She was driving into a town where history stopped twenty-three years ago. More than four thousand souls had once lived here. Grown up, gone to school, fallen in love, raised families, headed off to work every morning. Made friends, got drunk, bickered, shopped, had sex in the back of cars, played Frisbee, met over coffee. Four thousand people who together made up a community, a complex living and breathing organism.

And in a matter of minutes, it was all over.

But unlike, say, if a nuclear bomb had been detonated, the structures remained, except for those closest to the derailment. The town was intact, but had endured more than two decades of neglect.

As Annie drove slowly through the streets, the evidence was everywhere. Front yards that were once well tended were now essentially fields, lawns that had grown into two-foot-tall grasses and weeds. Some houses were hard to distinguish because they’d become completely overgrown with vines and moss, cocooned. Shingles were curled up or missing from rooftops. Weeds sprouted through pavement cracks in the middle of the road. Bits and pieces of trash blew about.

Windows were boarded up on some homes, but smashed in on others, shredded drapes still hanging from the rods, drifting idly in the breeze. Annie saw a mangy dog leap out of one home’s glassless picture window, a rabbit between its teeth.

Off to the side of one house, a child’s swing set was nearly swallowed up by tall grass. Annie surmised the city was without power, given the number of dropped lines that crisscrossed the roads, the absence of any working traffic lights.

“Christ!” she shouted, and hit the brakes.

In the middle of the road, directly ahead of her, was a moose.

The beast was unruffled by Annie’s presence. It gave Annie a disinterested look, then strolled majestically past her car, its left antler passing within a couple of inches of her window.

What Annie might have expected to see more of were abandoned cars—if this were a real disaster movie, they’d be all over the place—but there were relatively few. Those were probably reclaimed by extended family or insurance companies, although she did see an old pickup truck parked at the curb as she started coming into the downtown business area. Who would want to buy a used car from a town where everyone died? Annie supposed if the price was right . . .

She could see a more dense cluster of buildings ahead, what would most likely be the downtown area. But she wasn’t going to be able to get to it in her car, as a once-towering oak tree that must have been downed during a storm sometime since 2001 blocked her path. She’d have to go on foot; there was a gap between the road and the tree she’d be able to duck under.