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an eye out for those helicopters that ought to be on their way any time now. Ready to wave them off. Victory snatched from defeat. We did it, son.
     

TWO
The Shelter
     
     
     
     
    The picture wouldn’t stop eating at him. The picture and the memory of that SUV roaring up the interstate into a world he would never see. The only signifier of it this flimsy little square that Carmichael had left behind. Testimony to his escape. Weller tacked it up after all. He tacked it up on the pegboard over his workbench where he could keep an eye on it. Where it could serve as inspiration to question everything in sight. The junk that people brought in to be repaired and the junk that people brought in to sell and the work he did turning one into the other. Ashes to ashes. Junk to junk. He had the rearview mirror from the red Volkswagen hanging from a hook on the same pegboard, and he hated that mirror in particular. For what it reflected. His own stasis.
    Everybody in the photograph was looking into the camera except his daughter.
    That was the worst thing.
    She wasn’t looking anywhere. Her eyes were vague and she wasn’t looking anywhere. Sitting there on his knee with her bright and freckled face held to the sun and no idea that she ought to be looking in the direction of her mother and the camera.
    He let the picture work on him for two or three weeks, his mood disintegrating and his anxiety growing and an idea taking shape in his mind. Summer wasn’t going to last forever. Fall would come to the Zone and everything would lock down for the cold and the snow. The moment for travel was still with him and if he had any sense he would take advantage of it.
    He wondered exactly how far was it from here to New York. Nobody went, so nobody knew. He would be a pioneer, like the old overland travelers who’d first made their way from Plymouth Rock to the Isle of the Manhattoes. Two or three days on foot from this point maybe. Three or four. Then again there might be a ride to be hitched along the way. Some kindhearted Management trucker not made entirely of stone.
    The girl would be a help to him there. She’d slow him down as to foot travel, but when the time came to hitch a ride she would prove herself an asset. Who could resist that child? Who could be afraid of her father? On balance, she might shave a day or more off the trip. Cut their need for food and supplies. Not that he would dare go light on that account. And not that he would have gone without her anyway, even if she required a steamer trunk full of equipment and him to shoulder it. She was the whole reason.
    Carmichael had said he owed him a favor, and Weller had decided to take him up on it. Get his daughter to New York and get her in front of a doctor. A specialist.
    Get her eyes fixed if it was the last thing he did.
     
    *
     
    Liz didn’t approve, and the weeks he’d spent wrestling with himself had left him adamant, and as a result they fought. They fought although they usually didn’t disagree about much. But they fought over this. About Penny and her fate. About whether there even was such a thing as fate and whether or not it could be thwarted. About the odds and the risks. The odds and the risks of merely making the effort, never mind the dangerous procedure that might come afterwards if everything went according to plan and Carmichael was agreeable and some doctor was up to the task. They fought quietly and they fought cruelly, because they had no secrets from each other. Because they possessed a wide range of the subtlest weapons that time and love can provide. They fought for days, each of them privately fearing that they would never recover. That they had gone too far. That the only way to mend the damage that they were doing was to have it over and done one way or another. For him to bring the girl back healed. Or else not to come back at all.
    And so they quit fighting. Reconciled themselves to what would be. Packed supplies and blankets and the tarp