We’ve gotten used to this.

I turn to Trace. “Why did you stop running?”

He shrugs. “Didn’t see the—”

He closes his mouth and doesn’t finish. Point. He didn’t see the point anymore. Cary crosses his arms, bolstered.

“You’re not going today, are you?” I ask him.

“No. I need a few days to plan how I want to do this. I want to make sure I’m prepared.” He pauses. “They’re going to come back. Sooner or later, they’ll surround this place and Russo’s isn’t going to explode twice. If you want to go with me, fine. But just keep that in mind—you’re coming with me. Not the other way around.”

“What makes you think I’m going to follow you?” Trace asks.

“Did you not hear the part where I repeatedly said I don’t care if you do or not?”

“Are you sure Rayford is closest?” Grace asks.

It’s a fair enough question that Cary crosses the room and turns the radio on.

Immediate white noise. Static. No reception.

He fiddles with the dial.

“The radio’s out,” he says numbly.

“Are you sure it’s not the battery?” Grace asks.

“It’s on,” he says. “It’s not the battery. The radio’s stopped.”

We all listen hard, like maybe there’s a human voice trying to find its way through all the buzzing but there’s nothing.

“That’s not good,” Trace says.

Harrison swallows. “Does that mean the emergency shelters—”

“It doesn’t mean anything except the radio is out,” Cary says, but there’s an edge of doubt in his voice. “Something could have happened to the tower, that’s all. It doesn’t mean something happened to the shelters.”

But it might mean exactly that. It feels like every next can only be bad things. The landlines are down, cell phones are dead, the power doesn’t work. The water doesn’t work. We got lucky with the tank and that’s going to run out and we don’t know when. Emergency broadcast is officially dead. We will never rebuild. This thing will overtake us, is overtaking us. Buildings will crumble and weeds will grow through their foundations. We’ll become reanimated corpses navigating a sorry imitation of our glory days and this is why I don’t understand the point in going on, why it’s so wrong to give up. There’s nothing left.

“Turn it off,” Harrison says, because he’s thinking it too. Cary doesn’t. He stares at the radio and he looks so hurt that he would make this bold decision to leave and it would betray him like this. The snowy rumble emitting from the speakers only seems to get louder and Harrison starts to cry. “Turn it off !”

Cary snaps out of it and turns it off but I feel like I need the sound because if they hear it, they’ll see how stupid they’re being. How dumb it is to continue. I get to my feet and go to the radio. I turn it on again and Cary doesn’t stop me. I let the grainy rush of noise fill the room while Harrison whimpers and then I turn the volume all the way up—