As we exited the city, on my right, in the trees, I caught sight of unnatural colors. The intruders were back, though whether they were the same ones, I couldn’t tell. The lenses of their cameras flashed in the sun. I looked back at Morris, but he had not noticed them.

Inside the main house I took him to the big kitchen where the food was stocked, and he seated himself at the counter like a patron waiting to be served. It had been a long time since I had made a sandwich for another living human. Robotically I spread the mustard on the bread and placed the cheese just so, and though a memory of the supermarket deli, the one with the bitchy boss who yelled at me to hurry up, whooshed through me for the first time in ten years like an electric shock, I remained cool, calm. I could also remember the market before that, my days behind the counter with Jim, sometimes Hernan, listening to them joke around with the customers, the smell of the soup of the day wafting up, making my stomach rumble, happy hours long gone. Morris noticed nothing, and from a distance I could hear him prattling on about futures or stocks, something boring and safe.

Outside, I thought I could hear the intruders coming closer, the clicks of their cameras, the rustle of their excited chatter, their profane feet crunching across my grass. I should have known. Escape would not be allowed. There is no escape from other humans, from being human.

Handing Morris the sandwich, I turned and left the kitchen, grabbing some large trash bags on the way out. “Stay here,” I said. Like a child, he watched me leave but stayed put, chewing, too polite to follow me.

Walking out of the house, I went to the garage where my old truck was parked. There, on a far wall, were several full gasoline cans. Next to them were a variety of unopened kerosene cans.

I stuffed several of them into a trash bag and walked out. The bag was so heavy that after a few steps I began dragging it behind me, heading toward my beloved buildings, listening to the sloshing metal cans make their music.

Morris had ventured out of the front doorway of the house by this time, still holding half his sandwich at his side, when he saw me passing by. “M-Miss Lincoln?” he called from the porch. “Aren’t you going to have some lunch?”

I ignored him and continued my trek. Something was breaking loose inside me. Finally! After months and months of being dead, of mind-melding with the maddening wall. After months of my roommates’ stubborn silence.

Morris followed me at a distance. I could hear the city door squeak when he came through it behind me.

When I arrived in front of my apartment building, I stopped, and he stopped, too, but did not come any closer. “Miss Lincoln?” he asked. I unlocked the door to Apartment 101.