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but we’re still a point of curiosity for the towns around here. Don’t you think they wonder why we’re out here all alone? Do you think that once the earth’s rotation reverses, they won’t figure it out? We only have enough supplies stockpiled for our own people, and even then we might not have enough. If people start showing up here looking for shelter, they aren’t just gonna take ‘Sorry, we’re full up’ as an answer and walk away. They’ll fight,” Dad says, the volume of his voice gradually increasing with his enthusiasm for this subject. “Would you really risk one of us dying to ease your own misguided conscience?”
    “You’re being too soft speaking of them that way,Thomas.” My mom’s eyes are rippling with tears. “Those people out there are monsters. Evil. Each and every last one of them. They need to be wiped from this earth. Not one deserves our mercy. The Brethren watched all of us for years. They know the Outsiders’ motives. We are the chosen, the ones who showed true goodness and compassion. We are meant to survive, not them. And if they come here before the end—or just after the disasters begin—we cannot feel sorry for them. Not ever. We would only be helping to keep evil alive, and all of this, all that we’ve done here, would be for nothing.” She’s started trembling now. I watch as she looks over at Pioneer’s picture. She puts a hand out and touches the frame with the same kind of anxious strokes that she uses when she rubs Karen’s shoes. If somehow Pioneer really can watch us through that picture, she probably sees it as comforting.
    I stare at my plate. Tears blur my own vision, making everything look like an abstract painting. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, okay? I want to do what I’m supposed to, believe me … but I just, I don’t know. I just freeze up or something.”
    Mom puts a hand on one of my shoulders and Dad puts his hand on the other, their other hands still tightly clasped together. We are all connected now in one unbroken circle.
    “It isn’t wrong to defend yourself, honey. What would be wrong is not fighting to keep the people you love alive,” Mom says.
    They’re right, of course. I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to them, to Will or Marie. I’ve been selfish, and worse—stupid. I have to do better.
    “I’ll shoot right from now on.” I speak my words like a vow—to them and to myself. I’m not a little kid anymore.I can’t choose to ignore what’s happening. It’s time I grow up.

It’s a foolish person who keeps putting himself in danger.
We must do what we can to survive, to protect those we love.
—Pioneer
     

     
    We never found Karen. We buried an empty coffin along with many, many other New Yorkers that fall and tried to tell ourselves a funeral without a body was somehow just as final. When it was over, my mom couldn’t go home, not to a place with nothing but reminders of what we’d lost. The city was starting to feel like a foreign country, not ours anymore.
    We spent a few months in a rented apartment while my parents tried to figure out what we should do and where we should go next. My mom took me out of school and promised to teach me my letters herself, but she spent most days under the covers staring out the window, leaving me to wander around the apartment alone all day. I drew pictures nonstop. I guess I was still trying to make things right.
    My mom was scared all the time too—scared someone would take me, scared that there’d be more terrorist attacks. My dad didn’t say much, but he didn’t have to. Hiseyes were as empty as that coffin had been. We were alone a lot of the time. My parents didn’t have many friends even before Karen went away. And since Mom grew up in foster care and Dad was an only child with parents who died before I was born, there weren’t any grandparents or aunts and uncles to come help comfort us.
    Pioneer was the only one who came around. He didn’t