We headed north, as we always did. I did not turn back to the burned church. I saw Ginger looking at it sadly as we moved across the meadow. I imagine that Lot's wife had much the same expression on her face.
"Don't look back," I said. "It's Gelassenheit. God's will."
She shook her head. "It would have been good to stay someplace for a few days. To rest. But not with the snakes."
I lifted my chin. "And not with the fire. Fire is something that all Plain people fear."
"Because of no fire department?"
"Ja. By the time that someone can run to find a phone, it's usually too late. And it is a particular fear in the winter."
"Why winter?"
"Because our chores stretch beyond the daylight hours. And we carry lanterns around many flammable things in the barn. One overturned lantern can engulf a barn in minutes. It can kill animals, people . . ."
"I guess I never feared fire much before," Ginger said. "But now that those modern conveniences are gone . . . perhaps I will again."
"It feels strange to be afraid of something so essential to survival," Alex said. "I wonder if Prometheus knew how much we would fear it."
"Who is Prometheus?" I asked.
"In Greek mythology, he was a Titan, one of the old gods that were a generation before Zeus and the rest of the Olympians. Zeus asked Prometheus to create man, but in doing so, Prometheus felt some sympathy for his creation. Prometheus watched man struggle to find enough to eat, to build places to live, and felt pretty darn sorry for our incompetence.
"So he brought us a gift. He stole one of Zeus's lightning bolts and gave it to man. It was the gift of fire. It kept man from freezing to death, helped him cook food. It saved man from a short life of cold savagery."
I shook my head. Alex's stories were exactly that-good stories. But I did not believe in the underlying morality of those old, cruel gods.
Ginger kept walking backwards, looking for the fire. And I resolutely looked forward, remembering how Lot's wife looked backwards, full of salt and tears. No good could come of that.
Within hours, my fear proved to be a prediction.
We smelled the fire before we saw it.
It wasn't the benign, warm smell of wood smoke. This was acrid, chemical. It was the stench of man-made things burning: plastic, gasoline, rubber.
We'd walked through the morning, having found a two-lane road. Horace trotted along the soft shoulder to save the wear and tear of pavement on his hooves. The clop of his hooves on the earth created a mechanical marching rhythm and an ache in my bones. We didn't speak, shuffling along at Ginger's pace. She struggled and wheezed a bit, but we went steadily. There was no traffic. No cars. Just buzzards circling in the distance. And a dark haze on the horizon.
The road fell away at a crossroads, and we plodded over a hill that seemed to go on forever. When we reached the crest, we stopped.
A city lay below us in the valley, burning.
I sucked in my breath. I had never seen a city before. I had imagined that it would be as I had seen in books and newspapers: skyscrapers laced with gray ribbons of road and overhung with the glitter of electric light shining against mirrored glass. It would be towering and vast and glamorous, full of life and movement. This was where I had intended to go on Rumspringa, a lifetime ago.
I was here, but this was not what I had pictured. There were tall buildings surrounded by a black cloak of smoke. Orange flames reflected on broken glass. Stilled cars blocked congested streets.
I stared ahead. "Should we go down there?"
Ginger's fingers knit in her coat sleeves. "There might be people down there. Radios. Survivors."
My stomach growled.
"And food," she added. "Supplies."
Alex frowned. "It could be infested. Probably is. Dangerous."
"It's daylight," Ginger said. I could hear the yearning in her voice for news. For hope.
"They can be awake during the daytime," I reminded her. "All they need is shadow, indoors, away from the sun." I had encountered a nest of them before in daylight hours, on an excursion from my old home to the nearby town. They had nearly killed me.
"It's too dangerous," Alex said.
"What if . . . what if we stayed in the open? Stayed on the street . . . found something to eat, and left right away?"
"There aren't only vamps to worry about. Survivors could be just as violent," Alex pointed out. "Especially if they're hungry or desperate. Violence is the first rule after any disaster. We're better off on the road."
I pressed my fingertips to my lips. I didn't want to believe that humans could be terrible to each other. But I'd seen what a disaster could do to even a small community, like mine. We had turned on ourselves, begun threatening each other with expulsion and dogma.
"We have to try," I said. "There's not going to be much more forage. Frost's coming."
Alex sighed and kicked at a rock. "Maybe we can find a car or something that runs."
I leaned protectively against the horse's neck. "We can't leave Horace behind. All of us or none of us."
He reached out and tenderly touched my cheek. "Horace will be fine. We can't-"
He saw the ferociousness in my face. My grip tightened on the reins. "All of us or none of us," I repeated.
His hand dropped and he stuffed it in his pocket. "It'll . . . it'll work out."
We descended the hill and walked down a highway off ramp together. Horace's hooves rang loudly against the pavement, piercing the silence. My heart clunked unevenly in my chest as we approached a truck stop that spread out by this, the first exit to the city. The blacktop lot was mostly empty, but my spirits lifted when I saw a few tractor trailers parked there and imagined that Horace could fit in the back of one of them. A convenience store, gas station, and deli were housed in the same building. A sign listing prices for diesel and unleaded fuel stood above advertisements for sodas, cigarettes, and sandwiches.
I could tell that the place had been abandoned. My heart sank. A chain was run through the handles of the front door and fixed with a padlock. Ginger grabbed the pay phone receiver and shook her head. "No dial tone."
The locks on the building had done little good. The glass in the window was shattered, and I could see a toppled display of fruit pies inside. I slid down from the horse and found my stake in his gear. I tucked the weapon into the crook of my right elbow, pressing myself forward against the dizziness creeping into my skull. I reached with my left hand through the ruined window, conscious of the hollowness in my belly.