Page 24 of What Remains

There they were. Exactly where she'd hoped.

Two rifles leaned neatly in the back corner, in soft cases. A handgun sat on the top shelf beside two military-issued knives, one with an edge still sharp enough to slice paper. She gathered all of them with shaking hands, pressing their weight against her chest as if afraid they might disappear.

"Thank you," she whispered to the empty room, unsure who she meant it for—God or Mr. McKale himself.

She found an old duffle bag then opened the dresser drawers. Extra magazines. Cleaning kits. Loose rounds rattling in a small wooden box. She dumped everything into the bag, barely registering the metallic clack as it hit the bottom. No time to organize.

With the weapons secured, she crept back into the hallway, her heart refusing to slow even a fraction as she descended the stairs and pushed her way into the kitchen. The room sat untouched for months, the silence pressing in around her, heavy and suffocating.

She opened the pantry. Half-empty boxes, a few cans, old pasta. Rice. Anything that would keep went straight into the duffle.

Then her fingers brushed across a jar of peanut butter, and she stood there holding it. Layla loved peanut butter. She ate it straight from the jar with a spoon. She called it her "sleepover snack" in that small, bright voice that belonged to a different world.

Josie snatched the jar, shoved it into the bag, and fought to control her trembling breath.

Her hands, trained to heal, were now stealing from the dead. She should be teaching Layla the alphabet, not about staying quiet. Each stolen object felt less like a victory and more like a betrayal of the woman she used to be.

She closed the pantry, swung the duffle onto her shoulder—and froze.

A floorboard groaned somewhere above her.

Just old beams settling. Probably.

Her grip tightened around the handgun she'd slipped into her coat pocket.

Her jaw set hard. "Just get it done," she whispered. "Get it done, get home, get Layla."

She stepped out of the kitchen and headed for the garage, the duffle thumping heavily against her side with every stride.

The seconds bled away.

The SUV bumped and rattled along the frost-heaved road. Cara sat in the passenger seat beside Jay, bracing a hand against the dash each time they hit a deep rut. Seth rode in the back, a map unfolded across his knees, his eyes sharp and constantly calculating as he glanced between worn mile markers, the paper, and the trees lining the highway.

They were on the right path. He checked again anyway—because out here, a wrong turn could cost them hours of backtracking, wasted daylight, or something far worse.

Outside the windows, spring had arrived without fanfare. Pale green shoots pushed stubbornly through mats of dead grass, and budding branches trembled beneath a wind that still carried winter's leftover bite. Cars sat abandoned along the shoulder. Paper cups, plastic bags, torn clothing, children's toys—layers of what had once mattered to someone, now nothing but roadside trash.

Every few miles, a power line sagged across the road, its pole half-rotted or snapped clean through. In the old world, crews would have arrived within hours—cleanup trucks, flashing amber lights, workers in neon vests restoring order before anyone had time to complain. Now the fallen lines simply remained where they dropped, a permanent interruption.

Seth traced a finger along the red route line. "We should hit the turnoff in four miles," he said.

Cara nodded, though her eyes stayed fixed on the landscape sliding past her window. "It looks worse out here than last time."

Jay glanced at her, then back to the road, nodding toward a collapsed barn. "The winter must've finished it off."

Seth leaned forward. "The weeds are taking over. Give it another year and you won't even know the barn was there."

Jay exhaled, long and low. "Give it a year, maybe two, and these roads will be forests again."

Cara didn't disagree. The idea haunted her—comforting and merciless all at once.

"It's like we're driving through a ghost story," she said.

Seth huffed a humorless laugh. "We kind of are."

But none of them spoke the thought that hovered in the cab between them, unsaid and undeniable: we're the ghosts now—haunting what used to be ours.

By mid-afternoon, the SUV crept toward what had once been a sprawling car lot. Seth leaned forward between the seats, scanning through the windshield. "Good sight lines. No movement."