Dr. Doom entered the classroom after students arrived and sat in back, planting shoe heels on the desk in front of him. A few students, including Minah, snipped glimpses of the odd man at rear of the room, eyes dodging forward again when he returned their gaze. A bald swath ran down the center of his head like a landing strip, a severe little beard pointed down from his chin like a crooked finger. His eyes sweltered. Minah felt them branding the back of her neck. Too old to be a fellow student and clearly not the professor, who would be at front of the classroom looking over the roll sheet or sitting on the edge of the desk greeting them with a cordial smile. The girl next to Laney leaned over to whisper, “Who’s that creep?”
          “The inspector,” she whispered back, sensing his eyes on her.
          “The End of History” course was offered by the Sociology Department to be taught by a visiting professor who held doctorates in history and evolutionary biology and had written thirteen books with depressing titles such as How Civilizations Die and Nothing To Eat. An intellectual jack of all trades. Minah was excited about the class and fixated on the subject it addressed: global warming and mass extinction, perhaps both of animals and humans.
          A fidgety student entered fifteen minutes late, muttering about his car not starting. The man in back barked, “You are late, young man! Next time you’re out of my class.” Then snapped, “Sit down!” at two students who rose to leave, fed up with whatever game the professor was playing. They sat instantly; his was not a voice to defy. He began speaking from the rear of the room, slowly making his way to the front. “You see our problem? Three examples of it already and we’ve just begun. Impatience is the byword of the day, an inability to tolerate frustration or even notice what’s right before your eyes—classic hallmarks of a doomed civilization. We are an impatient species, a greedy species, a species that can’t ever get enough. Frugality is an axiom in the animal world that humans don’t accept. We are addicted to growth. More is better. Bigger is better. What a silly idea “trading up” is in the natural world. Does a bear keep trading up to a bigger den? But you three—” pointing at the triplet of violators “—will devote your lives to it! Do you realize, kids, that four-hundred parts of carbon per million has long been considered the red line. We crossed it years ago and are speeding towards two degrees of warming, likely four by century’s end. That will be catastrophic, the end of human history.”
          Minah was both scandalized and intrigued. Professors don’t attack students in the first few minutes of class or talk down to them with disdainful relish as he clobbers them with bad news. He stood on one foot at front of the room, the other planted against the wall behind him. His six-foot frame swayed to the fury of words pouring from his mouth; he teetered as if in danger of toppling over. He assaulted them with a nonstop rush of bad news: species die-off, humans and their livestock accounting for 95% of the biomass of mammals, loss of natural habitat, clear-cutting old growth forests at the rate of twenty-thousand acres a day and destroying the lungs of the planet, pollinator die-off, micro-plastics in the bloodstream of all living things, wild fires doubling in ferocity every year in the West, hurricanes on the gulf coast, floods in Bangladesh, pollution in Beijing, hundreds of millions of climate refugees pouring over borders into wealthier countries. “Soon people will be shooting them down at the border, including some of you ... because you will, kids. Ten, twenty years from now, you will. On behalf of my generation and those that came before, I apologize for putting you in this horrible position. It delights me to hear you’re no longer having sex. That’s hopeful. In my day, we fucked like bunnies. Damn fools. There are now eleven billion of us on the planet. It can’t accommodate so many; there isn’t enough food and water. Go infertile, kids, stop dropping brats.”
          Around Minah students were stunned, like boxers on the ropes. The girl who’d whispered “creep” was on the brink of tears. Most slumped in their chairs under the heavy hand of dread. While Minah felt calm, even relieved. She liked it when people told the truth, no matter how distressing. If you don’t know what you are facing, you can’t hope to face it. Her parents had refused to accept it when her younger sister went missing, so made little attempt to find her. She couldn’t forgive them for that. She hated avoidance.
          Most students left class downcast. A half dozen stayed behind to tell Dr. Doom they were dropping. “I don’t sign drop slips,” he barked, “I’ll have to flunk you. Do you think the climate permits us to drop out? You are the kind of people who need to start listening.”
          If his intention was to stir debate, he succeeded famously. She hung out with three of her classmates at the student union after class discussing his lecture, one a survivor of the East Bay Complex Fire that had destroyed the Oakland and Berkeley Hills and run clear to Walnut Creek, killing eighty-thousand people. “I’m going to hate this class.” He sighed. 
          “Me too,” Minah agreed. “That’s why I’m staying in it.” 
          “That makes no sense,” a girl snorted from a nearby table.
          “It does if you’re scared all the time but don’t know what you’re scared about.”
          “I learned a lot from the fire, but don’t know what to do with it,” the boy said. “I hope to get some ideas from Dr. Doom’s class.”
          “‘Dr. Doom!’ I love it,” a boy nearby cried. “‘Dr. Doom and Gloom.’”
          “I hope he has solutions,” Minah said. “The only thing better than someone who knows what’s broken is someone who knows how to fix it.”
          “It pissed me off that he kept calling us ‘kids,’” the girl said.
          “Many of you,” Dr. Doom warned them in the second class, “will join bizarre cults as rising seas flood coastal cities and blazing heat distorts and dulls your brains and makes zombies of you. When your brains are melting in their skull pans, you will think nothing of running down pedestrians in crosswalks. Fortunately, there will be no cars and few pedestrians.”
          “Not me!” Minah called out. “I hate cults. A cult stole my sister from me.”

Aunt Laney had not seen the boy who called himself “Moss” for some time, but felt certain that he was still combing the mountain for supplies to pilfer after fire destroyed every cabin on the mountain except hers. He had promised to leave her in peace since she was planting trees to help refurbish the decimated forest. Perhaps that was why the burning forest had spared her house, since trees, she believed, possess hive intelligence. She must case her neighbors’ survival bunkers for supplies before Moss and others from below beat her to it. Nothing remained to eat on the mountain but what dead neighbors had stored in their caches. She had at most three months of food and water remaining in hers. Moreover, survivors might still be trapped in underground sanctuaries and would need help getting out.
          She started with the O’Ryan place nearby. Nothing was left of the house but a few charred studs rising from the ashes and blackened rafters arranged in a grid atop a mound of cinders as if the roof had come down in a unit. Spanish tiles lay in a jumble on one side. What appeared to be an AC unit had melted into a solid puddle. Fierce Santa Ana winds blowing over the bare mountains these past weeks had blanketed everything in sand and dust. However, winds blew from the west now rather than the east, depositing the Valley’s topsoil on slopes overlooking it. Everything gone cockamamie and unnatural. It amazed her how quickly civilization, which had taken fifty-thousand years to build, could collapse. They were watching it happen in real time. A few hundred years from now—hopefully after forests had come back—you might walk over this spot and not know that any human habitations had been here. She found this a strangely comforting thought.
          She dug and poked in the area where she surmised the O’Ryan’s bunker would be, but found no trace. So went down the mountain to Tom and Liberty Cotton’s place. They surely had a well-stocked bunker; they were survivors. Tom’s backhoe was gone. Likely he’d lowered its blade and plowed a path through the burning woods, fleeing the mountain, with his crippled wife riding in the raised backhoe bucket behind him. Laney had spent many summer evenings with Liberty drinking home-made juniper gin while Tom cleared the road leading down to the Valley, the single remaining escape route. Remarkably, the two patio chairs they sat on remained in pristine condition on their scorched deck overlooking the valley. An omen. Over the years, fewer and fewer lights were visible below in what had once been a grid of electrified jewels extending into the distance before the power started going out. Fewer and fewer cars crawled along roadways. One by one, lights blinked out until nothing remained but pulsing campfire clusters blurred by smoky haze in survivalist compounds. Civilization was shutting down.     
          The San Jacinto Valley had long been home to hapless itinerants, n’er-do-wells, Jesus freaks, aging health nuts, Neo-Nazi loonies and left-wing paranoiacs. If you wanted a catalog of the cultural fads of the past fifty years, you couldn’t do better than the Valley, which Liberty called “California’s wet dream.” A curious name for one of the driest places in the state.
          Other than the chairs, nothing remained but ash two feet deep. The hatch opening onto the Cotton’s underground bunker stood wide open. Cleaned out, she knew, before looking into it. Hopefully by Tom and Liberty before they fled. More likely by Moss and his pals or other scavengers from the Valley. “I’ll have to abandon the mountain soon,” she told that empty hole. “But go where?” In time she would surely locate the O’Ryan’s stash. Even so, there was little hope of holding out for more than a year or two. When the future becomes an inverted question mark, it’s hard to sustain hope. And hard to go on without it. 
          Reaching the first burned-out cabin on Ponderosa Lane, she heard something scurry away over cinders with a rustling metallic sound and saw movement in a stand of charred trees below. Whether animal or human she couldn’t tell. Seemingly, she spooked it and it fled. 
          You would expect Armageddon to manifest in monotonal black and white, but the fire’s hot breath had littered the ground with scorched pine needles that formed rust-red rings at the base of blackened snags. Cinders were scraped away from an area below the cabin, likely by whatever scurried away. No doubt searching for food and water, but looking in the wrong place, she saw at once, noting the bunker’s air intake pipe affixed to a stump above an abbreviated incline. The bunker wasn’t underground but mined into the hillside, its hatch cleverly concealed by a latticework of charred branches cemented together by baked red clay. Unable to open the hatch by hand, she found a galvanized pipe in the cabin rubble and pried it open. The putrid stench of a dead animal sent her reeling backward, a hand over her mouth. Whoever was left trapped inside had likely died of smoke inhalation weeks ago.
          She left the hatch open to air the bunker out and hurried uphill for her pistol. No doubt it was feral dogs—some of the only wildlife remaining on the mountain—that had scratched at the dirt in search of food. A devious hybrid of doomed civilization, they could be deadly dangerous, as were human scavengers. If she was to compete with them for the stash, she must be armed. The rotting corpse guarding the bunker wouldn’t keep them away for long.

The lab where Minah worked tracking fungal infections had closed a month ago. Such infections, which had wiped out most cold-blooded amphibians, including frogs, were now sickening humans. Potentially more deadly than SARS-MinkX that had killed an estimated one-fifth of the earth’s population. Warm-bloodedness had long protected people from fungal infections. But now that it was getting warmer, fungi had mutated to withstand higher temperatures in hosts’ bodies, beginning in the damp Indian subcontinent and quickly spreading around the globe—Candida auris Cryptococcus in particular, which was much like Ebola. Victims died within thirty days. There was no known treatment. In Southeast Asia, they used caustic fungicides to save babies who were particularly prone to fungal infections, but these were often as deadly as the fungi.    
          Years ago, Dr. Doom had warned about exotic infections. His gloom saying had inspired in her a realization that she wanted to be part of the solution rather than a helpless bystander. So she became a biologist. But labs, like hospitals, were closing from lack of funding and, increasingly, of staff, who regularly fell victim to the lethal ailments they were trying to cure.
          She had been on the road since the lab closed, looking for she didn’t know what exactly. Renewed purpose? Safe haven? She thought to seek shelter at her brother Dugan’s place in L.A., but the dying city was best avoided. Moreover, she hadn’t heard from Dugan in years. He could have moved or might even be dead. So she set out for her Aunt Laney’s cabin in the San Jacinto Mountains. She had visited her aunt as a girl and loved the serenity and sense of self-reliance in the mountains. People up there were as resilient as the ponderosa and Jeffrey pine trees that battled drought and bark beetle infestation, itself like a fungal infection. Beetles devoured living tissue under the bark, leaving behind hillsides of dead orange trees. 
          She followed highways south on foot, sticking to drainage ditches paralleling roadways, ready to dive into a culvert if a vehicle approached, or finding her way through chaparral or forest along the road. It was tough going, but shielded her from armored Patriot Patrol personnel carriers that trolled the roads in search of climate refugees, Scalpers and anyone else they could lay their hands on. No telling what they would do to her: swap her to Scalpers for one of their own, sell her to a cartel, rape her, or, if she was lucky, just take her rucksack. Her sister Cassidy was kidnapped by a white slaver cartel years ago. But patrols passed rarely and no one else dared travel the highways. The Patriot Patrol owned the roads.
          Early one morning somewhere near Riverside, she heard an angry swarm of Africanized bees, a furious droning that shivered the air. From behind a bush, she watched the swarm circle high in the air: a pulsing, living organism, swerving side to side, fraying in tatters, then coming together again in a tight spinning ball, forming one single entity with a multiplex intelligence comprised of many individual neurons. Fascinated and terrified, she watched that living nebula perform a circle eight, then hover high above ground directly overhead as if sensing her presence. The swarm plunged toward her. Fleeing, she knew, would further infuriate the swarming beast, but instinct told her to run. Incredibly, a stagnant pool stood at mouth of a culvert just ahead. She dove in head first and frantically smeared her body with glaucous muck that stank of putrescine and cadaverine, those toxic amines she knew well from the decaying flesh of test frogs at the lab. The pond was surely infected with the deadly fungi that abounded in all stagnant water now. But better to die in thirty days than the agonized minutes she would have if the swarm got her. Smelling swamp scum that reeked of death, it veered away.
          Rising from the sludge, Minah passed through a haze of mosquitoes vibrating above the inky surface of the pool, slicked with prismatic light that opalesced in a liquid rainbow over the opaque water. A seductive but devious beauty, since mosquitoes posed the deadliest threat in the animal kingdom—carriers of West Nile Virus, Dengue Fever, malaria and Fevres disease. But nearly comatose in the heat, with barely strength enough to hover, they left her alone. She wiped the sludge off her skin with a t-shirt and much of the little water she had left.
          Sometimes in the early morning long before dawn she walked barefoot on the tarmac. At this coolest time of day the temperature often dropped into the eighties. It was dangerous, but she surmised that she would feel the vibration of an approaching vehicle in the soles of her feet and could get off the road before headlights appeared.     
          She passed through mostly-abandoned suburbs on the outskirts of Hemet on high alert. During normal times, housing tracts had metastasized across the Valley. Now they were disappearing under sand dunes birthed by fierce Santa Ana winds. Ozymandias, California-style. Chaparral sprouted on rooftops and mesquite invaded living rooms occupied by snakes, lizards, rats and the skinny coyotes that fed on them. She was careful to avoid hills of fire ants that could set her feet ablaze. The hot new world was birthing the age of arthropods. An eerie chorus of yipping coyotes echoed through derelict McMansions. “Hurry,” she urged herself, “if you don’t want them to make a meal of you.” She held a golf putter she had found in the rubble at the ready.
          Without warning, a hydrovan leapt around a corner and silhouetted her in its headlights. Bare-chested men and women in loin cloths leapt out and surrounded her, crouched and armed with thick clubs as if she were a dangerous animal, surely one of the neo-indigenous cults she’d heard tales about, but had dismissed as one of the end-time urban legends that abounded, including about Scalpers who were said to dine on human flesh. A tall man with a deeply-lined face got out and approached her. A braided blond beard hung down his bare chest, his hair also done up in fastidious braids. Muscles of his powerful body were delineated as if in an anatomical chart, each distinct and seemingly oiled. His eyes were spectral moons aglow in the headlights. “What do we have here, barefoot and ready?” he asked. His followers stood up straight, regarding her with slack expressions. “You know, sweetheart, there’s packs of wild dogs roaming these precincts and the Burning Crew that torched houses over yonder.” She made out their glistening skeletons in the moonlight. “It’s a dangerous place to be.”
          “I only wanted,” she spluttered, “I’m just trying to reach—”
          “Let’s say we give you safe harbor, what can you offer us?” It didn’t seem he was giving her much choice: join them or God-only-knows-what. 
          “—trying to reach my aunt on the mountain,” she continued.
          “On the mountain? Y’r aunty’s up on the mountain?” His eyes widened. “Tell you what, she’s burnt toast. Nobody could have survived the last fire.”
          “Last fire?” she asked.
          “Three months back. There’s still ash blowing. They say there’s bunkers where people stored their food. One of these days we will go up and see for ourselves. Dead people don’t eat.” His followers found this funny, whether he intended them to or not.
          “You think my aunt’s dead?”
          He shrugged. “Not saying one way or the other. I presume.” Light from the headlamps refracted off his eyes, throwing spokes of light in all directions. Dreadlocks smoldered fiery red atop his scalp. He wore a leather loincloth while others wore rags. His solemnly flat expression and self-assurance reminded her of Dr. Doom: the certainty that he was never wrong while others mostly were. “Like I’m asking: what do you have to offer us?”
          “I’m a biologist. I could be useful.” It astonished her to hear herself say this, but she sensed she must. If Aunt Laney was truly dead, she would need safe harbor. A taint of smoke and sickly sweetness like rotting fruit hung on the air, suggesting menace, as did the sweltering atmosphere. It was no place to be alone. She thought she heard the thrumming of far off drums. Surely not distant thunder. It hadn’t rained in two years, certainly not in October.
          “That’s the Crystal People,” the leader said. “They believe drums repel evil.” His followers shook their heads; he remained poker-faced. He held some inexplicable sway over them as all prophets do over their disciples and, like Dr. Doom, brooked no disagreement. An existential absolutist in a world where most harbor doubts. A man who had no use for the niceties of social interaction and did not participate in give and take. It was intimidating. Humans are like other animals that way, she thought. Someone declares, “I am lion king”—always male, always humorless—and few dare contest it. 

Once she’d become a member of their neo-indigenous tribe, Minah’s doubts evaporated. “The Messenger,” as they called him, was inscrutable, but she soon came to trust his judgment unconditionally. He knew precisely what needed doing. Such a contrast to Dr. Doom and others of his kind who carped about climate apocalypse but offered no solutions. Such a comfort to find a person who did not merely perceive disaster but had remedies for it. Simple and obvious remedies. The only way to save ourselves and the planet, he taught them, is through deprivation. “Fools call it ‘self-sacrifice,’ I call it ‘liberation.’ From hunger, want and comfort.” They wore nothing but loincloths in the dead of winter, worked half naked under the scorching summer sun, raised meager garden plots and ate little, slept together in a huge sweat lodge, its dirt floor covered with mattresses salvaged from abandoned houses. The Messenger put her to work finding a remedy for the bed bugs and lice that were a communal plague. Every common cold became a communal infection. She urged the ill to wear masks. He forbade it. Illness, he said, was nature’s remedy for overpopulation. Child bearing was taboo. “Our job is to help the human race die off. It’s a sin against nature to have children.” Drugs of all kinds were forbidden, even analgesics. If pain woke you up at night, it was considered a blessing. Humans should suffer along with the pained earth. 
          They held group masturbation sessions, stroking their genitals in a cozy circle, leering at each other but not touching. It was the group’s single concession to human desire. Touch was forbidden, since it might lead to intimacy and that to childbirth. Moreover, intimacy was a bourgeois sin a dying planet could no longer afford. Group sex brought them closer and mated them all to The Messenger. 
          Secretly, she had begun to fall in love with him, though love was forbidden. How could she not? He was more self-certain than Dr. Doom or anyone she had ever known. Messianic, really. Tall, erect, his face acorn brown. Seemingly without ethnicity or gender. He was everyone. Androgynous. At times, he/she appeared to have a penis, at others not. Making love to him/her/them, she decided, would be like fucking a star. She could not even look into his face. It was like looking at the naked sun.
          One night they raided the Crystal People’s enclave and burned their marijuana crop without resistance. No one wanted to mess with them. They were fearless. Pain and death didn’t worry them. “The planet is already dead,” the Messenger said, “and we along with it.” Dr. Doom had said something similar years ago. But what had once frightened her was comforting now. “There are others we must deal with,” he told them, “liars and deniers and false prophets.”
          This brought to mind one of Dr. Doom’s lectures. “There will be four kinds of survivors,” he said. “The wealthy who are buying up land in Iceland and building fortified compounds out of reach of marauders and social collapse. Gangster sociopaths who prey on the weak, whom I call ‘Scalpers.’ Thirdly, ‘Single Walkers,’ individuals who rely on their wits, ingenuity and stealth to survive. Finally, true believers: Jesus freaks and other faith terrorists, ‘avenging angels,’ left wing communards, right wing neo-Nazis, all kinds of assorted nutjobs who believe they alone will survive. Some of you will be attracted to such cults because they will offer simple solutions.” Saying this, he looked tellingly at Minah. Nonsense, she had thought then; I’m no joiner.
   
On her fourth try, Laney found the O’Ryan’s bunker with the help of hell hounds, as she called them, that dug down to the concrete roof, attracted by the smell of food inside. She finished digging dirt away from the trapdoor, and opened it with trepidation, fearing the O’Ryan’s moldering corpses might be trapped inside. They weren’t. But many pounds of dried corn, beans, rice, canned meats and fruit were stacked on metal shelves, untouched by mold or rodents. She was giggling in delight when she heard voices overhead. At first, she froze in terror. Then hurried up the ladder, fearing whoever it was might close the door on her, and was astonished to see perhaps a dozen people approaching in nothing but flimsy loincloths. “Hi, Aunt Laney,” a middle-aged woman called, her round face vaguely familiar, looking something like her brother, Jerry. “I’m very happy to see you. I wasn’t sure you were still alive.” 
          “Minah?” she asked. “My god! It’s been twenty-five years. What are you doing here? Half naked to boot? It must be forty degrees.” 
          “Suffering builds character,” a young woman insisted. “It prepares us for what’s coming.”
          “And what’s that?”
          The girl made no reply, but a hulk of a man with a coarse, weather-worn face, hair in tight ringlets and a braided blond beard falling to his navel said, “That is as bad as anything humans have ever faced, likely worse. We must steel ourselves.”
          Laney gestured at the charred desolation around them. “Here’s suffering for you: four hundred residents burned and thousands of trees. Suffering is overrated. Who are these people, Minah?” she asked the niece she hadn’t seen since she was a girl.
          “‘Survivors.’ This is The Messenger.” Gesturing at the man with the braided beard decorated with dozens of bright beads. He didn’t quite smile but displayed a mouthful of widely-spaced teeth. Like a goat’s, she thought. His yellow irises appeared to pulse in their sockets. He put her on guard, even more so than the boy Moss who had locked her in her bunker months ago. “What do you people want? There’s nothing left up here but ash and burned houses.” 
          “With food stashes beneath. Right, grandma?” The man grinned menacingly; his followers giggled.
          “I’m nobody’s grandma,” she snapped.
          The brazen, half naked girl said, “Even if we eat just only enough to stay alive, we still have to eat. The Messenger was instructed to come up here.”
          “Instructed by whom? To take what isn’t yours to take?”
          “Not yours to take either,” her niece snapped. “That’s your house—” she pointed “—this isn’t. I remember the granite boulder above it.”
          “The only house still standing on the mountain,” a tall man said accusatorially.
          “The O’Ryans would want me to have their supplies, as I would want them to have mine. We were friends.”
          “Ownership no longer applies,” The Messenger said. “Didn’t the fire teach you people nothing? What’s yours is ours; what’s ours is anybody’s.” His acolytes nodded at what Laney imagined was a slogan to them. He waved two of them down into the bunker. Cults that had sprung up since the end of normal times spooked Laney, given their presumption of entitlement, communal privilege, and secret knowledge. Faith freaks, Crystal People, Avengers, Truth Talkers, Survivalists. Dangerous people.
          “It must be nice to have all the answers,” Laney said. “I don’t. At least I admit it.”
          Her niece laughed. “She was sarcastic like that when I was a girl.”
          Laney asked her, “Do you really think this man cares about you? Any of them do? They are loyal to a hollow fantasy, not people. I know; I grew up with that.”
          They surrounded her, their irises appearing to pulsate to the same hypnotic rhythm. With a nod of the head The Messenger could have them on her. “I was going to leave you a token for leading us to this,” he said. “Your greed has changed my mind. She who lives by sacrifice earns charity; she who doesn’t earns nothing.” Several of them drummed their bare chests in assent.
          She remembered that she had left the hatch to her own bunker wide open. They would strip it bare and likely commandeer her house and leave her nothing. A desperate, inchoate plan came to her, which, hopefully, would fill out in its undertaking. 
          “Come up to the house with me, Minah. I have pictures of you and your sister Cassidy you will want to see.” Telling the Messenger, “Minah’s younger sister was lost to her years ago, likely taken by sex slavers. Minah was devastated.”
          “Minah doesn’t need to be reminded of her lost sister,” he said. “What’s done is done. We’re all lost now, everyone of us.” More chest-thumping agreement. 
          “You can have the O’Ryan’s stash,” Laney persisted. “It’s all yours.” 
          Minah seemed torn between The Messenger and a desire to see her beloved sister’s face again. Laney gripped her elbow and started off. He ordered the adolescent girl to go with them.
          While the two of them looked at family pictures on the corkboard, Laney slipped into the bedroom to retrieve her pistol from the night table. Returning to the room, she pointed it stiff-armed at them. “Not a peep! I will shoot.” Fully believing she was capable of it. “Tie the dish towel over the girl’s mouth, Minah, and her arms behind her back with that electric cord. I don’t trust her; she’s brainwashed. I’m not sure about you yet, but at least we’re family.”
          She marched them behind the house to her underground bunker, out of sight of The Messenger’s crew, Minah’s hands raised stiffly in the air. It didn’t hurt that she thought her aunt a touch crazy. Laney ordered them down into the bunker, untying the girl’s hands when she was on the top step of the ladder, closing the hatch behind them and covering it with ashes. Then she marched over the cinders with a metallic rustling toward the O’Ryan place, the pistol hidden behind her back. The Messenger turned toward her as she approached, his eyebrows arching when she brought the gun out. “What have you done with my girls?”
          “They are in a safe place. I may release them when you’re gone.” She surmised that he wouldn’t risk much to keep a couple of chicks in his flock. There were plenty of desperate people to recruit. Likely he wouldn’t return; there were other bunkers to sack. But you couldn’t be sure of anything anymore. She allowed them to retreat with a pillow case full of goods, hands raised stiffly over their heads until they were out of sight. 
          “I want you off my mountain,” she barked at the girl after calling her and Minah up from the bunker, their faces white as bleached sheets. They had feared that she would leave them down in that cold, dark hole. “I’d like you to stay here with me, Minah. You are family, and, seemingly, need a home.”
          Her niece appeared to assess this: stay or return to The Messenger? She nodded. “You were Cassidy’s favorite. We loved visiting you on the mountain.” Her eyes surveyed the devastation around them: a graveyard of charred stumps, thick trails of ash where trees had fallen, the white-washed gray sky stretching out over the valley, barely distinguishable from the ground beneath it. She grimaced as if trying to comprehend it. “I could help you plant trees,” she decided.
          Laney nodded. “I could use help. You...Git!” She jabbed the gun at the girl, who slipped and slid over the ash as she fled down the slope, looking like a marionette with a broken guide string.