The smoke had lingered for days.

​

It curled up from the blackened ruins of the farm like a ghost that refused to leave, thick and bitter on the tongue. Nika crouched at the edge of the tree line, her fingers tight around the wooden stock of the rifle that was too big for her frame. Thirteen years old, five foot nothing, and starving. Her older brother Josiah lay belly down in the grass beside her, eyes locked on the distant remains of their former home.

​

“No one’s left,” he whispered.

​

She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. The silence said more than she ever could.

​

After the Western Front rolled through, everything was ashes. Mama’s garden, Papa’s solar panels, even the old tin shed where they used to store the winter squash—they were all gone. Burned or blasted. The militia didn’t care what they destroyed. They came looking for conscripts, slaves, women. Josiah had been right to insist they run. There’d been too many to fight, and they had all heard tales of what the Western Front did to the women it captured.

​

Josiah nudged her. “We should go.”

​

“Where?”

​

He looked at her like that was the wrong question. Maybe it was. There weren’t good answers anymore.

​

“We head north. I heard there’s still resistance in Iowa. Some preacher with a broadcast rig and a bunker town. They call it Redemption.”

​

She almost laughed. Redemption. As if there was still something holy left in the world.

​

They moved silently through the trees, sticking to deer trails, staying low. Nika kept her finger close to the trigger even though the rifle only had one round left. Josiah carried a hatchet, rusted but sharp, and a bundle of jerky and dried apples he’d looted from a corpse three days back. Every step took them further from what they’d known and deeper into the fractured shell of America.

​

That night, they found shelter in a culvert beneath the cracked bones of an overpass. A rusted car burned nearby, the occasional pop of glass sounded like distant gunfire. Nika couldn’t sleep. She stared at the stars, wondering if the people who lived among them were watching Earth like a cautionary tale.

​

Josiah stirred in his sleep. He always muttered when the nightmares came. Names, mostly. Mom. Dad. Casey—his girlfriend from before The Collapse. Sometimes he called out for people who weren’t real anymore, ghosts of a time when they still believed in things like snow days and pizza Fridays.

​

The next morning brought trouble.

​

A drone. Old military model, whirring overhead like an angry hornet. Josiah yanked Nika into a ditch, and they watched the thing hover, scan, then dart off toward the northeast. That meant Western Front patrols weren’t far.

​

“Keep moving,” he said.

​

By midday, they reached the edge of a small town, or what was left of it. Gutted buildings. Burned remnants of what might have once been a pretty home to a few hundred people. The church held a gaping ragged hole where the steeple used to be.

​

They crept into a pharmacy that still had half the roof and a door that opened without too much noise. Inside: silence and dust. Shelves picked clean long ago. Nika moved toward the back, searching the storage room. She found a bottle of ibuprofen with a cracked lid and three tablets rattling around inside. Score.

​

She turned to call for Josiah—when the floor creaked behind her.

Not Josiah.

​

A man stood in the doorway, one eye cloudy white, the other bright and feral. He had a shotgun and a grin like he’d just won a prize. She could smell him now. A mix of off odors that told the story of no running water and someone who didn’t give a damn about things like deodorant or clean clothes.

​

He leered at her. A slow, hungry smile sliding across his features. Nika could see the man showed the same care with his teeth as he did the rest of his body. A mottle of yellow, along with blackened broken stumps and the gleam of at least one silver-tipped canine.

​

“Well, now,” he said. He wasn’t pointing the shotgun at her, per se, but that could change in an instant. It was obvious he meant for something far different from her.

​

Nika’s mind went blank. She didn’t scream. She didn’t run. She just stared. The rifle was slung behind her. Too far to reach. Too slow.

​

Before she could say anything, do anything, the man jerked forward with a gurgling sound and dropped in a heap on the ground. Josiah stood behind him, hatchet slick with blood. His mouth, hell, his whole body trembled.

​

“I had to. He woulda…”

​

“Let’s get out of here. Before someone else shows up.” Was all that Nika could think to say.

​

They didn’t talk much after that. What was there to say?

​

That night, Nika took first watch, her hand on the rifle, her heart an echo chamber of guilt and gratitude. She replayed the moment in the pharmacy over and over, the crack of bone, the look in the man’s eyes as he died.

She didn’t sleep at all.

​

By morning, they were moving again. Her body and mind felt detached, floating. Tired beyond tired equals something different, something active and alive and hard. She would go until she had nothing left. Then crash.

They walked. Always north. Always hoping. Because in this world of ash and bone, hope was the only thing you didn’t have to scavenge.