Gunshots pierced the fog and silence over the beach. I peered out the window of one of the many rooms of the abandoned vacation home I'd claimed months earlier. Traveling bandits filtered through the streets, stopping only to raid vacation homes along the way. Mine was at the end of the road, at the ocean's edge. I still had time to hide. I had few belongings, just my guitar and my wallet, so I collected what little I had and hid beneath the bed. The dust ruffle concealed me.

I waited in silence, which wasn't hard for me. I hadn't spoken a word since I lost my travel companion. Then, I heard the doors open on the floor below and voices echo through the hardwood.

"Nina, check upstairs for valuables," an older male voice ordered. It reminded me of how my voice used to sound when I still used it.

Footsteps creaked up the polished wooden stairs, but paused halfway up. "Terran, are you coming?" a smoky female voice, likely belonging to this person named Nina, asked.

A different voice called back, fresh and deep like the Three Lakes in Henrico, where I started my journey. "I'm going to check out the garage, and then I'll be up."

The footsteps continued up the stairs. Clop, clop, her boots hit against the wood. Despite the force of her steps, I could tell she was light, and that she was coming toward me. From beneath the dust ruffle, I spotted the bottoms of tan lace-up boots. Cheap, unlike the boots my travel companion used to wear.

The person in the room, Nina, stopped by the vanity, most likely checking the drawers for precious metals. That's what I would have done. That's what any smart scavenger would have done. She crossed into the adjoining bathroom, and whispered to herself, "Wow." It was a sight to see, to be sure. The marble was still white and gleaming, though a lot of that shine was thanks to me. Living alone in a giant house like that provided me with many opportunities to clean. My travel companion would have wanted it to look as beautiful as possible. She lived for beauty.

Nina stepped back into the room. She searched the drawers of the armoire. Then she stopped, and lowered herself to her knees. I knew then that she would find me, but I didn't tense, I didn't fear it. I had lost the capacity for fear, as many people who have survived their nightmares discover. All I could do was wait for the inevitable.

First I saw the torn, dirt-stained jeans. Then her calloused, cracked hands and her gun, a model I couldn't identify. I was never a weapons man, despite living south of the Mason Dixon line. Then her scraped arms, tanned from the sun. And finally, her face as her near black eyes met mine.

She gasped, startled to find me, but quickly caught her breath. "Get out," she ordered me, though her voice didn't raise above a whisper.

I wondered why she hadn't reported me to the men downstairs, as I had expected would happen, but followed her instructions. I slid my body out first, and then pulled my guitar after me.

Her deep eyes widened. "You play guitar?" she asked, her smoky voice lifting with excitement.

I nodded.

Now I could see her fully. Her tattered clothes, covered in dirt and grass stains, her long mahogany hair hanging down her back, in such complex tangles that it resembled the closest thing I'd seen to dreadlocks since the world ended. She was organic, of the earth, and beautiful in her simplicity. My travel companion would have asked to paint Nina, and would have relished using every shade of brown in her arsenal to bring her to life on paper.

Keeping her eyes fixed on me, Nina walked to the door, and called out, "Dad!"

"Yeah?" the older man from downstairs shouted back. "Go ahead without me. I won't be long."

"Be safe," the man shouted.

She held her gun at her hip, pointed at my chest, and crossed to stand on the opposite side of the bed as I was now standing. We watched each other for a moment across the black and white floral print comforter. "Put your guitar on the bed."

I did so without question. She watched me in confusion, probably wondering why I was so submissive. That's what I would have wondered.

Examining my face, she lifted the guitar from the bed, and held it to her chest. In a moment, she began to play scales, tuning the strings as we went through the notes. One last strum of the strings to check that they were in tune, and she sat on the bed to steady the instrument on her lap. "What is your name?" she asked.

I opened my mouth to answer, but my throat was so dry, so forgotten, that no sound escaped. "Can you speak?" she asked.

I nodded, and cleared my throat. Like an old jalopy, I tried to start my voice once, twice, and a third time, when it finally roared awake, "Reed. My name is Reed."

She continued to stare at me, now smiling, and she chuckled a bit. "Good to meet you Reed. I'm Nina. Do you have anything on you Reed? Anything of value or anything that you could use as a weapon?"

I cleared my throat again, a final sweep of the dust from my lungs. "Just the guitar."

"And the wallet in your back pocket." She smiled. "You didn't think I would see that? Let me check it."

I slipped it from the back pocket of my jeans, and after a brief moment of hesitation, handed it over.

With the guitar propped up beneath her arms, she opened the wallet and flipped through it. She lifted a ten dollar bill from the pouch, and held it up for me to see. "If anyone in my group sees this, they'll take it from you. I know it doesn't mean much anymore, but you should keep it somewhere safer. Who knows, maybe the U.S. will magically return, and you'll want this then." She placed the bill back in my wallet, and her eyes stopped on the picture of my travel companion. She furrowed her brows, and her thin lips fell in a frown. "Who is this?" she asked.

"That was...." I couldn't bring myself to say it. "My travel companion," I said instead.

She lifted her eyebrows. "She must have been more to you than that, but okay. I get it. There are some ghosts we want to keep at bay."

Nina closed the wallet and returned it to me. I slipped it back where it belonged. She placed her slender fingers on the strings of the guitar. "Teach me a song. A song that means something to you. A song that maybe your travel companion liked."

"Why?"

"Music is my currency. I'm sick of money and trinkets. They're useless now. I want something I can keep forever, something that will be never lose its value. But the thing is, I don't want you to teach me just any song. I want you to teach me a song that has value to you. That's where the payment comes in."

Yes, she was beauty inside and out. My travel companion would have painted galleries of this girl, and once upon a time, I would have written songs for her. I thought the apocalypse took the art out of life, but for this girl, the apocalypse was her reason for creating art. I smiled for the first time in months, the muscles around my mouth actually straining with the expression. "I wrote a song for my travel companion long ago."

"An original song?" she asked.

"Yes. Is that valuable enough for you?"

"That's the most valuable currency I accept. You may as well have handed me a gold bar," she joked. I laughed. I had forgotten my body was capable of laughter.

"Okay," I said, accepting the guitar from her, and sitting down to play. "It's called 'For Hattie.'" I placed my fingers over the frets for my first chord, when I noticed someone in the doorway. A golden blond boy about Nina's age, late teens, early 20s maybe. He watched me with a suspicious stare. I froze and shut my throat off to sound as I had been before Nina pulled me out from beneath the bed.

She looked up and gestured for him to come and sit beside her. "Terran, this is Reed. He's going to teach me an original song he wrote."

Terran's skin would have been painted with the same tan as Nina's, but my travel companion would have used all of her yellow paints to complete his portrait. Even his eyes were yellow-brown, and they lightened in tone as the suspicion cleared from his face. "Did you check him for money?" he asked.

"Yeah, already told him to hide what he has."

"Okay," Terran said, and finally approached the bed. "Let's hear this song."

I had never met bandits like these in my life, but I was glad. I hadn't indulged in art since I lost my travel companion. I played her song for her the night before I lost her, and hadn't touched the strings of my guitar again until that moment.

"For Hattie," I repeated, and then strummed the first chord. I picked my fingers through the notes, until it came time for me to sing. My voice was weak, but my words were powerful. At least to me. I sang them proudly.

When we go to the ocean,

Sand beneath our feet,

We'll crawl into the licking waves,

Healing all wounds that we may keep.

Until all is well,

Until all is beautiful.

When we go to the ocean,

I'll bring an easel and a brush,

And you will repaint the world,

No need to ever rush.

Until all is done,

Until all is beautiful.

And if you can't find any beauty,

And if you can't find any peace,

I'll search the beach for pearls,

And treasures for you to keep.

Until all you see is art,

Until all you see is beautiful.

When we go to the ocean,

We'll live a life that you deserve.

Saltwater in your hair,

Your livelihood preserved.

Until all is repaired,

Until all is beautiful.

I strummed the last few notes, and sang a soft ah along with the melody. When I had finished, I took a few moments to allow the memory of my travel companion—Hattie, her name was Hattie—to once again hide in some dark corner of my mind.

I set the guitar back down on the bed between me and the bandits. Terran hung his head in thought? Sadness? Respect? Displeasure? I couldn't tell behind his fixed expression. But Nina didn't take her eyes off of me. They pierced through me as the gunshot had pierced through the fog and silence earlier. "Who was Hattie?" she asked.

Then, there she was, Hattie, crawling out from that dark corner, just as she had when she was a baby. When she was first learning to move on her own. I watched her during the day as her parents worked to support her. As her father worked to support his struggling musician brother. I knew Hattie better than either of her parents did, so when they were shot and killed during a mugging in downtown Richmond, it was easy for me to assume guardianship of my niece. The summer the world ended Hattie had been at a camp for children coping with traumatic events. I fought through the chaos to retrieve her. Her only keepsake was a painting of us all, her mother and my brother included, in sloppy water colors. As the years rolled on, her paintings became more detailed, and more painful. Her dream was to live at the ocean and to find beautiful scenes to paint, so a few months ago we grabbed all her paints and headed toward the ocean. After the raccoon bit her, I spent much of my time in denial that she could die of rabies. We stopped in a cabin along the way to the ocean, and she withered into death in the locked bedroom beside mine. We spoke through the wall until silence fell over us, and I left. I continued to the ocean, both to honor her and to escape her.

I didn't say any of this. Instead, I simply repeated, "My travel companion."

Nina frowned. "I liked the focus on the ocean," she finally said. "Teach me the chords. I will write my own words about the ocean. Those words belong to you, they're too valuable for me to take from you."

Verse by verse, I taught her the music, and after Nina accepted my payment, she and Terran left me to return to the silence.

But Nina returned art to me, and in my solitude, I moved my fingers through the strings of my guitar once more. I wasn't sure what this song would be, but thanks to the girl painted with beauty, my throat was open to whatever words I might choose.