The guy who read the news . . .
He was crying. Screaming and crying.
On the radio.
They drove all the way to the edge of town before they saw the first explosions. Then they stopped on a hill, and Tucker put the pickup into park. They sat together and watched.
The road down from the hilltop was clogged with cars. So was the one rising from the burning town.
Their town.
Even with storming winds blowing, there were helicopters in the air.
Hannahlily and Tucker watched in stunned silence. Their mouths slack but their minds screaming. Even in the absence of all information, they both knew that what they had just escaped were not people. Not anymore. They were things. Creatures.
Tucker was shaking his head in denial of everything. His eyes were fever bright as he cut looks at her. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. “I’m . . . I’m . . . no . . . no, I’m okay.”
“Thank God,” he said. He gripped the wheel and drove into the night, heading for the road back into town. When Hannahlily reached out to squeeze his arm, he yelped in pain.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” he said with a wince. “I think one of those crazoids . . . bit me.”
Hannahlily stared at him in the dark cab of the truck.
“It’s not bad,” he added quickly. “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
Hannahlily continued to stare. Just as she had known on an instinctive level that the things that had attacked her were not quite people, she knew with equal certainty that neither of them was going to be fine.
Ever again.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
ON LOVE
(BEFORE ROT & RUIN)
I don’t understand love.
I don’t think anyone does.
I know, big surprise, right? Insight of the century.
The whole thing is so weird, though. So hard to make any sense of. Especially in the world as it is.
Before First Night, love was all about meeting the right person, getting together, building something important, and then making a life worth living. Family and kids and all that. At least that’s how it seems from everything I ever read. People find each other and they try to live happily ever after.
The thing is . . . what does that even mean?
How can there be an “ever after” if the world ended? Doesn’t that mean love ended too?
Doesn’t it mean that there’s no point to love? If there’s no future, why fall in love? Why get married? Why have kids? Why hope?
Is this even real love? Without hope for the future, are we just going through the motions? Is love in what’s left of the world just a habit? Or some kind of biological thing that’s only chemicals in our heads reacting? Is it only our minds trying to make sense of animals who follow an instinct to continue to breed? In science class they told us about the “inherent need to perpetuate the species.”