But the advice is so jarring, so entirely not what she thinks she should do, that it almost comes to Malorie as a memory. She hears her mom saying the same thing after she’d picked her up from school for being sick in the bathroom. She remembers the sights on the drive home. It was autumn. Mom pointed out the colors, told Malorie a lot of people get sick when the seasons change, told her don’t worry.

How about when the world changes, Mom? she thinks. And how about seventeen years after the world changes? Do they get sick then? And do they ever get better if they do?

Yet, still, the images comfort her. Even now, harried and afraid. The sights and smells of autumn. How it once was. How it must still be, though Malorie doesn’t have proof of that anymore.

“No,” she says. “I’ll be okay.”

But the silence from her teens following this statement tells her they don’t believe it. That’s fine. Somebody on this train spoke of a man who claims to have caught one. Says the thing lies in a box in storage.

Now isn’t the time to lie down.

She breathes in. She holds it. She breathes out.

Then she’s up again. Can this be happening? It’s bad enough that they can touch you now (can they?), it’s bad enough that there are more of them now than there used to be (are there?), it’s bad enough that this very train will pass through what Dean described as a concentrated area, a place where, for whatever unholy reason (and Malorie doesn’t want to know what that reason is) they congregate alongside the tracks, but now this? That one might actually be with them on the train?

“We have to tell everyone to close their eyes,” she says. Because now she’s thinking of the other people on board. Not because she worries for their happiness. But because of what they might do to her and her kids if that thing in the box (is it really there?) were to get out and walk the same halls Malorie just took herself. Out there where men don’t feel they have to respond to the smaller, blindfolded woman who keeps her entire body covered for fear of contact of any kind.

Jesus, she thinks. You gotta slow down.

“Well, we can’t tell everyone if we can’t leave the cabin,” Tom says.

And Malorie slaps him.

It’s sudden and it’s unplanned, and it feels like the only thing to do.

Because Tom has been looking for a reason to leave this cabin since the moment she said they wouldn’t be leaving it anymore. Because Tom is at that damnable age where he believes he must resist every fucking thing his mother tells him.