The Wolves of Winter. Tyrell Johnson

that’s racist,” Ramsey said.

      “Nah. People are too sensitive. Anyway, the flu started wiping out Asia. Guaranteed, we sent it to them somehow. I don’t know what we did, maybe poisoned their water with it, but I promise you this: the flu in Asia was a weapon sent by America. With the Asian travel ban, I guess they didn’t count on it coming back across the Pacific so quickly. When the first case was reported in Florida, organizations started popping up. The IMA, Refugees for Peace. And especially the DCIA: Disease Containment and Immunity Advancement. Everyone called them Immunity. Or the Immunizers. They were funded by some corner of the government no one had ever heard of. Apparently, they’d been around for years, only no one knew anything about them until the flu.”

      “I remember seeing them on the news,” Ramsey said. “They were the ones with the white stars pinned to their shoulders. Supposed to protect us from the spread.”

      “That’s them. They started showing up in schools, businesses. They set the containment rules and made us wear masks. They were doing research, supposedly. All I saw was them with soldiers, trucks, and guns, blocking off safe zones from people trying to get in. And telling cameras they were ‘working on it.’ They sent that vaccination, but a lot of good it did. Was probably just sugar water.”

      “Sugar water?”

      “Yeah. By this point, Asia was decimated. Millions of people were dying, and the survivors were migrating out any way they could, even though international travel was forbidden. Once it started to spread in the States, it was lights-out fast enough. People dropped like flies. Then planes stopped flying, mail stopped coming, hospitals and schools closed, then the news stopped reporting. Total information blackout. People panicked—those who weren’t dead already. Then the exodus. Like Moses. Most people didn’t know where they were going, just somewhere without a lot of infected people. The cities got pretty ugly. With the riots, looting, gangs, and all the fires. No fire department to stop them. Remember the huge one outside Fairbanks? Wind blew the smoke right through Eagle. It was hazy for days. So many damn fires. Who knows how they all got started.”

      “So you really think we caused the flu?”

      “I do. Unless it was one last terrorist attack. A jihad. Suppose if it was, then they really did win in the end.”

      “Jihad?”

      “Kill the infidel. That was their goal. And look around you. Job well done.”

      Snow is the quietest kind of weather. After dinner, I sat outside on the stump and watched it fall. It was only the beginning of the winter season, something like September, and it had been snowing off and on for a while already. I’d experienced enough snow to last a lifetime, but I still liked to watch it. There’s something peaceful about those flakes drifting down from the sky, like they aren’t in a hurry. Rain is so panicked and forceful. Walt Whitman—good ol’ Walt—in one of his poems said, “Behavior lawless as snowflakes.” I think I get that. The falling, forming, unforming, drifting, and swirling—there’s a lawlessness about them. I looked up and felt the icy pinpricks on my cheek and in my eyelashes.

      There was a crunching in the snow in front of me. I looked down. It was Ramsey, buried in his musk ox jacket, his blond hair tucked beneath a skullcap. He was growing a beard like Ken’s, though his was a young man’s beard with pale stubble patches.

      “What are you doing?” he asked.

      “Sitting.”

      “Oh,” he said as if he hadn’t noticed.

      He wanted me to say more. I didn’t have more to say.

      “Sorry about Conrad.”

      “He’s an ass.”

      “Yeah.”

      Ramsey was a nice kid. Eighteen years old. A good-looking guy, but in all honesty, without Jeryl taking care of him, he would never have survived this long. Sure, he could fish, but how hard was it to hold a stick over the water? He had crappy aim, had next to no muscle, and was timid. Timid got you dead. But he was nice, and I liked him well enough.

      “Don’t get too wet out here,” he said.

      “Thanks.” He turned toward his cabin.

      Only after did it occur to me to ask what he was doing out in the snow himself.

      I’d given Ramsey the old college try, as my dad would’ve said.

      It was a stupid move, but I showed up at his and Jeryl’s cabin late in the warm season. The snows hadn’t come yet, so the smell of pine and spruce wood was still heavy in the air. The winter would take care of that, numb the senses, make everything smell like ice. But the wind already had a good sting to it, and I could see the air congregate in front of my face. Congregate. That’s a good word. Like my breath was a church gathering, and I was God, breathing life and then watching it drift away in the wind.

      The thing about Ramsey was, other than Conrad, he was the only man in our settlement who I wasn’t related to. Which means exactly what you might think it means. And with Conrad being a thieving asshole who was too old for me anyway, there was only one real option. Thanks, apocalypse.

      I’d had sex with only one boy before everything changed. His name was Alexander—not Alex, as he liked to tell people. I met him in Eagle. He was tall with dark hair. We’d hang out after school, and he’d smoke in his dad’s basement. There wasn’t much else for us to do in Eagle. I never tried smoking, though. Grossed me out. I didn’t care how cool it was supposed to be.

      I liked Alexander because he was funny, because he was nice, because he used words like preposterous, and because he was the only boy who ever looked twice at me.

      The first time he kissed me, I pulled away and said, “My dad’s gonna kick your ass.”

      The second time he kissed me, I kissed him back.

      We started making out a lot. I didn’t let him smoke beforehand because the taste was nasty. I’d take off my shirt and let him touch me, but I kept my bra on. He wanted to have sex. I didn’t.

      “You gotta have sex sometime.”

      “We’re not old enough.”

      “When’s old enough?”

      “I dunno, eighteen.”

      “Eighteen! I can’t wait that long.” He said it with a laugh. But we were only sixteen, and I guess two years is a long time for a sixteen-year-old boy.

      So we didn’t do it. Not then, at least. For a while after that, we stayed friends, but we stopped making out. He moved on to other girls. Then the world ended. Literally. Between the wars and the flu and the TVs going out, it seemed like the end of time. People were already starting to evacuate. But it wasn’t till after Dad died that I really felt the weight of it all. The world crashed down hard around my feet. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t read, food had no taste.

      I met Alexander in his dad’s basement, just to see someone other than my family, someone who didn’t remind me that Dad was gone. I don’t remember if he kissed me or I kissed him, but next thing I knew, we were taking off our clothes, and for the briefest of moments, I felt something. A closeness.

      Afterward, I walked out the door while he lit a cigarette.

      “Lynn?” he said. But I kept walking, tears filling my eyes.

      My dad’s gonna kick your ass. I don’t know why, but it was the only thought in my head.

      We continued sleeping together, all the way until Alexander and his dad left Eagle. I never told my mom. I tried alcohol too. But it was the same as the sex. A moment of relaxation, of comfort, followed by emptiness.

      And now there was Ramsey. He hadn’t