Sienna, Beckett and Emrik.

And in memory of my brother Jimmy, 1951-2023.

PART ONE

The Dakotas

Fame is fleeting,

Life is short.

You take your beating

And you depart.

—Ava

This Earth, That Sky

The two Travelers—both women; one older, one young—together in a pickup with a camper shell where they sometimes slept.

They drove the rural and snow-spackled Dakotas toward the horizon on a wintry afternoon across flat farmland blanketed in snow under the threat of more weather. “Nana, those are mountains.”

“Serena, those are clouds.” Nana held tight to the wheel. She knew the tires on the truck were bald. When wind flared, old snow stippled the highway, obscuring it. Sometimes she felt the truck skid. Late afternoon shimmered, alive with breaking flocks of birds heading south.

“Nana, they’re mountains.”

“They look like mountains, don’t they?”

She wouldn’t argue, even in jest. A large flock of dark birds wheeled above them, fighting for purchase against harsh wind, finally admitting defeat and flying with the wind, unable to go south. A fly buzzed against the windshield until she opened her window and shooed it out.

“Shoo fly, shoo fly,” Serena said, laughing.

A darkness was coming. It felt to Nana like vertigo, and she wondered if what she saw was shadows made by congealing jelly in the aging vitreous of her eyes. She shook her head to clear her vision. “Without clouds, the land in these parts would feel naked.”

Serena narrowed her eyes to concentrate. “They don’t just look like mountains; they are mountains.” She had the open face of a young, bronzed angel, or what Nana imagined an angel would be if such things could light upon the uninhabitable parts of the Earth. At ten she had baby fat, despite their hit-and-miss diet, and fleshy fingers the color of hard-packed earth. She enjoyed making things, whether with thread or felt or colored pencil, and playing games of all kinds: board games with cards or dice and any other game found at a flea market or in one of the abandoned moldy aisles in the new ghost towns as the Dakotas emptied out. People died, moved on. There was nothing there anymore for anybody looking for a life. The ones who remained, who had connections, whether tribal or ancestral, sometimes stayed in place, locked and loaded. The others lived in the cities or close to the interstate highways, where Police still patrolled, at least during the day, when they kept a kind of order, the ones who could be trusted.

The two were on the run.

Nana sometimes found herself hobnobbing in the little shops in the inhabited towns that still speckled the land. She was social. She needed conversation. There wasn’t much of that anymore. Her husband, Martin Gonzalez, had been shot dead by somebody they thought was a friend. It felt like medieval times. It was hard to know whom to trust. Shops in many towns were closed or had very limited hours. “OUT OF BUSINESS.” How many times had they seen that sign hung from a doorway or painted on a window? “WHAT’S LEFT IS YOURS,” one said. That shop had been cleaned out long before they arrived.

They had stayed the previous night in an abandoned bed-and-breakfast called the Out-of-the-Way B&B, with Victorian lace doilies and a collection of bone china teacups on every available surface, all dusty and half broken, each with a gaily painted wooden troll inside. A single gleaming toaster on the breakfast buffet table actually worked, a piece of crumbled toast still in it. Dust covered everything. Nothing had been plundered, only broken. There was a frozen loaf of bread in the kitchen freezer.

Nana had dreamed that night of a man who took her ticket from her, the ticket that could get them into a room where nobody died. He held it before her but refused to punch it. “I paid for it,” she argued. He stared stone-faced, like unyielding gneiss in a field, hate burning in his eyes as he put the ticket in his pocket and turned away.

The electricity still hummed in the house. It was a mystery. We could stay here a time, she thought, if it wasn’t close to the highway. Not out-of-the-way enough.

“Nana,” Serena said when the toast, frozen no more, popped up so fiercely that it sprung to the table and almost fell to the filthy floor, “that toast is ready, and it’s not going to butter itself.” There was no butter. She and Serena could kill whole weeks like that, traveling through towns where people once lived and thrived, stopping here and there, burning the days. Nana had a wad of money from the house she once owned and kept it in a compartment under the seat. She felt a catch in her throat. “The whole world given away for twenty-four pieces of silver,” she muttered. The bitterness was like habanero, burning the tongue.

She knew they had to find a place to settle, a community to take them in, or try their luck in Fargo, where she and her daughter, with Martin, had once lived, and hope for the best. Traveling was a way to kill time. It was also a way to get killed. Stay in one place, everybody said. On the road, without a convoy, you’re meat. And Nana had grown old for such a life. “They’re mountains, Nana. I can see snow.”

But she felt alive, safe on the road. Maybe it was disease after all the mayhem, a claustrophobia she couldn’t quit without moving, but Serena deserved better.

In the car Nana reached and squeezed the young girl’s arm. “We don’t have mountains in this part of the world. The horizon is almost flat.”

Alert, Serena turned toward her. “What’s horizon?”

“It’s where earth and sky appear to meet.”

“Do they meet?” Serena studied the road. “It looks like it. But we never get there.”

“No, they hope to meet but don’t, just look like it. A tragic love story. Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot and Guinevere. Orpheus and Eurydice. Pocahontas and John Smith. Rama and Sita. Frieda and Diego Rivera.”

“The Fantastic Four. The Black Panther,” Serena added, smirking. “The Three Stooges.”

“John and Yoko,” Nana added. “Jimi Hendrix and the sky.” She felt a catch in her throat. They were all dead. Was there anything that wasn’t? “I barely remember,” she said.

“They are so over, Nana.”

“Why are they over?”

“Why don’t we ever get there?”

“That’s a very good question, Serena.” She thought, There’s nowhere to get, that’s why. It was strange, how she felt safe on the road, in danger if cooped in a farmhouse with people they might trust or in a city where people might or might not give a shit. She remembered Martin Gonzalez. That had been more than a year ago. She was still a handsome woman, she knew that; but the last man she came across after Martin, who had been good, had wanted something from her but wouldn’t give a thing in return. He had turned her to the ground and taken her from behind but let her live. Serena had not been in the yard at the time, but it would have made no difference to him.

That would never happen again. She staked her life on it.

The road is better than the roadhouse. Live free or die. She liked the sound of that.

The two of us and nobody else. Nobody else in the world. The last two people on Earth, except for the caravans of homeless with haunted eyes and filthy faces they saw sometimes in a field camping for the night or driving ahead of them in battered vehicles that she would go out of her way to avoid. The military convoys, coming from someplace and going someplace else. The occasional farmer in a combine plowing the fields, often with a son or wife or friend standing guard, holding a rifle—the equivalent of a scarecrow meant as a warning not to birds but to people like her. “There’s nothing for you here,” the profile with its rifle said.

It was impossible to know how much of the contagion the land carried, so Nana had no interest in scavenging food from fields. Some people were still good. They would help an older woman and child, but she kept her foot on the accelerator. “We need gas,” she said. “Goat Hollow is up ahead. The pumps there are still open, I’ve heard.”

“Heard from who?”

“You know. Word gets around. The telephone telegraph. Things have changed; I don’t know why, but we still find company, don’t we? This is still adventure, isn’t it?” The words rang hollow, but she repeated them anyway, for Serena.

“You don’t know why?” The question was high-pitched. Nana could hear a twang in Serena’s voice, anxiety rising. What were the rules of this game? Were they all of a sudden talking about something else?

“I have an idea, but I don’t want to give you the wrong information. Why don’t you pull out your crystal ball?” Serena had an old smartphone, which had long ago belonged to her mother, Ava, who was now (so far as Nana knew) so far away, up in the Boundary Waters, taken there by one of the men they were running from, who would find them if they stayed put, especially in Fargo, that she might as well be in another galaxy. Ava knew Serena had the phone, still with the same area code and number. Maybe one day she would call, Serena hoped, but Nana didn’t think Ava would be heard from again. Not in her lifetime, anyway.

Sometimes the phone brought them news. It was useful to know where the bands of Marauders were last seen. Law enforcement had mostly abandoned the Dakotas to the Militias, and word of mouth was essential, but the interstates and cell towers were still patrolled and protected. What good that would do on a lonely stretch, she couldn’t say. The phone was the most precious thing Serena owned, because it came from her mother and put her in touch with the world. It also gave her something to do. The world inside the phone often—too often, Nana thought—absorbed her attention, so that the world—the real world, Nana thought—vanished. As the Dakotas emptied out, the virtual world blinked on and off too.

There were no guarantees anymore. Had there ever been?

“Will we ever reach the horizon, Nana?”

“No. It’s like tomorrow. We never get there. We wake up and it’s today.”