When the flames had died down and we knew she was dead, we started back home. Sadie wanted to hang around some but the smell was too much and I started walking and everyone followed. It was getting dark, anyway. We had our flashlights and the moon was full, but the coyotes started hunting around dusk and the walk up the hill and through the woods was an hour, and the dogs had gotten braver since the government had stopped picking up the bodies. They're still carrion feeders, but they test you; they try to nip at your heels and see how far gone you are.
       Coming over the top of the hummock, we could see the flames from the fire-pit on the roof of our house. The coyotes didn't bother us but we could hear them lurking and howling. Liz and Birdie led the way down, hand-in-hand, walking in moonlight and the trees reared up around them like ancient sentries. Marie was next to me, rubbing shoulders, but I wasn't having it.
       "Did you want to share a room tonight, Tory?" Marie was asking.
       "No," I said. She was a withdrawn little thing, and every question she asked was like a clay pigeon waiting to get shot down.
       "Okay," she said, and she took a step away from me so I moved over and bumped shoulders with her.
       "Stop it," I said.
       "I'm not doing anything."
       Sadie had been bringing up the rear, singing "Come Together" by the Beatles, until we were a quarter of the way down and her voice cut off. After a few minutes of silence, she started running, going full-sprint down the hill, huffing and pumping her arms and we called after her but she just kept going.
       Liz turned around. "She's a special one, isn't she, Tory?"
       "The Mushies wanted nothing to do with that kind of special," I said.
       Marie and I had come across Sadie the year before. You could still find a few working cars then, and we were trying to hit all the big towns surrounding Reading for supplies ahead of winter. We found her meditating like a yogi on top of the old Bethlehem Steelworks building, naked and unconcerned with the world around her. She never mentioned the Mushies or the corpses and could build a better fire than either of us, even if she spoke like an old Zen-master who was three sheets to the wind.
       A bit further down, the trees broke and the sky opened up, all stars and the great big spotlight of the moon. A wind was blowing from behind us and the air was warm and it felt like an old August night. I breathed in deep, smelled something sour, and decided I would run too. I took off without saying a word. Liz and Birdie laughed, but I could hear Marie calling me. "Victoria!"
       I lost my balance near the bottom, hit a rock and tumbled to the ground. The sky ate up my whole vision with its stars and planets and stretches of blackness and I almost laughed. It was a beautiful sight and I almost laughed.
       "The hell's your problem, Tory?" Marie leaned over me and offered her hand. I didn't take it, pushed myself up, and told her I was fine.
       "I think your brain is turning to mush," Liz said as they caught up. She tapped my head and said, "You sure you don't have Mushies up there? You're gonna start acting like Sadie."
       Sadie was far ahead, walking in an "s" shape up Duryea Drive. She turned onto 13th street and we followed at a slow pace, not speaking.
       Trash and empty beer cans rattled through the streets of the city, but they were old and moldy. Stray dogs slept in the vacant lots pocked with raised mounds--long abandoned bodies that had been covered with grass and moss and rashes of fungus. The windows in most of the buildings and row homes were gone, and they loomed empty and contrived like plastic doll-houses.
       The city didn't look too different, really. Reading and the people in it had been blown-out for a long while before the Mushies grew out of central-Russia to cover the world. Sometimes when we were going down the hillside, I'd get the feeling that there would be a cop-car idling in one of the parking spots along Duryea. The headlights splashing on the tarmac, the cop leaning his head out the window with his flashlight, asking what young ladies like us were doing in the woods so late at night. I would be walking down the hill and I'd see empty and crushed cans of Keystone Light or busted forties caught in the bushes, garbage that had been there for years, and think that we had just missed some girls from Saint Catherine's or underage college boys from Albright.
       But there was no cop, nothing on 13th Street. No deadbeats hanging out in front of the corner stores smoking Black & Mild's, no old Italian stew-bums playing cribbage on their porches between swigs of potato vodka. Hop-scotch squares were torn up with the rest of the city blocks and the only smell was that sour stench coming from over the hill.
       Marie asked me if I was okay. She always felt guilty when I was feeling down. God, I can't stand stuff like that. I didn't respond and then she got upset and tried to catch up with Sadie, calling her name and telling her to slow down.
       "You really that upset?" Liz said after Marie was out of earshot.
       "Upset about what?"
       "You know she was gone," Bird said. "And you know it passes on."
       "I'm not saying we should have done anything different."
       "What was the dumb bitch doing getting pregnant anyway?"
       I dug my hands into my pockets, hunched my shoulders, and didn't say anything else. These girls weren't soft for others and I guess I can't blame them. They had their own heads to deal with and regardless, most of us had a rough go of it before the Mushies and weren't all that open in the heart. Maybe Marie had been open, but she came from money and was about as broken as a china doll after an earthquake, and maybe Sadie, but her depth was pretty much a sinkhole.
       Maybe that's why I tried to get into Marie, especially after we picked up Birdie and Liz in Allentown. We drank too much a few nights after all of us had moved into the house and I lost my cool. I told her that she wasn't, I wasn't, and we weren't like Liz and Birdie, and all of the loneliness in the world couldn't change that.
       We had our nights after that, but I guess we never got over. What can you do?
       There wasn't any more talk, and we turned onto Greenwich street and walked the block to our house. It was an old boarding-house, big and red with four floors and a fire escape running up along the one side and a big flat roof where the fire roared. We always kept it going in case someone with any sense ever wandered into the city. The house was flanked by two vacant lots, but the lots both had big, gnarled trees eating up their space, so there were no mounds and no fungus.
       It was a little cooler inside, darker too. I went upstairs and saw candlelight beneath Marie's door and kept going. I wanted to check the fire, to be near it. It felt like a night to be outside. Sadie was there, sitting on one of the old couches we had dragged up. The fire lit up her face in a spectrum of red and yellow colors and her eyes looked glazed, almost white in the flames. She was very thin and narrow, with a pointed nose, and for the first time since we'd picked her up, I noticed how pretty she must've been before all this shit. I felt really bad for her. I felt really bad for all of us.
       "What's up, Dee?"
       She didn't say anything but I expected that. The flames were caged in a wire-frame tower we'd picked up from a Lowe's in Exeter, and the base was a flat sheet of iron we found in the basement with a square of bricks surrounding it that Sadie had laid. She was good with that kind of stuff. I opened the door in the cage and tossed in a few logs. There was another couch and a chair, but I sat on the concrete and looked at the fire.
       You can think about a lot of things looking into a fire. I thought about that pregnant bitch and how she had gotten here. Where had she been before it took her over and how had she wandered so far. Who had she been with. How did she catch it so late. I wondered what had been left of her mind, because you never could tell. After a few months, people on the news and people behind podiums were telling us to put-down anyone who was showing caps. They justified it by saying that the fight was already lost at that point; their minds were gone and they felt no pain; they were shells of people.
       You never can tell. Her face was a mess when we found her out in the front yard of a nice house in Mt. Penn. She was showing through her dress; it was blue with small flower prints and it wasn't clean but it was all together. She was having a fit on the ground and struggling to breathe. The fungus wasn't just clogging her throat by then, but spilling out of her mouth in white tendrils, filling her nostrils from the inside. The death knell, they said, was when you saw it coming out of their ears. That meant their time was maybe an hour or two away.
       I remember saying that we should leave her, but Bird said we should grab her and Bird was big and she took one arm and Liz took the other and we walked her back into the city, towards the forest. She went easy, almost seemed calmer except for a few random fits here and there. We didn't say much. I guess we all knew what we were thinking, and even if we didn't want it, it sort of just willed itself into being.
       "We should just shoot her," I said, but we didn't have a gun. The woman had lost most of her strength before we reached the top of the hill, and we pretty much had to carry her down. She thrashed here and there, but she was worn pretty thin except for the belly.
       There was an old farm on the other side of the hill, with another fire-pit that the owners must have used. It's one of those big ones you find out in the country. A big concrete circle set into the field with another circle-pit in the center that looks like a well. There's a fire cage in there and you light it up and the fire will blaze fifteen feet high. When we first found each other, we would pile up the wood and dance around it. The stars would blaze with the reflection of the flames, sort of like they were winking at us, and that made us feel big. The world had ended but we were witches dancing for the Gods. We had wanted to live.
       But the winter came around and held on into April, and days of note passed without a word said to one another, and the summer was burning and fearful. Marie found some rope in a barn and Liz tied the woman's arms and legs and we threw her in and after it was still for a while I thought we should walk away.
       "Will you do that to me?" Sadie said. Her eyes were like white howlite in the flames and the burning of the stars and the moon that crowned the sky.
       After a while I said, "You don't have it."
       She stuck her tongue out. I could see the white gunk covering it. "My throat was scratchy," she said. "Some of my breathing felt, you know, it felt like there was dust or cobwebs in my throat. But there's been a lot of pollen in the air. We've been breathing a lot of smoke."
       "When did you know?"
       She laughed, kinda. "Forty minutes ago? Going down the hill. I could taste it. My tongue hit the roof of my mouth and I had to unstick it, like a suction cup. I could taste it running down my throat, I could really feel it." She was laughing but tears were rolling down her face. "It's disgusting."
       "And you ran."
       "It felt good to run."
       The door to the roof opened, Liz and Birdie came out. They were laughing about something and took the couch opposite Sadie. Bird cradled Liz, I was sitting Indian-style, and Sadie was tucked into herself, feet up on the tattered sofa.
       "Anybody got war stories?" Bird said.
       War stories were what we did when the nights got long and lonely and we felt like talking to each other. Campfire stuff. When the Mushies got going, they just about started a war. Everyone pointing guns and bombs at everyone else. It all fell apart, though. The govts got so obsessed with flexing their muscles that the Mushies took over. The soldiers got it, the Presidents got it, just about everyone in the world.
       The war never happened. We told the stories because we wished it had.
       There was a strip of silence broken only by the crackling of firewood, and then Sadie said, "I got one." She sat up straight, coughed--it was a wet and ragged cough.
       "So China does a cost-benefit analysis. They go, hmm, if we loosen our grip just a bit, if we let these guys at each other's throats like a couple of dogs for just thirty-seconds or so, let them get roughed up, let them draw blood, then yank them apart…" She looked at me and bounced her eyebrows with a smile. "They grab power," she said. "The U.S. isn't a leader anymore, they're a belligerent. China thinks they can broker a peace deal that goes through them, but--but it blows up. Try to grab an attacking dog by the collar and it'll bite your hand." Sadie chomped the air, Bird and Liz laughed.
       "So the U.S. puts sanctions on China, and Russia ends their diplomacy with them. China now has a vested interest in all-out war. Not just to prevent two nukes from flying over them, but to get their stuff back; their economy is crumbling with the rest of the world's.
       "And they fight. They all fight. They fight and they fight and they fight. They use guns. They use chemical weapons because why the fuck not. They use bombs. Lots and lots of bombs. Until most of the people are dead, and the ones that aren't are still shooting at each other."
       What is there? A bunch of stars in the sky. The skeletons of a thousand homes spread out like tombstones. If I went to the edge of the roof and looked out, I would see my childhood; I would see the corner where me and Maggie Farro first paid a wino to go into a 7-11 and buy us a pack of cigarettes. L&Ms, I think. A spire of metal knots and loops in the center of the playground by the rec center, a tree-like thing I had climbed with my sister a thousand times. Next to that would be the basketball court where I played my first summer-league games, dad coaching, mom watching from the sideline. About a year-and-a-half before the Mushies came along, I met a boy named James Cassill at a winter mixer held in the gym of Saint Catherine's. I called him Jimmy though, and we knew each other for a while and I thought we would know each other for a lot longer, and then he went to the hospital and when I asked my mom if I could visit him, she said, "Absolutely not," and then a few weeks later she was gone too.
       I never really learned what happened to him. Maybe he's on a bed rolled out into the hallway, the whole place dark and smelling like shit, maybe he's all covered in caps or he's just a solid and gushy mass of fungus like a heap of tangled moldy linens. Maybe he's in one of those mass graves. Sadie was dying in front of me and all I could think of was fear for myself. How sick is that? You don't want to die but you shun everything that means anything.
       I wanted to tell them, but I didn't. I wanted Sadie to, but she stared into the fire.
       "That ain't a good war story," Bird said.
       Sadie shrugged. "Maybe the survivors band into little battalions. Shooting people that they don't recognize. Keep the war going, you know? Nothing really changes even after the world ends."

       I slept alone that night and didn't dream. I woke up a few hours before dawn, alert and untired, aware that something was different. But I listened and there was nothing happening in the world. I left my room with a flashlight and found the hall empty and dark. Then another door opened and Sadie peaked her head out. "You heard it too?" she said.
       "I didn't hear anything."
       She said nothing, but gestured me to follow her. We went up a flight, up then into the attic, then out on to the roof. She took my flashlight and went along the border, shining the light down. "Heard something," she kept saying.
       "Heard what? I didn't hear anything."
       "You heard it too," and then she stopped. It was the street-facing end of the roof, and there was a huddled mass of hair and clothes lying on the pavement below. There was a moment of complete silence, no breathing, no thinking, and then I jumped into the fire escape and ran down. Sadie followed and we found Marie in a pool of blood and bile, her face shattered. I rolled her over and took the flashlight from Sadie and shined it into Marie's mouth, looking for traces of anything, a cap, the rot of fungus, a white patch, anything--and found nothing. And I bashed her face with the butt-end of the flashlight and Sadie had to throw me off and all the commotion must have woken Bird and Liz and they came down and held me while Sadie dragged Marie off of the street and beneath a tree in one of the vacant lots.
       Next thing I can remember, we were up on the roof, the night nudging towards dawn. Sadie got a fire going in the pit. She sat on one couch, Bird and Liz on the other, me on the floor, like the night that had just passed. I was wrapped in a blanket, shivering despite the heat, and I smelled blood.
       "Sadie's got it," I said. I probably hadn't spoken in a long time.
       No one said anything. After a while, Sadie nodded.
       "She wants to know if we'll burn her too."
       At that, Liz put her face in her hands. I could see her shake and convulse and little compressed noises like something escaping came out of her. Bird tried to hold her but Liz didn't want it. She left a few minutes later and Bird followed, saying that they were going to bed.
       I sat there with Sadie, wanting to feel angry, but all I felt was sadness. I wanted to rage at some injustice, but it all felt so deserved. We wanted to think we deserved so much more.
       I watched the flames in the fire-pit, thinking about the woman. I thought about Marie and what might happen to all of us, and I thought about Jimmy Cassill and the first time he asked me to dance at the winter mixer, more than a year before anyone would even hear of the Mushies, and we left the dance and kissed in the street and walked around Reading in the cold, in my dress, in his suit, and we passed an alley where a few bums stood around an oil drum fire, their hands dirty and kissed by flames, and I'd imagined what my night would be like, what my life might become, the flames flicking out in the darkness like the serpent tongue of a witch.