Perhaps she was fooling herself, and it was simply easier to bury one’s head in the past. About suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters, Auden had written in his famous poem about the fall of Icarus: how well they understood / Its human position: how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. Calliope had argued back in an undergrad paper on postcolonialism how the “masters” had misinterpreted suffering—how those joined together in blood and pain and heartache understood the impossibility of turning a blind eye when that eye was shared.

But the years had turned her fire lukewarm, and she’d gotten comfortable in her cushy office chair, clacking insights at the keyboard, little ticks and tocks like notches in the flint; only her weapons had dulled, and she wasn’t sure anymore what good they would do anyone.

What was happening in the world hadn’t come yet. Until it had.

* * * *

The gunshot rang in her ears. She hunched in the doorway, the door swung partway into her tía’s cabin. Chance pushed Calliope and Eunjoo toward the front wall, beside a moth-covered porch swing, shouldered his rifle, and called out, “Stop shooting! We aren’t here to fight.”

A woman’s voice. “Who’s there?”

Calliope’s heart raced. She shouted, “Tía? It’s Calliope,” and rose from her crouching place.

Chance whispered, harshly, “Wait, mujer. We don’t know it’s her or if she’s …” He paused, grappling for words. He finally settled on, “Changed.”

“She’s not a zombie, she’s my aunt,” Calliope said, rising the rest of the way and standing beside Chance in the doorway.

“Tía, I made it!” A woman in bright yellow overalls, her silver hair draped across her shoulders, appeared in the doorway, holding a rifle. Her usually friendly expression pulled into a tight grimace, eyebrows raised. This wasn’t Tía, but the artist who lived in the trailer down the creek. Tía’s girlfriend. “Oh, it’s you. Mara, you scared the shit out of us.”

Mara’s eyes darted past Calliope, toward the yard. “Come in,” she said, her voice hushed, laced with panic. Calliope looked closely at Mara’s overalls, red stains smeared across the bib and thighs, more bloodlike than paint. Blood handprints. And dried, caked mud. Her boots were stamped with mud as well. The hairs on the back of Calliope’s neck prickled.

She stayed rooted to the porch. Her voice smaller, she asked, “Where’s my aunt? And everyone else?”