I felt the weight of the gun in my pocket. The shadows before me arranged into a rectangle. A black pool. It wasn’t frozen all the way. The pool had been halfheartedly covered by a tarp, its corners flapping in the wind. There was a chain-link fence, collapsing on one side around the pool, and a shed, its sides blasted with snow.

The wind shifted, and I smelled something sharp and chemical. Even the cold couldn’t mask that, even the clean scent of snow. “This is an injection well, for fracking,” I said. “This is supposed to be guarded.”

“Well, the guard left.”

I saw the deer in the pool then, the shape of the deer, which seemed not to be an animal, not to be anything at all, a torso unbound by time—except that there were antlers, a white rack. They almost looked beautiful, bone painted by snow.

But the body had a stillness I could not unsee. It buzzed with it, bobbing in the pond.

I thought of the Pumpkin King, made a scarecrow in his own dead garden. It was more frantic than the most frantic movement: the stillness of death, a frenzy of no longer caring that legs had broken off like icicles, that nostrils had filled with slime. Death had no shame. The deer carcass floated, antlers pointing at the sky.

“Everything’s fucking falling apart,” Dance said.

We did not get a signal on my phone. The truck started, and we drove in silence for a while.

If the guard had abandoned his post at the well, what else had been abandoned? Most businesses along the highway looked dark. Cars passed us, as frequently as stars, but the roadside diners and drive-throughs that would normally have traffic had none, just parking lots filling with white. We drove by truck stops and gas stations—had they closed for the night, or for good? Was everyone like us, like The Church and my mama, running?

At the first gas station with its lights on, I stopped. I refueled the truck while Dance ran inside. Prices had skyrocketed. Almost seven dollars a gallon. We had to wait in a line of cars for our turn. I had the canisters of cash, but I wanted to save that, for as long as I could.

I was the only one in my family, among the three of us, to have a bank account and card. Mama’s idea, and I was not sure that Lobo knew. I was glad now that she had insisted. I had put a little money in the account every time I met the paper bag boy: a little for the bank, a lot for the ground. My card still worked. I watched the numbers rise.

I had finished refueling and just replaced the pump when the digital pad began to blink, the numbers flashing. I heard a click, and the pad went dark.

The gas station had lost power.