over the crash barrier at the side of the flyover and tumbling down a sixty-foot drop. Our speed is such that I dare only look down for a fraction of a second, but I see that the area of town below us now resembles a vast battlefield. Escaping refugees have collided head-on with an army of our fighters marching into the city. They’re no match for our people. I look down over a bloodbath of unprecedented scale and brutality.
The front of the Land Rover clips a lump of concrete, and I almost lose control. I try to focus again as we start to descend toward the highway, Unchanged military vehicles ahead of us and behind. Ellis starts throwing herself at the door, trying to get out, oblivious to the danger.
“Sit down,” I shout at her, reaching into the back and trying to grab her arm. I manage to catch her wrist, but she won’t budge. Christ, she’s strong. She straightens her legs against the back of the front seats. The harder I try to pull her forward, the more she resists.
As this road widens and merges with the highway, two vehicles try to pass me at once, a truck on one side and a jeep on the other. Still struggling with Ellis, I accidentally ram the cumbersome truck. It veers off to the right and hits the metal barrier running along the median and spins. The back of the truck jackknifes and blocks two of the three lanes behind us. I glance up into the rearview mirror and watch as more vehicles smash into the truck, filling almost the entire road with a tangled mass of crashed traffic. Other trucks and vans manage to swerve around the wreck and keep moving.
Ellis lunges at me from the back. I lift my hand to protect myself and manage to get a hold under her armpit. I drag her forward, flipping her over through a full turn, bringing her slamming down hard on her back on the passenger seat.
“Sit down!” I yell at her, the volume of my desperate voice seeming to finally have some effect. She backs away from me and moves toward the door, pulling up her knees and curling herself into as small a shape as possible. “Put your belt on, Ellis,” I tell her. “Do it!”
When she doesn’t react I ignore her, focusing my attention on getting as far away from the city as possible, passing a large armored transporter on the inside. There’s a flash of light and a thunderous noise directly above me, and I brace myself for another missile explosion, but it’s just more helicopters, their pilots and passengers fleeing from the fallen city along with everyone else. I glance at the dashboard for a fraction of a second-as long as I dare-and I see that we’re doing more than ninety miles an hour. More than a mile a minute. We might be six or seven miles away now, maybe more. Is that far enough?
“We’ve got to get away from there, you understand?” I yell over the noise of the engine, looking over at Ellis. She cowers on the seat next to me, half naked and covered in blood and grime. Her huge brown eyes stare back at me unblinking. Poor kid’s in shock, traumatized by everything that she’s seen and done since we were last together. If only Lizzie hadn’t taken her away from me. She’d have been better off with me there to explain everything. “Listen, we’ll find somewhere safe to stop, then we’ll-”
Her eyes dart away from my face and toward the windshield. She looks up, scanning the white clouds above us. I follow her gaze, then look down again and steer quickly out of the way as we almost hit the back of a slower dark green vehicle. We rumble over the hard shoulder, the tires brushing the edge of the grass verge and churning up clouds of grit and dust. I yank the Land Rover back on course, the sudden movement making us both slide over to the right. Ellis’s gaze remains fixed, staring into the sky.
“What is it?”
She doesn’t answer, but it doesn’t matter. I can hear it now. Even over the Land Rover’s straining engine and everything else, I hear a high-pitched whine. And then I see it-a single dark speck racing across the sky toward the city at an unimaginable speed. Must be a jet or…
Fuck… It can’t be…
The accelerator pedal’s already flat on the floor, but I try to push it down harder still when I realize what it is I’m looking at. With one hand on the wheel, I reach across and shove Ellis down. She yelps in pain and protest and tries to fight me off, but I ignore her cries and keep pushing. She slides off the seat, and I shove her harder, forcing her down into the foot well.
“Get down!” I scream, my voice hoarse with panic. “Get your goddamn head down now!”
She looks up again, and all I can see is those beautiful brown eyes staring back at me. She tries to move again, but I push her back.
“Don’t look up, Ellis. Whatever you do, don’t look up-”
Then it happens.
There’s a sudden flash of intense white light, so bright that it burns. I screw my eyes shut, but I can still see everything as the incandescent light and sudden, scorching heat wrap all the way around us, filling the Land Rover, burning my skin and snatching the air from my lungs. It fades almost as quickly as it came, but the darkness that takes its place is equally blinding. I’m thrown forward as we smash into another vehicle ahead of us, and in the fraction of a second I’m looking out, I see that the highway has become a single solid mass of smashed cars and trucks.
A howling wind swallows up the Land Rover and hurls us and everything else forward again. I try to reach out for Ellis, but I can’t find her. I lean over, but I can’t feel her. She’s not moving. The Land Rover’s spinning now. Feels like it’s rolling over and over, being hit by debris from all angles. I’m thrown back in my seat again, and the back of my head smashes against the window.
Try to move but I can’t. Try to focus but I can’t. Try to speak but…
40
HOW LONG? HOURS, MINUTES, or just seconds? Everything is still, much quieter than it should be. I slowly pry my eyes open, not knowing what I’m going to see. The windshield of the Land Rover has shattered, the glass crisscrossed by hundreds of tiny, snaking cracks. We’re straddling another wreck, and the nose of the car has been shunted up into the air. Lying back in my seat, all I can see in front of me is a foul and angry yellow-gray sky. It’s the color of bile.
Ellis moves. I try to lean across and turn toward her, but my neck’s stiff. I reach up to massage it, but I stop. My skin feels moist, raw, and pliable. Must have been burned. Ellis shuffles again, and I try to twist around. Then I freeze. I feel my bladder loosen involuntarily.
The force of what just happened must have spun the Land Rover around through more than a complete half turn, and what I can see now through the passenger window is the single most terrifying thing I have ever seen. Between here and what used to be the city, almost everything’s on fire. There are flickering flames everywhere, and the ground is scorched and black. The city itself-my home, the place where I lived with my family and where I worked and played and struggled and fought-is gone. A thick climbing column of dark gray smoke rises straight up into the sky from its dead heart. At a height I can’t even begin to imagine the smoke balloons out and turns in on itself again and again, forming the unmistakable shape of a mushroom cloud.
Ellis climbs up onto the passenger seat next to me. Thank God I found her. If I’d been any slower or any later or if I’d waited any longer she’d be gone now, vaporized in the blinking of an eye along with so many others. Lizzie, Josh, Edward… all gone. I start sobbing. The apartment, Joseph Mallon, Julia… Don’t know why I’m crying. Is it shock, relief, or sorrow…? Ellis looks at the explosion in the distance, then turns and watches me, her brown eyes locked onto mine. I try to talk to her, but I can’t make the words come out. My throat is burning and dry. My lungs feel like they’re filled with smoke. Is she in shock, too? For the first time since I found her she’s quiet and subdued.
“We’ll wait here till it’s safe,” I tell her in a voice that doesn’t sound like mine. “Then we’ll find somewhere better, okay?”
She looks at me but doesn’t react. Then she looks at the broken windshield.
“Snow,” she says, the first proper word I’ve heard my daughter say in months.
“Not snow,” I tell her, watching a few large gray clumps drift down and settle on the cracked glass. “It’s ash. Dirty. Poison. Make you sick.”
She slumps back in her seat, and beyond her I can see the mushroom cloud again. Even now after all that’s happened, it’s a terrifying and humbling sight. The ultimate symbol of the Hate. Who did this?
“We’re going to find a house,” I tell Ellis, still watching the cloud, not knowing what I’m saying now or why,
