The Darkest Path

was taut with anticipation, ready to run, but the image of Nat standing in that warehouse — motionless as those men dressed her — wouldn’t fade.

Far up the road the pickup truck accelerated, turning deeper into the warren of crumbling buildings. In seconds it would be gone. I took a last look at the front and then followed.

• • •

Nat slid out of the pickup’s bed at the same corner as before and set off through the streets, the backpack around her shoulders.

She took a different route back, veering from the warehouses into a winding suburb of abandoned houses. She dipped in and out of patches of moonlight through overgrown yards and cracked driveways. I trailed her around the fenced-off edge of a drained swimming pool, but when I came around to the other side, she had vanished.

I stood panting amid a wall of hedges and scanned a trio of houses across the street, trying to see into the woods behind them. Nothing. Everything was gray and still. My heart was pumping hard, on high alert. Where did you go, Nat? Where — A branch cracked near the middle house. I took off after it but the second I passed the row of hedges, I knew I had made a mistake.

Something slammed into my back, knocking the wind out of me and sending me sprawling to the ground. My cast hit an exposed root and I nearly screamed from the pain. Nat emerged from the bushes, a thick branch cocked over her shoulder like a bat.

“Nat, wait — it’s me!”

She paused, her face lost in the darkness. The branch didn’t move.

“Who else is with you?”

“No one,” I said. “It’s just me.”

Nat checked down the street and in the dark between the houses. “You followed me?”

I nodded.

“Plan on running to your friends in the Path and telling?”

“I told you. They’re not my friends.”

“You didn’t look too upset digging latrines for them.”

“I was captured. What did you expect me to do?”

Nat threw the branch into the bushes. “Nothing.”

I pushed myself off the ground and followed as Nat crossed the street, heading for the dark woods behind a track of houses.

“This is insane. You can’t do this.” Nat ignored me, head down, striding away. “Do you think your dad would want you to do this? Or your mom?”

Nat whipped around to face me. “I don’t think it matters what they want anymore.”

Her glare was cold and blank. The breath froze in my lungs and I couldn’t meet her eyes. “I’m sorry. That was a stupid thing to — But killing a couple Path officers…”

“It won’t be a couple.”

“A hundred, then. A thousand. It doesn’t matter. They have the West Coast. At this point—”

“He’s coming here, Cal.”

“Who?”

Nat stared back at me.

“No. There’s no way he’d—”

“We hooked up with a Marine unit not long after we left you,” she said. “They were doing border raids into Arkansas and we decided to help them out. One day we came across a courier. Just one guy traveling alone. No phone. No radio. All he had was a satchel filled with encrypted messages. Once we broke the encryption, we were able to read them.”

“What did they say?”

“Hill knows this is the last battle,” she said. “He says God wants him to give a speech to the troops before it starts.”

“So tell the Feds,” I said. “If they know Hill is there—”

“We took it to them,” she said. “But they think as soon as the Path realizes the courier is dead, they’ll decide he was compromised and cancel Hill’s plans.”

“They’re probably right.”

“You know they aren’t,” Nat said. “If Hill believes that God is telling him he has to come here, do you think a lost message is going to keep him away?”

I searched for an argument, but she was right. If Hill thought coming here was his path, nothing would stop him.

“When?”

“We think tomorrow night,” she said. “In the Lighthouse. They’re already getting set. Flying in supplies. More security.”

“No,” I said, shaking the idea out of my head. “The Feds can’t make you do this.”

“No one is making me do anything,” Nat said. “I volunteered.”

Half in the moonlight, Nat’s skin was smooth and gray. She was thinner than I had last seen her, making her cheekbones stand out in thin ridges. Her eyes were sunk deep in their sockets. I reached out to her but she pulled away from me.

“There’s a soft point in the Fed line three and a half miles to the west,” she said. “That’s how my people got through. The password of the day is streetcar. Say that to a sentry and you’re on your way home.”

“Nat, wait.”

“Go on,” she said. “Mommy and Daddy are waiting.”

Nat turned her back on me and there was a whisper of grass beneath her feet as she slipped into the dark. A flash of sickly light came from the front, throwing Nat’s shadow across the trees and the abandoned houses. There was a deep rumble beneath us and when it passed she was gone.

The house in front of me was two stories with a soaring front porch and large picture windows, all of which were shattered. Its door hung limp on its hinges. I climbed the stairs and pushed it open. The floorboards creaked as I moved from the hall to the dining room and into a kitchen.

A winding set of stairs led up to the second floor. There were four bedrooms there, each one larger than the last. I visited each of them in turn, walking around fallen curtains and the strewn clothes that people had left behind as they fled. Inside the last one, there was a small bed stripped down to a dirty mattress. Next to it was a nearly empty bookshelf and a single window with torn Spider-Man curtains.

I drew the curtains out of the way. The neighborhood spread out below, black and pale gray where the moonlight struck. I tried to picture the place before the war, the drab houses painted in bright shades of yellow and blue, surrounded by yards so lush they seemed to smolder beneath the summer sun.

Now the empty houses made me think of seashells washed up on the beach. I imagined you could put your ear to them and hear the echoey sounds of the people who had lived there — bodies moving from room to room, distant voices.

I ran my hand down the dusty spines of the books that had been left behind on the shelf. An odd warmth came over me as I recalled a time when James was four and I was six. We had both fallen to the flu and collapsed into our beds for three full days, sweating with fever and groaning from aches that made it seem like our muscles had been tied into thousands of tiny knots.

Those three days had been torture — I knew that — but when I recalled them now, the pain and fear seemed distant, like things I had heard about but never actually felt. The only times that seemed to have any weight at all were when Mom and Dad crowded into our room to feed us ginger ale and read to us in low soothing tones. I could still feel my mother’s palm resting on my forehead, and my father’s voice, and the feeling of the four of us in that room, bound together in a way that seemed unbreakable.

It was strange that memory could do this, reach into our history and twist it into simpler, happy shapes. But didn’t I already feel the agony of our trek across Utah’s desert less keenly than the warmth of Bear in my lap as we watched the stars turn? Wasn’t the horror of our first days with the Path less present in my mind than the nights James and I laid up in the barracks whispering back and forth in our bunks? I wondered if this was a gift our