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tried to talk to them. There were gun battles and the outsiders won them all, because the locals were all spread out. The locals didn’t band together because they refused to leave their houses, the evidence and trappings of their lifetimes of hard work, and so they died family by family.
    Dad keeps up a pace that doesn’t seem possible. His skinny legs seem to be moving at an ordinary speed, but we have to keep breaking into a run to keep up with him. Mom was a speed walker back in the day, and she gets her hips swinging and she manages to stay with Dad, but her face is strained because we keep getting all strung out on the trail.
    I used to think that walking wasn’t really exercise. To a gymnast, walking is only part of the peaceful vacations that come between workouts. But we’ve been walking for weeks now, and I’m starting to change my mind about the whole walking-as-exercise thing.
    “Goggy” was the first word I had for my dad. It was an illogical baby-talk mutation of “doggy” and “daddy.” All I knew was that I loved both doggies and my daddy. It lasted until sixth grade before it began to slip, that idea of love without question. I was a very bad girl for a while, but when I returned to Planet Earth after that first big blast of puberty, he was a different, softer Goggy than I’d known back when I was little.
    I sprained my arm in my senior year from a flubbed gymnastics vault, and he stayed home from work the day after, joking and bringing me stuff and acting like he was about to explode into a big, mushy cloud of worry. I was taking classes at a junior college and Dad was proud of me and the air was heavy because of all the permanent changes that were coming. My arm healed and I came and went as I pleased, but I was about to leave for good, and I came to see that the threshold of a house isn’t defined only by what arrives, but also by what leaves.
    Then this shitty thing happened and the world is still turning, but this was supposed to be my big year. The year I went off to Berkeley. My first year of freedom, and I was
so
ready to grab hold of it. Why else would I work my ass off to get a gymnastics scholarship? I was ready to see if anything better existed beyond the hypocrisy of “turn the other cheek” and “peace through strength” and “smite thy enemies.” I was ready to join forces with people who didn’t believe in an afterlife—and so they had to maximize the amount of goodness they could bring about in the here and now.
    But now they’re gone. The nuclear-free zone of Berkeley is a graveyard of common sense. Maybe they’ll build a memorial there when the radiation cools, but that doesn’t help us now.
    And, in a way, Daddy and his pride did this to us. He and his kind. The selfish, hypocritical neocons. The armchair war pigs. I love him, but my Goggy is a war pig, and I won’t take the gun he wants me to carry. I won’t kill people. It has to stop somewhere. It might as well stop with me.

Scott

    I don’t have to think about things so much anymore. I’m nice to my family but I’ll shoot bad people in the head, if I have to. I won’t hesitate to shoot them, and I think that soon enough I’ll be doing a lot of shooting, and I don’t mind it at all. Fighting to stay alive gives people two faces, and both faces are more real and deep and true than our bored, spoiled peace faces. No more of the bitching and whining of the spoiled people we used to be. There’s only love of life and family now, and I’ll blow the shit out of anyone who threatens us. It’s down to love and hate, baby, and I’ve never felt so alive. It’s the purest rush I’ve ever felt, and I’ve felt a lot of those.
    I don’t know what I’ll do when the time comes to prove myself, but I want a chance to find out. We sleep in a hole above the road. I stand my watch from midnight until four, and nothing moves. It’s hell getting up and staying awake at that ungodly hour, but fear keeps me sharp. I