Lisbeth and I sat out on the hood of one of the church vans. This one had been repurposed as a laundry room, and the hood thrummed with the machines inside. Who knows where The Church had found them. The coin slots had been jammed with rags, and the machines were plugged into a generator. Long extension cords snaked across the frozen paths through town. At least this meant women didn’t have to wash clothes by hand here. I hoped. A pipe expelled the dirty water from the washing machine, repurposing it for something else. Everything had to be recycled, every broken thing remade. Another van had been turned into a chapel, the front seats removed for a mini pulpit. A cross hung from the rearview mirror. There wasn’t enough room for the whole of The Church in there, of course, but the preacher spoke with the van door open, congregants stamping out in the cold as they stood and listened, and there was talk of maybe soldering a few of the vans together to make a larger space.

The company store was in ruins, Lisbeth said. The ceiling had fallen down, sodden with rot. Rats and other animals had made a home in there, but then they had died. The Church was fixing it up, but that would take a long time.

“I guess you’re here for a long time,” I said. The laundry van, the chapel van—those things weren’t going to be on the road again anytime soon.

Lisbeth looked in the distance, across the old railroad tracks that bordered the town. Once coal had shuttled through here. Now the tracks were bones under the snow. I wouldn’t have known they were even there if she hadn’t told me; others from The Church had found them when they had first explored.

“How is this better than home?” I asked.

“It isn’t. But it’s where we ended up. It’s what happened. We didn’t know things would get so bad on the road so quickly.”

“Yeah, we didn’t, either.”

“I like it here. I like that we’re picking up where someone else left off. We’re making it work. I guess we’ll stay here as long as it works.”

“Is it working, though?”

I thought of the railroad tracks, rusting. What else might be buried under the snow? I tried to remember the last time I had seen a train. Were there train cars stalled, abandoned down the line? Had sleet melded the wheels to the track? Was it all just waiting there, stocked with food or supplies?