Mom lowered the passenger-side window. “Please be back soon to help unpack. I may need your help figuring out what was looted.”

“Ha,” I said. “Okay.”

“Give your girlfriend a big KISSY!” Charlie chimed in.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” I muttered as they pulled away. I pulled up her number on my phone, but still … no service.

Maggie and I weren’t dating. She’d been my best friend since we were little, and I didn’t want to mess up a good thing. She was one of those girls who’s better-looking than she realizes—or if she did realize it, she never let on. Her blond hair had a life of its own. So did her hazel eyes.

Yet, if anything, we had grown closer while we were away at our separate camps. Her emails were the one thing that kept me from going crazy at a place where the only people my age wore military uniforms.

“Where are you going?” a raspy voice behind me called as I walked down a quiet sidewalk beside weedless lawns, immaculate houses, and even a few new white picket fences. I turned to see a soldier with stubble on his baby face and a large rifle at his side.

“Just headed to my friend’s house,” I said. “We were in different camps.”

“The town of Mount Hope is currently under martial law,” he said with a robotic intonation. “You must heed the curfew rules until the emergency protocols are lifted.”

I fast-walked in the other direction, not looking back until I hit a dirt path. The empty lot next to Redmond’s Lumberyard was a shortcut to Maggie’s house. The grass and weeds were almost as tall as I was.

As I made my way through the thicket, I heard a growl.

You know how something might sound large or small to you? Whatever made this noise did not sound small.

It was not a cat.

It was not a dog.

I froze.

There it went again, louder. It reminded me of when I visited the Charleston zoo, and a lion roared and the bars seemed to shake.

And there it was, about thirty feet away, standing up on its haunches amid the weeds.

A bear. A ten-foot-tall bear.

I remembered from Boy Scouts that brown bears attacked when they were hungry, but grizzlies liked to fight for the sake of it. This bear was black.

I knew there was a hole in the lumberyard’s chain-link fence halfway down. The bear was right behind me, snorting like a bull just before it charges.

Now I wasn’t running; I was flying, going faster than I’d ever gone in a football game. I ducked behind an old red cedar tree next to the fence and—shit. The fence had been fixed, the hole gone. Thanks, do-gooding military.

Not looking back, I latched onto the limbs of the cedar and started climbing, my old sneakers scraping against the loose bark of the branches.

I made it up that tree in an instant and dropped to the ground on the other side of the fence, sticking the landing with my knees bent, including the surgically reconstructed one. It didn’t even hurt. I looked back at the bear halfway up the tree, grabbed a piece of loose lumber off the ground, and heaved it like a javelin.