July 11, 2023
Dear Journal,
We chased the white smoke at first light.
It rose from the northern ridge like a thin, deliberate thread—no wildfire's chaos, no greasy black of disaster. Clean. Controlled. The kind of smoke that says humans are here.
None of us said the word safe. We've used it too many times and it keeps breaking in our mouths.
Nora walked like a sleepwalker, hands empty for the first morning in days. The blanket was gone—the ground holds what it holds now—and the space in her arms looked heavier than anything we'd ever carried. Naomi kept pace beside her, not talking, the crossbow slung low, a knife riding her palm where it could think faster than she could. Marcus scouted ten paces ahead, boots careful on gravel, eyes flicking to tire tracks barely visible under a frosting of ash and dust.
The world was quieter after the rain. Leaves still dripping into the ditch. Puddles with skins of oil reflecting a sky the color of old steel. We made good time along a frontage road littered with glass like a salt trail. The air smelled faintly of burned plastic and pine.
We were two hours out when we found the first sign we weren't alone.
A cigarette butt, still dry under a ledge of rock.
Naomi crouched, touched ash that didn't crumble. "Less than a day," she whispered.
Beside it: a twist of fishing line caught on a thorn.
Marcus scanned the ditch. "Tripwires," he said, and his voice went flat and careful in a way I'd only heard when he talked about bombs in his old life. We stepped over places where the grass bent wrong, gave a wide berth to a cluster of cans that looked randomly scattered but weren't. The road narrowed, shunted by a tangle of overturned sedans and a city bus on its side like a dead whale.
That's when the white smoke drifted out of view, swallowed by the grade.
"Ridge ahead," Naomi murmured. "We take the culvert, stay low."
We slipped into the concrete throat of the drainage ditch, cool and damp, its trickle of water brown from the storm. The walls rose on either side, graffiti lichen'd to unreadability. My shoulders relaxed a notch in the shadow.
We should have known better.
The first sound was a bottle rolling.
Not close—up ahead, somewhere beyond the culvert's bend. Then a second, nearer. Glass chiming glass. A third skittered behind us.
Naomi froze. "Back," she mouthed.
We were already too late.
A shape rose at the far bend and planted a boot on the lip of the culvert. Silhouette only. Another slid down behind us, easy as rain. Then four more stepped into the ditch from the east bank, and three from the west, rifles and pipes and one glittering machete catching a slit of sun. We'd walked into a throat that only opened one way.
A familiar voice laughed—low, satisfied.
"Well, well," he said. "Westbound pilgrims."
The red-toothed man from the roadblock stepped into the light, teeth not red today but chipped and smiling just the same. He'd shaved since we saw him—fresh stubble, knife-scrape clean. Something about the effort of grooming made him more dangerous.
He tipped two fingers at us. "Didn't I say you'd learn?"
Nobody moved.
Marcus shifted subtly, putting himself between Nora and the men on the west bank. Naomi didn't raise her crossbow. That told me everything about how quickly this could go wrong.
Red Teeth—he didn't offer a name—gestured lazily with a pistol that might have had more bullets than ours. "Drop the packs. Weapons, too. Leave your water. Keep your boots. Consider it mercy."
Naomi's voice was soft. "We're not here for you. We're following smoke."
"Oh, I know," he said. "So's everyone. Smoke's a good trick. Like bells for strays."
"You running the trick?"
He smiled with only half his mouth. "I run what's in front of me."
One of his boys—young, seventeen maybe, a scar splitting his eyebrow—edged closer along the concrete. His eyes flicked from Nora to me to the crossbow like he was inventorying where pain might start. The machete man on the bank above him said, "Let me," without saying it; I could hear the sentence in the way he shifted his hands.
"Don't," Marcus said. Not a shout. Just the word, grounded and iron.
"Big one's nervous," Red Teeth murmured. "I like nervous. Means you care. Caring makes you predictable."
Another voice from the west bank: a woman this time, hair braided tight. "Boss, the culvert branches twenty yards back. Hear it? Water different. They could've taken the split."
"They didn't," Red Teeth said. He looked at me when he said it. I don't know how he knew to pick me, but he did. "You haven't been choosing splits lately, have you? You've been choosing doors someone else opened."
The concrete smelled like wet pennies.
Nora's voice surprised me—quiet, even. "We just buried a child," she said. "Please."
The boy with the scar twitched at that, the blade's tip dipping a fraction. There was a human being in there, trying to live with all the bad ways left to do it. That crack in him made me ache—not with sympathy, but with the knowledge of what we'd likely have to do to walk out of this rectangle of sky.
Red Teeth snapped his fingers without looking. "Rook, no sympathy. You get paid in water, not absolution."
The boy—Rook, apparently—jerked as if slapped. The machete came back up.
Naomi slid her hand, slow as a shadow, over the grip of the knife in her palm. "We can pay," she said. "Food. Antibiotics. We'll trade and walk."
Red Teeth considered, eyes on Nora's empty hands, on Marcus' set jaw, on the salt track down the collar of my shirt. "We could trade," he agreed. He nodded to the men on the bank. "Or," he went on lightly, "we could take."
Everything happened at once.
A shout from the east—someone too eager moved. Naomi's wrist flicked; the knife spun and knifed the ditch's light—Rook yelped and fell back clutching his shoulder. Marcus grabbed the closest rusted grocery cart, ripped it sideways, and shoved: the cart went screeching down the culvert's trickle like a sled and smashed into two men's shins, and all the sound turned to metal and cursing and boots slipping on algae.
I didn't remember taking the crowbar out of my pack, but there it was in my hands, the weight of it like an old argument. The machete man dropped from the bank, fast, and I moved on instinct, swinging low and quick like Marcus taught me, not a heroic arc but a mean, ugly jab that met his knee with a crack. He howled. The machete kissed the concrete.
Gunfire chewed chips out of the culvert wall above my ear. The shot was wild—someone firing to scare, not kill—but it dug a groove in the air. I dove, the sound like bees in a jar, and rolled behind the shopping cart wreck.
Naomi popped up from behind a broken traffic cone and sent a crossbow bolt into the throat of a man with a pipe. It wasn't cinematic. He dropped like someone cut his strings, both hands rising too late to a spray he couldn't put back. She didn't watch him fall. She never does.
"Smoke!" Marcus yelled. It took me a second to realize he meant flare, to remember we didn't have any left—then I saw what he did mean. He'd cracked open a long-dry fire extinguisher, tested the gauge, and slammed it against the concrete until the pin gave. A gout of white—cold, chemical, blinding—blossomed into the culvert and turned the world to milk.
"Move!" Naomi screamed.
We moved.
I grabbed Nora's wrist; she didn't resist. Marcus took rear, shoving the cart wreck left as we squeezed right, bodies slipping in the wet. Red Teeth's voice cut the fog, maddened and amused in the same breath: "They can think!"
We ran into the split the braid-haired woman had pointed out—twenty yards back, a narrower run-off with slick walls and a ceiling that dipped low enough to make us crouch. Water splashed our shins. The extinguisher cloud followed us a few feet and then fell away, smothered by gravity and the culvert's slow wind.
Behind us: men cursing, boots scraping, someone sobbing—Rook?—and Red Teeth laughing, delighted to be opposed.
The side channel doglegged and vomited us into a drain grate half-buried in sediment. Marcus jammed his shoulder into it and shoved until the grate squealed like a living thing. Earth gave. The rectangle tipped. We spilled out into blackberry and tall grass.
"Up," Naomi panted. "Tree line."
We clawed through thorns and slid into the wet hush of pines. The culvert lay below us like a mouth, white fog still breathing out of it in pulses. Voices echoed, directionless, angrier now. The first two men hauling themselves up the slope found nothing but our dragged lines in the pine needles, which Naomi immediately obliterated with a fir bough as we moved.
We didn't stop until the smoke thread reappeared through the trees, further west than we expected. It couldn't have been more than a mile, but it might as well have been yesterday. My chest hurt. Nora's breaths came steady but shallow, each one the same distance from breaking.
We collapsed into a swale choked with ferns.
No one spoke for a minute. Then Marcus said what the silence was already saying: "I think I hit one. Maybe two."
Naomi wiped her hands on her pants. They were clean. Her eyes weren't. "You did what you had to."
I looked at the crowbar. There was a ding in the metal I didn't recognize as mine until my stomach rolled.
"I hit a kid," I said. "He was—"
"Armed," Naomi said.
I nodded. The word didn't help. It never does.
Nora hadn't looked at any of us since the ditch. Now she stared straight through the trees, past smoke, past the day.
"He said we'd learn," she murmured. "He was right."
I wanted to tell her we'd done it—we'd gotten out. I wanted to say we were alive, and that counted for something. Instead, I listened to the forest breathe around our little circle and felt my hands shake a beat late, like my body was catching up.
We debated moving. Naomi wanted distance. Marcus said every mile would smear our tracks more. Nora didn't care either way. In the end we waited, ears straining for pursuit. Nothing. Either Red Teeth decided we weren't worth the water, or he preferred teaching lessons to collecting trophies.
When we finally stood, I felt older than yesterday. Older than the city. The smoke line tugged us north-west, and once we crested the next rise, we understood it.
Not a camp.
Not exactly.
An orchard, terraced into a shallow valley, with a farmhouse at its heart and a chimney working like a heart valve—steady, human, measured. Apple trees furred with lichen, their fruit hard green and small. A fence of welded car doors ringed the yard, paint faded to a patchwork of blues and browns. On the gate, a sign:
NO ENTRY AFTER DUSK.
NO GUNS PAST THE FENCE.
WE DON'T BURY STRANGERS.
A bell hung from a beam beside the gate, a rope looped under it. The kind of bell you can hear in your bones.
Naomi lifted a hand to the rope.
"Wait," Marcus said. He pointed to the ground. Fresh footprints. A dog's prints beside them. A wheelbarrow's track. Civilization, printed in mud.
No watchers here. No skulls on wire. Just lines. Rules. The last time we saw rules, bodies lay in rows with zip ties on their wrists.
"We ring once," Naomi said, voice low. "We back away ten paces. If they call, we answer. If they don't, we leave."
"And if Red Teeth found another path?" Marcus asked.
Naomi's gaze cut back to the woods, to the culvert invisible beneath them. "Then ringing fast is louder than running slow."
She looked at me. "J.K."
I don't know why she asked with my name. Maybe because the voice in my head has been using it. Maybe because this story keeps asking me to decide which doors we open.
I pulled the rope.
The bell tolled once—deep, throat-sung, old.
We stepped back.
A long breath of nothing.
Then, from the farmhouse porch, a figure stood. A woman in a wool cap, rifle slung, palm raised. Another joined her—older, with a coat like a quilt and a dog at her heel.
"Hands," the older one called. Her voice carried. Clean. No static in it. "Palms open."
We showed them.
"Any of you bitten?" the woman in the cap asked.
"No," Naomi said.
"Any of you hunters?"
"No," Naomi said again.
"Any of you liars?"
Naomi didn't answer that one. Neither did we.
The older woman nodded like the silence was the only true thing we'd said all day. She slid the bolt back on her rifle but kept it leveled. "Guns off," she said. "Crossbow string out. Knives at your feet. If you come through our gate with steel, you don't go back out at all."
Marcus glanced at me. I could see Red Teeth in his eyes; I could see the culvert and the concrete and the way the world narrows to a circle you can't climb out of.
"We do this?" he murmured.
"We learn," I said.
We laid our weapons down.
For the first time since the farmhouse, Nora spoke like a person whose mouth remembered how. "We don't want to be buried," she said. "Not today."
The gate latch clicked.
The dog didn't bark.
The bell swayed once more, slow as breath.
I don't know what waits inside the fence. Maybe kindness. Maybe another shape of ruin. Today taught me again that the dead aren't the only danger—that the living shape ruin into rules and call the carcass mercy.
But I also know this: the orchard smelled like woodsmoke and apples.
That's the first honest smell I've had in months.
—J.K.