakes. And the old smell of worms and water remain. The teens sleep by what was once the front register. Malorie is near them. She’s under a blanket, the cloth edges secured to the ground by her own boots. She’s on her knees, her legs sore from the walking, her nose close to the map on the ground. The flashlight shows her the legend, the mileage, and how unfathomably far they have to go. A little math helps. It’s close to an hour and a half per mile, walking blind along existing roads, through former crop fields, woods, even some swamp. Because the distance to East Lansing (if Ron is right that it’s East Lansing and not Lansing) is almost exactly twenty-one miles, this means they could have thirty walking hours to go. That would be two more days’ worth, if they put in the work they did today. In the old world, these figures aren’t much. A long weekend. But now, under the blanket, Malorie feels an urgency she hasn’t experienced before. Even leaving the house by way of the river required four years of gathering the courage to do so. Right now, she would run if she could.

“Dammit,” she says.

She thinks of her parents, difficult not to refer to them as Sam and Mary Walsh, the written names like a fire in her head.

She pulls the papers closer and flips past the scant information about the train. As she does, she recalls Ron’s fear of “the people who run it.” Tom said anyone who could get a train running would have to be very smart, but Malorie doesn’t agree. The whole world, it seems, is crazy. And everybody within it is only a gradation.

She stops at a page titled: WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THEM.

She almost laughs, exhausted, at this headline. The page ought to be blank, for all people have learned about the creatures. But Malorie quickly sees it isn’t.

The list immediately makes her uneasy.

They make noise, though not traditional sound. There is no flat-footed creak upon floorboards. Rather, it’s as if the floorboards themselves momentarily morph before returning to their natural state.