Parts of the roads we traveled had crumbled. Some were closed, gated or chained. Sometimes people had driven around or through, anyway, splintering the gates onto the ground. At nearly every gas station, we stopped. Most of them had closed signs, but we tried, anyway. We filled the fuel cans when we could. We collected kindling. We collected tins of little sausages and noodles in red sauce and we ate them cold as we drove, passing the cans back and forth across the front seat, like other girls might pass a joint, and I dissuaded Jamey from giving too many packages of candy or cakes to Starla.

Everything was stale.

In the afternoons, we found a place to stop for the night, somewhere sheltered, capable of hiding the house. We used the painted boughs from the Occupied Forest. We had our jobs that we had decided on. Jamey fed Starla and started the fire. I cooked, aware that I was not as good as Grayson, and was painfully reminded of him every time I stabbed at a hunk of frozen deer meat with a spoon, or tried to do something with a potato.

“This is some of the last meat,” I said to Jamey as I handed her a plate of it, warmed with nubby brown potatoes, which we were also running low on.

“Good,” Jamey said. “I’m sick of deer meat.”

“You and Starla need protein.”

She looked up from her plate. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“That mama thing. Saving the meat for us? Giving us the biggest piece?”

“You’re younger than me.”

“So? That doesn’t mean you have to die for us. I didn’t ask you to.” She fed Starla a potato off her fork.

The trees shone silver with frost, like they had been shellacked, like the snow globes Mama and I made one winter for presents: saving food jars, gluing trees from model train sets onto the lids, and screwing them on upside down. Glitter snowed on the miniature world, and it was pretty, safe, to look at the fake cold, contained behind glass. I had given one to Lisbeth, and she had saved it on her windowsill for years. She was thoughtful like that, careful. I wondered if she had packed it. I hadn’t seen it in her room in the company town.

Jamey and I had parked for the night at a county fairgrounds, up on a hill by the horse barn. The barn was large enough to hide us, even the house, but we could see anyone approaching from below. The animals were long gone, of course, and the buildings probably cleared of anything useful. Snow layered the roof of the barn like old paint. The gutters held sprays of ice and frozen spouts.

I took the first watch; I took most of the watches.