After America

"Blue Dog, Red, you, too," he ordered. Sofia whistled to the dogs, and they followed her happily. "Guard!" Miguel called out when they were inside the fence before throwing a handful of jerky strips over the gate. The dogs fell on the treat with great hunger. As Sofia tended to the horses, he gathered the saddlebags and returned to the general store.

Full darkness was upon them now, and the light from the kerosene lamps seemed much stronger than before. Miguel's stomach was rumbling with real hunger, and he set up a small gas-powered camp stove on one of the tables in the diner. He took his Maglite and returned to the main area of the shop, where he soon hauled up the trapdoor to the cellar behind the counter. It was pitch-black down there, requiring him to take both the torch and a lamp down the steep wooden steps. He had to stop halfway down and consciously push away the image of his family sitting down to di

The cellar revealed itself to be well stocked, with enough ca

He shook his head in disgust at his own weakness. How could he possibly control events over the next few weeks if he could not even control his own thoughts and feelings? He returned to the diner with a can of Dinty Moore beef stew and a can of Del Monte peaches. A few minutes on his camp stove and di

"Are you hungry?" Miguel asked.

"Sure," she said, showing very little emotion. "Thank you, Papa."

She joined him at the counter, where he had set up the small gas stove. She seemed less aware or possibly just less bothered by the remains of the Disappeared. The younger ones, he noticed, were like that. They seemed to accept what had happened with much greater ease than their elders were able to.

"I am sorry," she said, looking at Miguel. "I should be feeling something, but I can't. Is that wrong, Papa?"

Miguel felt as though his heart might burst from the pressure gathering around it. He took Sofia into his arms and held her close. To his surprise, she stiffened. His own tears came, but they were quiet, unlike Sofia's from earlier in the day. They blossomed in his eyes like small exquisite pearls of acid and burned as he burned.

He would grieve, but he would also have vengeance.

14

New York A thorough skin care treatment and a small loss of dignity saved Julia

As soon as she lay down, her nose began to run.

"Oh, bugger," she said irritably.

She plucked a tissue from the box by the bedside, blew her nose, and lay a fresh tissue on the pillow next to her as a precautionary measure. She hated the idea of lying on a snotty pillow and waking up looking like a glazed doughnut in the morning.

Off went the bedside light, and with her hot, greasy begloved hands at her side, Julia

The tissue was caught inside the lid of her eye.

"Godshitfuckdamnshit!" she cried out, blinking rapidly to clear the obstruction but only dragging the corner of the Kleenex in deeper under her eyelid.

She tried to grab the tissue, but her hands were so clumsy with the greased-up gloves, she managed only to poke herself in the other eye, smearing Vaseline in there. Shrieking with frustration and pain, Jules tried again. She could only imagine what she looked like, sitting up in bed in a tattered pink Teletubby T-shirt, her tiny ponytail standing straight up on her head and greasy rubber-gloved hands yanking wildly at a Kleenex that was stuck inside one eyelid, flapping up and down on her face while she cursed up a storm.

"God shit fuck goddamn motherfucker!"

Not quite the queen of the seven seas image she'd cut as master and commander of the Aussie Rules. She smashed the bedside lamp while reaching blindly for it in the dark, tried to lever herself out of bed, and crashed to the floor when her slimy hands slipped on the dresser. Mercifully, the fall yanked out the tissue, and she stumbled to the bathroom, cursing again as she flicked on the light and got a look at her raw, red eyeballs in the mirror.

It took a long time to settle down after that, perhaps an hour. For a while, she sat gazing out of a dirt-smeared window at the Lower Manhattan skyline, which was dark for the most part with the silver wash of a full moon haunting the empty and occasionally burned-out skyscrapers. A flicker of tracer fire could be seen in the distance, but she could not place the exact location. After calming down, she returned to bed, where the fearful crash of artillery from the firebases on Governors Island sounded like a distant thunderstorm. Her eyes, heavy-lidded and grainy sore, closed of their own accord as she recalled a party on the roof of a nearby building. The Rhino, Ma

She slept through her alarm, only waking to the sound of Rhino hammering on her door.

"Come, Miss Jules, your carriage awaits! And verily the driver is pissed!"

For the briefest moment she dreamed herself in a Cinderella world where a handsome horse-drawn buggy and a charming young prince did indeed await, but the Rhino's bellowing and hammering quickly ended that.

"Come on, they'll dock us a week's pay if we make them late," he yelled through the door somewhat more prosaically.

Julia

A sharp, stu

The dirt-smeared windows shattered and exploded into the room. Shrapnel whistled through the air, burying itself in the plaster walls, and pepper-black smoke rolled into the room as the building shuddered all the way to its foundations. The explosion shook the building so violently that she was seized with a fearful certainty that it would collapse around them. Jules tumbled from the edge of the bed onto the floor with the pillow over her head, falling painfully on a few broken shards of the lamp she had knocked over in the night.

The eruption began to subside, only to be followed by a barrage of smaller, sharper explosions she recognized as rocket fall. Burps of Gatling gun fire spit upward at the rockets from some improvised navy missile defense weapon on the roof. If they had any effect, Jules couldn't tell.