“Forward, party,” he said. “We must press on.”

The families lined up behind Alex and Coco. Now that Alex was exposed as an ox-owning pillar of the community, the party was eager to follow him.

Past the creek was a multipurpose field. Over the years, Coco had uncovered baby turtles in the field, a nest of condoms, a gold ring. The grass was long. You could find anything in it.

“Keep to the tree line for cover,” said Alex, though the orange cones ran a haywire path through the center of the field.

The families hadn’t gone two hundred feet past the creek when Mr. Bennett jumped from the forest directly in front of the Culver family wagon. He wore grease paint smeared up his cheeks, a suede coat with jangling tassels, and a cardboard headband with stapled feathers. The feathers were each a foot long, the most vibrant blues and yellows and scarlets. If they were real they would have been exceedingly valuable due to their size and color, but Coco recognized them immediately as craft feathers. Virtually worthless.

“You’re under attack,” Mr. Bennett announced.

“Who would dare attack us?” asked Alex.

“The Feather Weather tribe,” said Mr. Bennett.

Alex’s face twisted angrily. “Ha. Who is it, Ms. Harper?”

Mr. Bennett grinned as dead family members poured from between the trees. Each dead pioneer had their own headband and their own feather. As they advanced, they stirred up the pine scent of the forest. There were more of them than there were living pioneers. And they were armed.

Every member of the Feather Weather tribe carried a homemade bow fashioned from a stick and a string. The bows were serviceable for shooting kindling, though their power was dubious. Victoria led the pack, her face obscured by inelegant swaths of paint.

“Die, die!” she cried, shooting kindling from her bow.

“Anyone struck in the chest is considered dead,” said Mr. Bennett.

The tribe poured among the pioneers. Kindling bounced off their chests and backs. Coco dropped to four legs. Alex tumbled off the wheelbarrow and rolled underneath. The crippled sufferers were felled first. Some pioneers leaped in front of the arrows, perhaps preferring to join the exciting band.

Coco prayed she wouldn’t be shot. She needed to complete the trail. Between bobbing feathers and twigs hurtling through the sky, she peered west across the school yard. She was a true pioneer, one ocean behind her and another—one she’d never seen and might never reach—ahead. She didn’t want regular school to resume. She wanted to survive, to stay in the game.

Mr. Bennett dragged the corpses out of danger. Victoria pillaged the Culver family wagon, munching through loaves of bread and shoveling dry tapioca and Wheatena into her mouth.

Marley and Peter, Coco’s ex-children, surrounded her.

“So you won’t be our mother?” asked Marley, aiming a sharpened twig at Coco’s underbelly. “You’re too good for us, huh?”

“Yeah. Huh?” asked Peter.

“You’d rather be livestock than our mother, huh? You’d rather be on your hands and knees and, like, pooping in the grass, huh?”