I set the alarm on my phone for six hours later, 7:30 PM. If the voices didn't come knocking before then, it was the signal for dinnertime.

For our other dinnertime, we had a duffel stuffed with canned goods, a pile of frozen Lean Cuisines, and a twelve-pack of Coke, plus our personal gear. It was bizarre how quickly we'd adapted. I don't think we really knew what was happening back then, like it hadn't sunk in yet. For Rivet, and to a lesser extent, me, it felt like we were at the beginning of an adventure. Jennie's always been the efficient type, and that hadn't changed, but I couldn't tell what she thought about the whole thing. She took Titan.

"You know, I never thought I'd say this, but it's a good thing Rivet wasted so much money on that crappy Dodge," Jennie said, "because it probably won't have any trouble getting past... She trailed off, maybe high, maybe not quite ready to give voice to the thought. Rubble, destruction, bodies, Armageddon. I didn't know what she'd meant to say, but I knew what she meant by it all the same. At that point, we'd only seen one halfy—a half-changed person; Rivet coined the word. I think we were riding pretty high on what we thought was going to be a walk in the park. My chest still smarted, but I'd bandaged it up and thought I looked pretty fucking swag in my bloodstained shirt. Weren't we cool, making up witty names for dead people. We had no idea.

So here's how our gear stacked up, all tidy and packed away in three backpacks, plus one extra duffel:

Jennie—Six cans of food (peaches, red beans, black beans, asparagus, kidney beans, peas). Four bottles of semithinthetic opioid narcotics (outer pocket, for easy access). One large steak knife. One bag of dry kitty kibble (salmon). One flashlight. One pair of scissors. One black cat (asleep).

Rivet—Nine cans of food (sweet corn, pears, carrots and peas, sweet corn, black beans, sweet corn, asparagus, tuna, sweet corn). Two flashlights. One open pack of D batteries (seven remaining). One first aid kit. One steak knife. One shovel. One fireplace poker. One roll of duct tape (reflective orange). One length of twine. One cigarette lighter. One magnifying glass. One James Rollins paperback. One bandana (pink). One can opener. One fork. One spoon. One cooking pot. One water bottle. One miniature trowel. One pair of plastic safety goggles.

Me—Six cans of food (coincidentally, identical to Jennie's stash). One meat cleaver. One axe. One cigarette lighter. One bottle of cabernet sauvignon (dusty).

Duffel—Seven frozen Lean Cuisines (various flavors). Twelve cans of Coca-Cola. Twelve cans of food (pears, sweet corn, asparagus, asparagus, black-eyed peas, okra, sweet corn, peaches, black beans, tuna, black beans, olives). Scotch tape. Masking tape. One coil of braided rope. Three steak knives. Three forks. Three spoons.

Rivet groaned as he hefted his bulging backpack and slid his shoulders into the straps. We were at the front door, gathered around Janet's body. An eggy, sulferous smell had already begun to work its way into the air around it, and a few black flies were buzzing at its perimeter. Jennie kept swatting them away from where they were landing on her blood-tinged head wrap.

"Why'd you need an extra fork?" I asked Rivet. He looked at me through the safety goggles. They were that old-fashioned, boxy kind with a white elastic strap. He'd stretched the pink bandana over his scalp and tied it in the back. Just a safe, gay pirate.

"In case we get separated." Like it was the most obvious thing in the world. I grunted. Sure.

"Everybody ready?" Jennie asked. She was in front, her hand poised over the doorknob. We'd already moved the shovel that Rivet had wedged behind the door. I shifted the axe in my hand. It felt good, solid. I nodded. My other hand held the duffel.

Rivet raised his shovel over his head and tapped it against the ceiling. "Onward and upward."

Jennie cracked the door a smidge. We crowded close, pressing our faces to the hair-fracture aperture. Rivet bumped his safety goggles into the doorjamb and cursed.

"Dammit, move over, Jen," he said, and flung the door wide. Sunlight streamed into our dark world. Jennie flinched, and so did I. In a little over an hour, we'd become earthworms, albino denizens of a deep cave. The sunlight hurt us. I squinted, looked around the empty yard, and the moment passed. Just another beautiful day in Joshuah Hill, the hemorrhoid scrunched down America's ass.

I took a deep breath. "Let's go."

I pushed open the glass storm door and sprinted across the yard, feeling Jennie and Rivet behind me. My sneakers slapped the asphalt street first and I angled to my left, jogging back up the street toward my overgrown front yard. Rivet's breath was already coming out in short smoker's puffs behind me, while Jennie easily sprinted up on my left and surpassed me, hair bouncing over her shoulders, black kitten snuggled into the crook of her elbow. I tried not to watch the backside of her jeans as she fell into pace ahead of me. Hand on my heart I tried.

"See anybody?" Rivet shouted, huffing.

"All clear!" I called, forcing my eyes off Jennie. The street and the surrounding lawns were as still as a dry riverbed. My breath was beginning to catch, too. Smokers aren't made for running.

Suddenly Jennie hitched up to a halt and I bumped into her from behind. "The fuck, Jen?" I wheezed.

"Shhh!" she hissed. "Shut up, Ray. Don't you see him?"

"Huh?"

"You know that guy, Ray?" Rivet asked between gulps of air. We'd been running barely twenty seconds and beads of sweat already glistened on his forehead.

"What guy...shit. Nope, never seen him before."

I hadn't seen him because the street curved gently right before my house and Rivet's old Dodge parked in my driveway partly obscured my lawn, but there he was: a middle-aged man, olive skinned with a long green t-shirt, standing thigh deep in the thick weeds that sometimes posed as grass in my yard in the summertime.

As we watched, he rubbed his hands together in front of his chest and a small flame sputtered to life.

"He's got matches," Rivet said. "Hey! Hey dude!"

The man cocked his head, but didn't turn. He tossed the lit match onto the ground in front of him.

"Stop that!" I shouted. I dropped the axe and the duffel bag and stepped forward. "It hasn't rained since—"

Too late. A patch of dusty, dry, weed-choked lawn began to smoke, then turned orange as flames began to lick toward the sky. The fire spread impossibly fast, racing through the dry brush first with a crackle, then a roar, then a pop as the first tongues licked the dry boards of my front porch.

The man's head cocked sideways again, like a Tourette's tick, and he began walking toward us. No, not toward us. Toward my neighbor's lawn. As he stepped out of my weedy lot (fire burning so close to him now it must have been singing his legs), I realized he wasn't wearing any pants. Below that long green t-shirt, his shrunken penis swung lightly in front of a tangle of pubic hair.

"Don't look, Jen. I might get jealous."

"Does it ever end with you, Rivet?" Jennie hissed.

Rivet said something else, but I didn't hear it. I was already sprinting toward my house...my parents' house. The flames had overtaken my porch and were filling the air with the sputtering moan of a fire given too much fuel. Even while I was still on the street, the heat struck me like a wall, forcing me to stay off the lawn.

As if he didn't see any of us, the man turned to face my neighbor's house and struck another match, which he dropped to the ground. This time the grass didn't light immediately, so he struck a second one and aimed it at one of the brown shrubs lining the front of the house. That time, it caught.

"What the fuck are you doing?" I screamed, running for the guy. My backpack, full of tin cans, bounced painfully against my spine. I reached the man and drove him to the ground.

"Why'd you burn down my house?" I shouted into his upturned face. He stared back blankly, eyes pale. "Everything I own is in there. Everything she left...it's all gone."

"Where...?" the man gasped weakly.

"In my house!" I cried.

"No...no. No. Where's...where's Irene? She gets so cold in these winters. I just lit her a fire and now she's gone. I just lit it. I just lit it for her."

A shadow fell across us and Rivet said, "I honestly can't tell if he's on drugs or not. Ugh, and he stinks."

I felt one of Jennie's hands on my shoulder and let her help me to my feet. On the ground, the man moaned suddenly and twisted onto his side. There was shit smeared across his bare thighs and lower back. Unlike any other cat I'd ever seen, the black kitten in Jennie's arms hadn't tried to bolt through any of this. It just perked its ears up and watched.

"Hey guys..." Jennie said slowly. "There's someone else."

Rivet and I turned. Sure enough, another man was walking up through the neglected lawn of one of the vacant houses at the far end of the cul-de-sac.

"Okay, Rayman. You definitely win."

"I think I wish I hadn't."

"If wishes were fishes...sonofabitch!" Rivet stomped suddenly and leaped at least two feet in the air with the same motion. The pantless man had crawled over while we were talking and grabbed at Rivet's ankle. Now he just looked up at us, jaw agape. His eyes were milky and pink, like Janet's had been.

"Go, go!" Rivet shouted. "Get in my car."

Jennie reached it first and sprang back. "It's hot as shit. Oh, Jesus, the tires."

I looked. While we'd been talking, the fire in my yard must have been cooking Rivet's Dodge, because the rubber tires had begun to melt into a thick sludge at the bases.

"Ohhhhh man. We're screwed," Rivet moaned. "We're so...hey back the fuck up." He kicked at the man's head, who'd again crawled up behind us.

I dug into my jeans pockets and found it—the jingling key fob we'd unearthed from Janet's back pocket. "Back to Janet's house. The pickup. Hurry." I stooped to grab the axe and the duffel bag I'd dropped in the street and took off running.

We reached the dusty pickup and I swung around it to get to the driver's side while Jennie and Rivet fiddled with the handle near the house.

"Locked!" Jennie called.

"Working on it." There were almost a dozen keys on the keychain. I tried the first one. It wouldn't even go in. Second one. It slid into the keyhole below the handle, but wouldn't turn.

"Lock and load, Rayman," Rivet hissed on the other side of the truck. "Get us in there."

I thrust the third key into the hole and tried to turn it. Nothing. I pulled. Shit. It was jammed. I yanked again, and the key snapped in half, its front still wedged in the lock.

"Shit!" I yelled.

"That better be triumph," Rivet returned.

"I broke it."

"Broke what?" said Jennie.

"The lock, the key. Shit!"

"Back to the house," said Rivet. "You said she has another car? We'll take that." He and Jennie started across the lawn.

I ran around the back of the truck to catch up and saw it. God, we were idiots. "Guys!" I yelled. "Come back." Without waiting, I vaulted the sidewall and landed in the bed of the truck. Rusty springs squealed as the truck shrank under my weight. I slipped in the thick covering of dust, but I caught myself and reached the back of the cab.

On these older Fords, there's a sliding window in the rear windscreen. They've got little plastic latches that lock in place when you slide the window all the way shut.

This window wasn't all the way shut.

I dropped my pack and the duffel and the axe into the bed, worked my fingers into the narrow opening, and slid the window all the way open, then wormed through headfirst. The small cab was hot and stuffy from sitting in the sun, but I was in. My cheek pressed into the hot vinyl seat cushion, then slid across it as I pulled my legs through the window. My head left the cushion and thumped the floorboard; my foot kicked the ceiling.

"Like a swan!" Rivet cheered. "Way to go, Rayman. Open, open, open."

I reached over and pulled the inside door handle, disengaging the lock. While Jennie gently placed her pack into the bed beside mine, Rivet hauled me right-side up, and then we were all in the cab and Jennie slammed the door shut and locked it.

The gunshot echo of the door died in the stuffy air faster than a dream, leaving us in breathless silence. I scanned the street, the yard, the neighbors' yards, the intersection, the road beyond.

"Not a single fucking zombie!" Rivet exclaimed. "Come on!"

Jennie laughed, the sound loud and genuine. I looked at her and caught the bug. For the first time today, she looked happy. The chuckle caught in my throat at first, as if unsure of its destination, then burst free all the louder because of it. My laugh spurred Jennie into hysterics, and I joined her. I guess adrenaline and drugs made a strange cocktail.

Rivet made a show of being nonplussed, but Jennie threw her arms around him, giggling, and he finally cracked a smile. I realized he still had his bulging pack on his lap and, Jesus, the shovel! Sticking straight up between his knobby legs in the tiny cab. I lost it again.

"Har har." Rivet calmed down first, like usual. Jennie and I finally tapered off, Jennie wiping tears of laughter from her eyes.

"Sorry," Jennie said, smiling. "I guess I just expected...I don't know. More zombies. After all that. I mean, it was intense, guys. That crazy guy back there? Running all the way to the car. I was scared." She raised her hand as if she were voting as a member the "scared" group. "I'm sorry, though, Ray. About your house."

"Me too," I said. Just like that, the urge to laugh was gone. I'd lived there since both of my parents were gone, and found something to hate about it almost every day. But now that I couldn't go back, well, it's weird what you miss.

"Keep trying those keys...," Rivet prodded.

After two tries, a key slid smoothly into the ignition and turned. The engine coughed to life. The gas gauge read half full; a minor miracle, since I don't think Janet had driven this truck in months.

"Onward?" I glanced at Rivet.

"And upward," he said, peering straight ahead through the goggles.

A left on Bloomingdale and then a right on River Street had us motoring along the back way to downtown Joshuah Hill, three and a half miles away.

As we passed Mrs. Winters's house, I swear I saw her pull aside a curtain and wave. She looked just fine.