“Peter, we need to go.”

“Where’s the nice woman?”

“We need to get you out of here.”

Peter became aware of movement at his side. He turned, watching the snow fall gently across the window and for the briefest moment thought he was back at the lake. But there was no cry of wolves to accompany the snow. No chattering blue jays darting in bright blue flashes past the tree-house window. Here, in this life, there would only ever be the tick of the clock and the sound of time yawning as it slowly slipped by.

“Tokala, what is this place?”

Tokala turned towards the window, as if looking over the whole town somehow, and sighed.

“We think it’s the town where they experimented with people’s return to civilization before us.”

“Experimented?” said Peter.

“Or trialled, yes. To see if the same thing happens to people as happened before.”

“Before?”

Peter sat upright, so very awake now, and Tokala’s dark eyes held his.

“Peter, the national parks were never just a refuge from the Dead. They were also a release back to nature, a release from a modern world we made but were utterly incapable of freeing ourselves from. A world of money and things and never-ending routine and rituals to pay for those things. Back then it was impossible for people to even comprehend the depth of their own misery because the world they were born into already had them tricked. First, it tricked us into believing that all we needed was stuff, then it trapped us into maintaining what we’d gained and encouraged us to reach for more. More things. More everything. And it tricked us early on. Children’s toy collections that needed completing became the burn to have the latest gadget. We took jobs to pay for them. Then, as we got older, bigger jobs to pay for bigger things. Homes. Apartments. Houses. Houses that needed filling. Buy a vase and you’d need a table to set it on. Toilet paper needed a holder. There were cars, curtains, furniture and clothes. Except, you could never keep up. Fashion went out of fashion and needed replacing. Technology needed to be constantly updated. Phones. Smaller versions, then larger. Larger versions to store more stuff. Music, photos, videos and apps. When we ran out of stuff to fill them with, we filled them with each other. Social media. It was empty at first. It needed filling. So, we filled it up with family and friends. People who weren’t even friends. It didn’t matter, just as long as we had them and kept hold of them. So, we added more photos. More videos. More stuff. Dogs. Cats. Funny ones were best. Anything to keep up and keep people in our stuff until we were just stuff too. And we just kept going until we’d filled our virtual world with as much stuff as our real worlds. More things. More everything.