That afternoon, as we made our way through the ruins of Santa Fe, the high desert sky cleared to brilliant blue and I thought we might be safe, at least for a while. The rubble of the city lay quiet under its soft, muffling blanket of dust and sand. There were tentative peeps and calls from a few scattered birds, but of human noise I heard not a whit. Mainly what I noticed as we passed through, Cassie and Peau and me, was the ringing of flagpoles as hanging chains blew into them.

There seemed to be just the one tone—a low, resonant ting—each ting separated from the next by a pause of five or six seconds, piercing peaks of sound that emphasized the emptiness of the silent valleys that lay between them. Elementary school, high school, post office; buildings long fallen to rebar and broken cinderblock, but each with a steel pole outside, each staff with its spousal chain, so that as you slogged through town on the weedy roads, roads bordered by the charred piles of buildings they once gridded, you moved from one chiming sphere of sound to the next. It brought to mind some ancient feudal world, where cloistered territories of power and safety were defined by the peals of bronze church bells. In those days they sometimes had distinct melodies for weddings or funerals, or for fires and invasions. There were church bells in Santa Fe too, of course, but the elegant mission towers that once hefted them skyward had fallen, so the bells squatted off-kilter on the ground, silent and vaguely sullen. As often as not, some critter had taken shelter underneath. A good use of them, I couldn’t help thinking. Who needed to hear about weddings anymore?

I had no clue, but what I did know was that I was too old for this. At fifty-two, which practically made me a Methuselah, both my prognosis and my prospects were increasingly dire. Everyone was younger than me, often by decades, but of course “everyone” is a deceptive term, implying bounteous humanity when in fact almost no one was still alive. The few wandering strays that caught sight of me—lice-ridden, straw-haired urchins with hollow eyes; starving, desperate teenagers; the occasional feral twentysomething—tended to start and stare, gobsmacked by the grizzled old beast, poised on the blade’s edge of whether to attack or sprint for the hills.

I did my best to find a middle path. If I had any food, I’d offer them some, and this typically had a propitiating effect. I couldn’t afford to lead them into dependency, though; too much ground to cover and too little time to do it in. Nor did I dare suggest that I owned more provisions than I showed, which would have painted a target on my back. I had to act tougher than I felt, in other words, but this was the story of my life. And, of course, there were the reasons for my urgency, nine mounted men doing their monomaniacal best to hunt me down.

Places like Santa Fe made it harder to forget everything we’d lost, and remembering gave me a hollow flutter of anxiety in the pit of my stomach. We all lived on the precipice of annihilation now; there were no doctors, no vaccines or medicines, and formerly minor injuries like sprained ankles could quickly doom you.

To the south, Albuquerque still stood, albeit empty of people. This was a little better but not much. Its few skyscrapers had settled off plumb, as if emulating Pisa, and had been defenestrated, though by bird strikes or hammers or the compressive effects of time and desiccation and gravity, who knew? They gave the city its most unsettling and beautiful characteristic, though, for even in gentle breezes it began to whistle and moan like a collection of giant wind instruments. High flutelike trills, the baritone of oboes, human-sounding wails and cries of despair, all this resonated through the streets depending on the direction and velocity of moving air, so that the place exhaled a full-throated symphony of lamentation and downfall. The buildings bled long vertical streamers of rust from the summer monsoons, and many were bearded with verdant vines like ancient Mayan temples. On the bright side, they hosted millions of pigeons and doves and songbirds—and, of course, peregrines, who happily devoured the other birds at every chance. In Santa Fe, there were no such reassuring signs of life. I could still imagine cities out there full of fine, healthy men and women, young and old, gleaming in the night with the full galactic bounty of electric light. I’d yet to see one, though.

One good thing about Santa Fe was the money. It was ubiquitous, fast-drying, and tough, so it was excellent for starting fires. As we neared the western edge of town, I collected fistfuls of tens and twenties from the grate over a storm drain and stuffed them in my kindling sack. There was more everywhere, but I didn’t have room for it all.

We started up into the mountains, and I was overjoyed to be out and away from the city. There in the southern Rockies it was a perfect evening. We rode west on an old state highway, as nearly as I could tell, though my ancient map had been folded and refolded so many times it appeared to have been dredged up from oceanic submersion and dried in a pitiless sandstorm. I had what I needed, though: two solid mules and a hitch rigged up so they could pull the old rusted-out F-150. The truck sported a fiberglass camper shell, beds for me and Cassie (though it was her habit to crawl into mine), a nest for Peau in the front seat, food and cooking gear, and a .22 long rifle with a scope and a handful of bullets. Without the engine, tranny, drive shaft, and gas tank, the truck sat high and light on its squeaky springs. It was an easy haul for the big, tough mules, and with a bottom welded in, the engine compartment made fine storage space. So we bounced along through the rocks and weeds, vaguely westward on the abandoned road, overgrown and overhung and wild, partially blocked here and there by boulders or landslides. The truck never would have made it on engine power, given its balding, senescent tires. The mules were splendid, if not excessively speedy, with the further advantage that they found their own way perfectly well and I didn’t really need to steer.

The sun set and the moon slid its big hungry face up over the ridge behind us in the east. The air cooled, turning to a kind of blue crystal. We were snug enough in the truck’s cab, even without a heater. Cassie was curled up on the bench seat next to me, blended well into her blanket by all the fur she’d shed, her whiskers twitching in mouse-dreams. Peau soared out over us somewhere, reconnoitering a likely place to stop for the night, seeking intelligence and company from whatever others of his kind he could scare up. It wasn’t difficult; people were scarce, but ravens were everywhere, hundreds of tribes with their own dialects. He did his best to communicate to me what he gleaned, and usually he succeeded.

The old snow in the crevices between the trees took on a hard cobalt shine from the moon, and dampness rose from the ground, hovering in a low layer of mist. The sky deepened into a soothing, fathomless ultramarine. Venus gleamed ahead of us in the west. Stars were blinking awake, though there was still enough soft, diffused light to see by. I felt stupendously lucky to be alive. Of course it was perilous, wandering alone through mountains that had been aggressively reclaimed by pumas, grizzlies, wolves, and such. With people gone, even coyotes had expanded their ranges and become confidently militant. There were worse things out there than bear and cougar, too, but it wasn’t worth dwelling on. The mule deer were more plentiful than ever, there were millions of jackrabbits, and even elk and bison were spreading, all of it a bounty to their carnivorous brothers and sisters up the food chain. The secret lay in all the abandoned corn farms, vast fields of barley and alfalfa and other grains, stunted and uncultivated now, mixed in with weeds, but perfectly acceptable to your average doe or cow elk. Nutrition leading to fecundity, followed by predation. Hence the need for a good, hard camper shell; in a tent we would have been dinner for whatever toothy thing wandered by. I took some solace knowing that the plentiful four-leggeds drew attention away from soft marks like me, but I never got careless.

Cool wind pushed the pines around, and they whispered among themselves, spilling all their piney secrets along with cones and nuts. It pleased me to anticipate the rituals of evening. Zagging in the rising wind, Peau sailed in and landed on the flank of Mule One, as was his wont. Mule One, the girl, and Mule Two, the guy, halted. I hit the brake so the truck didn’t bump them in the butt, which they found irritating, and life improved when the mules weren’t irritated. Peau hopped over to the hood, then to the mirror, as I rolled down the window.

He carried a small, stringy mass in his beak and dropped it into my outstretched palm. Horsehair. He indicated a direction with his head and emitted a series of staccato clacks and little caws. If you can learn Morse, you can theoretically learn Raven, though the latter contains a lot of body language, a variety of subtle vowels, and a range of meaningful inflections that take time to master. I usually got a sense of what he meant, anyway, and this was one of the most confounding aspects of the world’s metamorphosis. Had the animals changed, or had I? Why were we now able to understand one another in ways that we couldn’t before?

I knew it was entirely possible I was losing my mind, but such matters are notoriously difficult to judge from the inside. Insanity, it seems to me, is just another kind of betrayal, and the lunatic often ends up in the same position as the deceived lover, by which I mean the last to know. You can try to console yourself with Laing’s First Pablum—insanity as the rational response to a deranged world, etc.—but seriously? Does anybody who’s ever had a crazy friend really believe that?

In any case, I knew roughly where Peau was suggesting we go, even though I was confused by the horsehair. I thanked him, and he took off.

“Yo, mules,” I said, and One and Two sighed in their martyred mulish fashion and leaned into their harnesses. We followed a spur road to a little clearing, where I smelled the horse before I saw it. So that was it.

The stallion lay by a granite outcrop with a black streak down it, and he smelled like burned flesh. He’d probably been struck by lightning during the storm that had drenched us in town the previous day. He was stiff and a little bloated, but not too badly, and the meat would be fine when cooked. It was a lucky find, though we’d have to camp both uphill and upwind.

The upwind was obvious. The uphill was so we could settle in quietly behind some sort of obstruction and keep an eye on the horse without being seen (or smelled) by whoever else got interested in it in the course of the night. Every hungry beast within five miles would want a piece, and they’d all be lifting wet noses into the tattletale breeze just about now, calculating direction, travel time, and potential for conflict. I was also thinking about our pursuers, who, because they were on horseback, might be overtaking us soon if their tracking was halfway decent.

I got out of the truck to look around. I loved the reassuring bang of a truck door closing. It spoke of the security of manufacturing, all the things we’d squandered. If you had to, you could always jump back inside and be safe, even in a thunderstorm. About the only thing that could get to you was a grizzly, which could hook its claws into the crack between the door and the frame and yank the door right off the cab. I’d seen the aftermath of this once, and it was extremely unappetizing, though evidently not to the bear. Jesus, those things can eat.

Oh, and the ants, of course. We have hunting ants now, apparently from somewhere in South America, and they sow terror wherever they appear. Weather stripping doesn’t stop them, and there are enough holes in the front of the truck, under the dash, where various hoses and wires and cables used to be, that they’d come pouring in like water. You’re okay if you stay out of their way—despite their name, they’re mostly scavengers, like the native ants—but they’re three quarters of an inch long, a russet color, and if they catch you sleeping or wounded and unable to run, you’re finished. They paralyze you with venom, swarm to the attack, and can skeletonize a person in about an hour. Unlike, say, pumas, they don’t bother to kill you before they start eating, so it’s an extremely unpleasant demise. Ants can smell, and I was worried that the horse might attract them, along with everything else.

I gave the stallion a nudge with my foot and he emitted a long, ghastly fart. Not the usual grassy, amiable fart of a horse but something much ranker and deader. I gagged a little, but some of the bloating went down. It was nearly dark now, and I’d have to get to it right away.

I found a place where we could park, nestled in a clearing with rocks all around, a kind of natural little fortress, just the sort of snug haven I had in mind. It lay thirty or forty feet upwind and slightly uphill, in fact, so I could look down onto the horse without having to smell him, unless the wind changed. A tall cliff behind us made ambush unlikely.

Once we were parked, I hauled the poke nest off the roof and set it up. This consisted of a portable perimeter of pine poles, six feet tall and spaced four feet apart; I pounded the sharp ends into the ground with a hand sledge. The poles were connected with interwoven barbed wire that I’d attached with U-nails. The thing rolled up for storage on the truck, then unfurled for deployment in a tidy circle at night. “Poke nest” is a rough translation of a term Peau used, because, as a bird, it looked like a nest to him, and he had to be careful where he landed on it lest he get pricked by barbs. It was essentially the same as the thorn-bush barricades that surrounded huts in Africa to keep out lions and hyenas.

I gathered wood, built a little stone hearth, got the fire going, then took my knife and trotted down to the horse. It was solidly dark now, with just a little light from the moon shafting through the trees, but I had a headlamp I could recharge with a thing I’d rigged up. The mules pulled the truck, which turned the wheels, which fed the battery, which connected to a little universal charger. It was a mule-powered flashlight, essentially, not fancy but good enough to let me see what I was doing.

I took a few seconds to sharpen the knife on a rock, then sawed off the horse’s back leg—the one he wasn’t lying on—and tried to get as much of the good thick muscle up in the thigh and flank as I could. The whole piece must have weighed a hundred pounds. I threw it over my shoulder, humped it back up to the truck, and dropped it on the ground. Peau swooped in, black from the black sky, suddenly materializing in the firelight as if the tips of his feathers were ablaze. He landed on the truck with a little click of claws.

What ho, he said—a ravenism of hearty greeting that translates quite well this way, I think. Cassie hopped out of the truck, looking sleepy and vaguely disgruntled. They glared at each other, as was their habit.

I led the mules into the poke nest, then put a bucket of water and one of oats between the truck and the cliff face, so the mules would follow and be hard to see back there.

Ravens are wary of large, fresh carcasses, as if they’re worried the animal might still be alive and trying to trick them. This may explain why in some places they collaborate with wolves on a hunt. Certain flight maneuvers and vocalizations help the wolves find prey, and once the pack has made the kill and begun eating, the ravens drop in and take a share. Peau, like others of his kind, preferred his dinner tartare and alfresco, so now that I’d cut open the horse’s flank, he flapped over, landed, and began enthusiastically plucking away. I wasn’t a hunter, but in situations like this it was an easy enough symbiosis.

Over by the fire, I skinned the flank, sliced off thin steaks, and started grilling them. Cassie and I ate together, and as soon as the rest of the steaks were mostly done, I tossed them, still hot, into an old steel ammo case we kept for such things. They’d finish cooking in there, then dry out and keep for three or four days. We’d be well provisioned.

We were almost done with the cooking when three coyotes showed up. They saw the fire and hesitated, but their hunger quickly overcame their inhibitions. Peau left the horse and flapped into a little tree beside the truck. I’m often impressed by the graciousness with which smart animals cede ground—none of the aggressive displays you got with humans, just practicality. Wow, you’re big. So long! No blame, no shame.

Coyotes, I’d learned, often like to start in the nether regions, and true to form they plunged their greedy mouths into the horse’s anus, tore off his balls, and proceeded from there.

I turned away to finish the cooking. When the meat was safely stowed, I stretched out the horse’s long Achilles tendon, which I’d saved. Horse tendon is strong and springy and useful for all kinds of things, so I wanted to cure it and have it available. I pulled the hot steel grill off the fire, leaned it against the rocks, and tossed on more wood. An ostentatious display of thermal technology never hurts when you want to impress substantial, hungry beasts. We were reasonably safe in the poke nest, though, and if push came to shove there was always the truck.

The coyotes had quickly opened a gaping hole at the back end of the horse and were gorging themselves, snarling and snapping at each other as they ate. The horse expelled great blasts of fetid gas, and I was glad we were upwind, but the coyotes didn’t seem to notice. Then, after about ten minutes, all three suddenly looked up at once, came to full alert, and scampered away into the darkness.

We heard the bear snuffling and mewling its way in. It emerged from between trees into the far edges of the firelight. A black sow without cubs; I didn’t think there’d be much danger. She studied us briefly, arrived at her apparently disparaging conclusions, then found her way to the horse and went to work. She was practical and efficient, almost humdrum, tearing off long strips of bright-red meat and scarfing them down. Once she glanced up at us again, more or less as a formality, then returned to feeding.

After half an hour of this, she looked up, peered into the darkness, then turned and shot from the clearing like a furry black cannonball. Bears always look ponderous and slow until suddenly they’re not. It’s sobering to remember that a grizzly can overtake a Thoroughbred, at least in the first hundred yards, and the black bear appeared nearly that fast.

We heard a sound off in the woods. I’d encountered something similar before and hoped I was mistaken, but then it came again, and I knew I wasn’t. It was a tiger chuffing, and my heartbeat kicked up a notch.

“Into the truck, everyone,” I said, and we all hopped into the cab together. I closed the door as quietly as I could, but I didn’t stop pulling until I heard the reassuring click of the latch. Then I locked both doors. I rolled the window down a couple of inches so I could hear, and we sat there, watching and listening. The mules got nervous, pawing at the earth and clearly wanting to run. I wished I could talk to them the way I talked to the others, because I wanted them to shut the hell up.

Soon a movement caught my eye, stripes moving among stripes. The big cat slunk between blue moonbeams and tree shadows as it cautiously entered the clearing. No more chuffing; it moved with utter silence, its shoulders rolling like ocean waves, smooth and powerful beneath its skin. Then, as a cloud passed over the moon, the cat vanished completely into the shadow of a little cliff, and the whole world darkened, as if the tiger had come to me upon my death and gently closed my eyes.

The cloud passed. The tiger slipped from the shadows and cautiously approached the horse. Then, much as the bear had, it looked up. The fire had burned low, but the tiger smelled smoke, it smelled mule, and it probably smelled me. But unlike the bear, which had merely peered in our direction and registered nothing interesting, the tiger looked me right in the eye, through the glass of the window. I could barely see the cat, but I could certainly see its eyes, which seemed to gather the moonlight and starlight reflected off of everything around us and concentrate it all into that glowering stare. It held my gaze while I held my breath, a good five seconds, and then in one fluid motion the tiger leapt over the horse and swept up over the rocks as smooth and ghostish as fog crossing a ridge—but fog with a purpose, fog with vision and focus. It halted noiselessly at the edge of the poke nest, a trace of steam curling from its nostrils in the cool air, its eyes like moons. In the cab of the truck, fur, feathers, and the hackles on the back of my neck all stood on end. The tiger raised a huge paw tentatively, batted at the barbed wire, then rubbed its huge head against the nearest pole, leaving scent from the glands at the corners of its mouth just like a house cat. A male, and we were apparently in his territory.

The mules started screaming and running back and forth in our little barbed corral, three paces then halt-and-turn, three paces, halt-and-turn. The tiger watched them and began to stalk the perimeter, looking for a way through.

I knew that the tiger could jump the top of the poke nest if he wanted to. He had a nice, tidy dinner waiting for him in the form of a dead stallion, of course, but some big cats just like to kill. The more agitated the mules got, the more excited he became, until he was pacing back and forth, drooling in the moonlight, tracking the mules’ every move, and making little tentative lunges that panicked them even more. For a second I thought they were going to try to run right up the cliff face, and if they’d been goats they might have succeeded. I didn’t want to think about what we were going to do if they got killed—we’d be stranded and utterly screwed. This possibility made me angry, because I was not exactly on vacation. I had commitments, miles to go before I slept.

I opened the door and got out. The tiger turned, lunged into the barbed wire, then gave a startled snarl of pain and backed away, disentangling himself and furiously shaking his paws.

“Leave them and eat your goddamned horse!” I yelled, pointing at the stallion, as if this should clarify everything.

I half expected him to jump the wire, tear me to pieces, then slaughter the mules. Instead, he stopped cold, sat down on his haunches, panted a bit, then lolled out his tongue. It was the weirdest thing ever, as if he’d been playing a terrifically fun game, and now he was disappointed to be scolded. He shifted his gaze between me and the mules, as the mules backed right up into the rock wall, almost falling over their own haunches trying to get as far from him as possible.

The tiger got up and turned away. He sauntered casually back down to the horse, pausing for a second to spray another one of the poke-nest poles. He grabbed the horse by the neck and dragged it off into the shadows under the rock overhang. Six-hundred-pound cat, twelve- hundred-pound horse, dragged twenty yards using mainly jaw and neck muscles. It made an impression.

I suspected I reminded the tiger of someone, presumably some- one who could inflict punishment and had been used to ordering him around. Even more amazing he hadn’t killed me, if so. I got back into the truck. It took me a while to slow my breath and calm my shaky hands.

An hour later, I dragged out my battered, scratched-up old night-vision goggles and peered into the darkness under the overhang. I could barely make out the horse’s white ribs. The tiger, gorged, lay on its side asleep, breathing steadily. I figured he would sleep three or four hours at least, and it occurred to me that he might turn out to be the best possible thing to come along under the circumstances.

In any case, nothing would unfold soon. Peau cleared the cat hair away from his spot in the cab while Cassie and I climbed into the bed in back. I lay there a while, watching the stars through the plexi roof, and finally felt calm again. I remembered seeing time-lapse video, in the old days, of the stars as they turned through the sky and ultimately fell below the horizon of the nighttime earth. It created the most astonishing effect of the planet moving through space. Without the special photography, though, everything felt less sensational. The stars I saw existed only as light, really, for the photons that found my retina had left their various suns thousands or millions of years before. Those stars would now be in different places, or possibly even be extinct. What I saw was just a kind of mashup of reality, the legacy of different times and places that had all found their way to earth at this same moment. I’d often wanted to go back in time—to move backward over the cemetery of spent hours, as Italo Calvino once wrote—in order to undo miscellaneous blunders or stupidities of mine. But, of course, time travel was impossible except in the way I was experiencing it now. I had all the ordinary thoughts people have when they watch a night sky, reflections that nevertheless feel profound and original because they arise in the intermingling of contemplation and emotion and lived experience. Space was incredibly vast; we were impossibly small; what did it all mean?

It was more than that, though. I was thinking about people I’d loved and lost, and there were so many of them it had become hard to keep track. This filled me with melancholy, for I knew that just as their lives had ended, my own death was long overdue. And what then, when it did come? Where would I be, how much time did I have? There was no way to know, naturally. But the vastness of the night sky, the knowledge that eventually all those stars would wink out and the universe would plunge into eternal lifeless darkness, made me profoundly sorrowful. We human beings had had our chance, and we’d blown it.

I finally managed to drift off a little but woke up again soon enough. I’d been grinding my teeth, and my bad molar had begun to throb. I got up, crawled out of the back of the truck, put on my boots, grabbed my pad and pen, and shuffled sleepily over to the camp chair I’d placed by the fire. I laid a couple of branches on the coals, blew a little flame to life, then fed in bigger pieces as the fire resurrected itself. Cassie hopped down from the truck bed, came over, and curled up next to me. She never liked sleeping alone. I uncapped the pen and began to write.

Dear Eva,

We’re in the mountains tonight, and as usual, when the moon is up and the stars are clear and the air is cold, I think of you. I can so easily imagine something you might say—something smart and funny and cutting in that way you have—as if you were here and whispering in my ear. I think of the warmth of your body and your breath, the feel of your skin against mine.

I’ve been traveling the past few weeks with a raven and an old cat, and it’s lovely to have the company after so much time by myself. Five months ago, the raven showed up at the meditation center, where I’d been living as caretaker because everyone else was long dead. The cat wandered in, half-starved, a few weeks later. Cassie’s an enormous tabby, part Maine coon, I think. She had a collar and a name tag, so somebody had owned her once, and she’s reasonably tame for a cat that’s had to fend for herself. She’s changeable, sometimes sweet and sort of a goofball, sometimes bitchy. You’d like her.

When the raven first sailed in, I was sitting outside, finishing lunch. I’d never liked eating alone, but alone was the only way I ate anymore, and I was feeling a little more glum about this than usual. Suddenly there he was, perched in a tree, saying “Grawk!” which might as well have been “Nevermore!” Nevermore was pretty close to how I felt about humanity in general, and of course this brought to mind the poet. It seemed too obvious to call him Poe, though, and I’d had enough French in high school to remember that “peau meant “skin,” so I settled on that. It’s just one of those embarrassing, stupid pet names, not that he’s actually a pet, or that it makes any difference to him.

He was curious about me, watching from nearby branches and emitting soft chucklings and little gurgles as I did my chores. One day I shared my lunch with him—he especially liked the homemade potato chips—and after that we were pals. He and Cass maintain an uneasy détente, given long and regrettable interspecies history (in the Latinate terms you favor, Corvus corax + Felis catus = Animus maximus). They don’t completely relax around each other yet, but I hope that will change. In any case, with time we’ve all begun to understand one another, and that may help.

It’s hard to explain this since I don’t completely understand it myself. The longer we kept company, the more I began to pick up their words—much as a child would, through some combination of repetition and context and maybe even telepathy. Once you get used to Raven, it’s actually quite musical, as if you’ve interspersed a variety of resonant vowels with castanets for consonants. My comprehension is still primitive; I speak English to them, but in the same way, it appears they’ve begun to get it. Sort of like good sheepdogs, except that Peau is smarter than any dog who ever lived, and Cassie, while not quite in his league, is certainly no slouch.

I know what you’re thinking, dear Eva. Animals who speak are for myths, for fables, for children’s stories. Well, we’re all children now, doing our best to navigate a world transformed, too wild for comprehending. Of course, in most of the old legends, humans and animals conversed as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and I like to think this represents

a kind of world-healing. They’re excellent companions for me, in any case. I have no way of keeping Peau, but he seems content to stay. We encounter flocks of ravens everywhere we go, and he appreciates the opportunity for sociability and reconnaissance. But ultimately he seems to prefer my company, and his keen interest and evident joy in everyday things are a tonic for me.

To matters more dire: a splinter group of the American Revolutionary Militia (known generally to nonmembers as the Asshole Reactionary Meatheads—hereafter the ARMs) continues its pursuit. I’ve learned something of their leader, a brute named Flynn, and I gather he’s not only strong and durable but also reasonably shrewd. All the things I’m not, in other words, including heavily armed.

And speaking of myths, I suppose we’re not so unlike Orpheus and Eurydice, you and me, in all our catastrophic failure and grim aftermath. So bear with me, if you will—you have nothing now if not time, after all—while I unfurl the story’s sails and see where the wind propels it, this fearful voyage of my life without you.

—Will

Cassie woke up and watched me as I finished writing. I fed the pages into the fire in the order I’d written them. When the first page had spun itself into flame, then floated upward in blue smoke, I added the second. Soon it was gone too, and then the third.

Cass’s eyes were large and inquiring.

“It’s a little like mail,” I explained. I told her that people used to communicate with letters, phones, and computers, but that all stopped when there were no more electrical grids or post offices. This was simply my idea of another way to do it.

Admittedly, I didn’t know how Eva would read my letters. It just felt to me that the smoke somehow represented the essence of the intention, and that under the circumstances, that would have to be good enough.

~

I put on my coat, got a blanket for Cassie, let the fire die down again, and then we waited. Eventually I heard them coming. The moon glowed overhead, cutting through the glade with shimmering blades of light. The men were trying to be quiet, but they weren’t especially good at it. Twigs snapped, misjudged steps kicked rocks, a stubbed toe led to a quiet curse.

I picked up the night goggles and counted two men in front, one hanging back. None of them had goggles, and only the one in back carried a rifle; the others held machetes.

The wind had shifted, and the stench of the horse was assailing us, but this also meant we were downwind of the men and they wouldn’t be able to smell the last of the smoke from the embers.

I could barely see what happened next, but I could hear plenty. The tiger awoke and slunk around behind the first two men, then took them out quickly, methodically, and enthusiastically. A sudden lethal pounce, a vicious bite to the neck, an eviscerating swipe from a massive paw, then another leap, all with great snarlings from the cat and shouts of surprise from the men, who had no idea what was going on or where to run. The slaughter took less than half a minute, and when the first two men had been dispatched, the tiger turned to the third. By then the guy had climbed up into a pine and begun to fire his rifle more or less at random. This was stupid for all kinds of reasons, not least of which was that bullets were now worth about a million bucks apiece, though of course a million dollars was actually worth nothing. When one of these valuable little commodities ricocheted off the rock behind us, I lay down on the ground and tucked Cassie in safely between me and the rocks, just in case. The tiger, who seemed to know something about guns, crept behind another tree and crouched down, waiting. Soon enough, the man had emptied his treasury and the rifle fell silent.

“Collins!” he yelled.

I couldn’t decide whether to answer or not. It would reveal where we were, and he might have more bullets tucked away. But we were safe enough behind the rocks, and I wanted information.

“Who’s asking?” I replied. The cool night air carried sound so well that we didn’t need to shout.

“Name’s Redding. I work for Buck Flynn. Is this your cat?”

“He’s one of them,” I answered, bluffing. “I’d hoped Flynn would come meet him himself.”

“Can you call him off?”

“Not really,” I said. “Mind of his own. You know tigers climb trees just as well as cougars, right?”

“That thing’s a tiger?”

I sighed. “You could save yourself a lot of trouble by telling Flynn to find another hobby and leave me alone.”

“Nobody tells Flynn what to do but Flynn,” he groused. “But I’ve got nothing he wants.”
“The way I hear it, you’ve got everything he wants.” “Mules, you mean?”

“Get serious.”

“Even if I did have something, I’d never give it to Flynn,” I said. “He’d have to kill me, and then he wouldn’t be able to find it anyway. So this whole thing is pointless. Tell him that.”

“You’re a human being,” Redding said.

“So?”

“So you feel pain.”

“You’re out of bullets and you’ve been treed,” I pointed out, perhaps a bit sharply. “You’re not really in a position to be issuing threats.” Redding grumbled something in response, but I couldn’t make it out.
Cassie batted at me. The tiger had snuck to the bottom of the tree. It leapt up and started climbing.

There was a scrabbling of claws on bark, a tiger’s roar, a strangled cry of surprise from Redding, a crashing of limbs, and then a sickening thunk at the base of the tree, the sort of sound you might get if you dropped a watermelon onto pavement. It was soon clear I wouldn’t be getting any messages to Buck Flynn that night, except perhaps the message he’d get when he came to collect what was left of his posse.

I felt a little guilty now. The tiger had done my dirty work for me as well as any soldier or assassin. I was grateful to him, but that didn’t mean I wanted to run into him the next morning.

In Cary Groner’s vision of the near future, the world has been ravaged by a lethal virus and only the young have survived. Cities and infrastructures have been destroyed, countries no longer exist as they once did, and the natural world has taken over the landscape in surprising ways, with herds of camels roaming the desert and crocodiles glowing in the rivers, the result of some CRISPR experiment gone awry.

Against this treacherous backdrop, Will, a former caretaker of a Buddhist monastery in Colorado, receives a mysterious directive: to bring a potential cure to a scientist in California—though he doesn’t know if California still exists. And so Will sets out, haunted by dreams of the woman he once loved. Danger lurks everywhere. A hitman is on his tail. And the only way he’ll make it is with the help of a clever raven, an opinionated cat, and a tough teenage girl who’s grown used to being on her own.

Both a page-turning adventure and, ultimately, a love story, The Way is an imaginative and inventive novel whose wisdom will stay with readers long after they’ve turned the last thrilling page.

PRODUCT DETAILS

ISBN: 978-1954118423
Price: $28.00
On-sale date: 12/3/24
Weight: 1.05 LBS