“No. I couldn’t call it that.”
“Sorry, just curious. We don’t come across too many like you.”
“Like me?”
“Living outside a town,” Kirsten said.
“Oh. Well. It’s quiet out here. This place you mentioned,” he said, “this museum. You know anything about it?”
“Not really,” Kirsten said. “But our friends were going there.”
“I heard it’s supposed to be a place where artifacts from the old world are preserved,” August said.
The man laughed, a sound like a bark. His dog looked up at him with an expression of concern. “Artifacts from the old world,” he said. “Here’s the thing, kids, the entire world is a place where artifacts from the old world are preserved. When was the last time you saw a new car?”
They glanced at one another.
“Well, anyway,” Finn said, “there’s a pump behind the building if you’d like to fill your water bottles.”
They thanked him and followed him back. Behind the gas station were two small children, redheaded twins of eight or nine years old and indeterminate gender, peeling potatoes. They were barefoot but their clothes were clean, their hair neatly trimmed, and they stared at the strangers as they approached. Kirsten found herself wondering, as she always did when she saw children, if it was better or worse to have never known any world except the one after the Georgia Flu. Finn pointed to a hand pump on a pedestal in the dirt.
“We’ve met,” Kirsten said. “Haven’t we? Weren’t you in St. Deborah by the Water two years ago? I remember little twins with red hair, following me around town when I went out for a walk.”
Finn tensed, and she saw in the twitch of his arm that he was on the point of raising his rifle. “Did the prophet send you?”
“What? No. No, it’s nothing like that. We’ve only passed through that town.”
“We got out as fast as we could,” August said.
“We’re with the Traveling Symphony.”
Finn smiled. “Well, that explains the violin,” he said. “I remember the Symphony, all right.” He relaxed his grip on the rifle, the moment passed. “Can’t say I was ever much for Shakespeare, but that was the best music I’d heard in years.”
“Thank you,” August said.
“You leave town after the prophet took over?” Kirsten asked. August was working the pump while Kirsten held their bottles under the spout, cool water splashing her hands.
“Craziest damn people I ever met in my life,” he said. “Dangerous as hell. A few of us took our kids and fled.”
“Did you know Charlie and Jeremy?” Kirsten recapped the bottles, put them away in her knapsack and August’s bag.
“Musicians, weren’t they? She was black, he was Asian?”
“Yes.”
“Not well. I knew them to say hello. They left with their baby a few days before I did.”
“You know where they went?”
“No idea.”
“Can you tell us what’s down the road?”
“Nothing for miles. Couple of abandoned towns, no one there anymore so far as I know. After that, just Severn City and the lake.”
“Have you been there?” They were walking back to the road. Kirsten glanced at the side of the man’s face, and the scar snapped into focus: a lowercase t with an extra line, the symbol she’d seen spray-painted on buildings in St. Deborah by the Water.
“Severn City? Not since the collapse.”
“What’s it like,” Kirsten asked, “living out here, outside of a town?”
“Quiet.” Finn shrugged. “I wouldn’t have risked it eight or ten years ago, but except for the prophet, it’s been a very quiet decade.” He hesitated. “Look, I wasn’t quite straight with you before. I know the place you’re talking about, the museum. Supposed to be a fair number of people there.”
“You weren’t tempted to go there yourself, when you left St. Deborah?”
“The prophet’s supposedly from there,” he said. “Those people at the airport. What if they’re the prophet’s people?”
Kirsten and August walked mostly in silence. A deer crossed the road ahead and paused to look at them before it vanished into the trees. The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it? Perhaps soon humanity would simply flicker out, but Kirsten found this thought more peaceful than sad. So many species had appeared and later vanished from this earth; what was one more? How many people were even left now?