Three weeks post-invasion and the McDonald’s was still spotless, its worker’s last shift still mid-prep for the dinner rush, its bathrooms stocked with toilet paper and soap, and the drink machines stocked with plastic lids and cups. When I entered, I expected someone to be standing at the gray counter and smiling at me, welcoming me on in while her coworkers texted behind her, oblivious to someone entering the restaurant. I expected this place to still be like it used to—the same delusion that hit me whenever I walked into a new building after the Fall.

  Hutch entered after me, holding onto a paper list scribbled with supplies. “Cups,” he said, pointing at the drink station. “And shelf-stable foods.”

  “I don’t think anything is shelf-stable here,” I replied, but I went for the back anyway. “I’ll check for their first-aid kit, though.”

  “And the fire extinguishers.” Hutch looked up from his list. “Don’t forget about the fire extinguishers.”

  I tapped my temple as I walked through the door labeled EMPLOYEE ONLY. Most of the world had become strangely familiar, but the uncanny moments were times like these. Middle of the day, and I was standing in a place I wasn’t supposed to. No one was going to come yell at us, and the police had no right to trespass us. I was the police, before the end of the world. And I wasn’t going to cite myself for stealing from a McDonald’s.

  Whoever was here before the attack still left their bags. I sorted through the purses, taking whatever I thought was somewhat useful: a handful of tampons, lip balms, and wipes. In the first-aid kit was what Hutch and I considered a gold-mine. Low level medical supplies, stuffed so full it was falling out when I opened the white box on the wall and let it swing open. My backpack was already pretty full from the coffee shop next door, but I made do. There was always a way to carry something back home to Eden.

  Technically, we were on the hunt for only what Alice Markle said to take. She was a reedy woman with a terrifying presence, the reigning monarch of the encampment. It was unfortunate that our little Flying J parking lot was covered in grime and didn’t have much going for it, because Alice deserved a whole country to control with an iron grip. But like the rest of us, she made do.

  “I’ve got cups!” Hutch called out from the front. “Do you see anything?”

  I looked around. There was really nothing to take, which was a bit depressing now that the world was over.

  Sometimes when people talked about the Fall, they blamed the aliens. The Mastodons—what people dubbed the ships that hovered lifelessly in the sky, waiting to murder us all—did most of the legwork. But standing in an empty McDonald’s with nothing to take, I couldn’t help thinking we’d made it easy for them. Everything was frozen and packaged in other facilities. It all relied on constant power from the underground cables that connected to the wider grid. There was no cooking oil here, no backup supplies.

  Just the reminder that we used to have it easy.

  I hated doing those runs, because every time I was reminded of that, I had to take a second and stare at a wall to wake myself back up.

  “Jack?” Hutch said behind me.

  I turned halfway around to give him a flat look. “Yeah?”

  “This place smells like shit. Have you checked the break room?”

  Shaking my head, I forced myself to focus. We had four more restaurants to go before we could meet up with Maggie, and she was going to hate it if we took our sweet time.

  Hutch picked up a spatula and examined it by turning it over in his hands. “Do you think the mess hall needs more utensils?”

  “They’ll throw a fit if we forget them.”

  “God forbid they’d make the chow worse than it is.” He grinned as he stowed it in his back pocket, along with two more.

  I made my way towards the smell. The break room and the walk-in freezer were both in the back, likely targets for whatever my nose was recoiling at. Hutch was right: it was pretty bad. I didn’t even want to pick up the gallon of pickles sitting on the shelf, worried the stench had leaked through the plastic. But I did anyway, putting three of the large jars down onto the station next to Hutch. The mess hall needed pickles. I wasn’t even a big fan, but sometimes that was all you could eat in an attempt to save their experimental slop.

  The break room was mercifully clear of bodies, and anything else that could reek. It was squat and rectangular, with a countertop running across the back wall with a large mirror so employees would have to stare at themselves while on break. On the wall furthest from the door was a set of gray lockers. I poked around for water bottles and yanked on some of the locker doors, but when none opened easily, I decided it was not worth the hassle. If the wall clocks were correct, we only had another thirty minutes before we met back up together and headed back to Eden. I couldn’t waste time on something as stupid as lockers.

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  Hutch popped his head in, his dark curly hair flopping down his forehead. After six weeks, it had grown pretty rapidly. Eleanor was angling to cut it while he slept, but I couldn’t imagine Hutch wanting sharp edges so close to his face. He barely tolerated a razor. “Trying your hand at petty theft?”

  “Always was curious what perps felt,” I said sardonically.

  “I don’t think they’re hitting up a Mcdonald’s break room.”

  “You never know.” I crossed through the small room to stand by him again. All that was left was the walk-in, which was already going to make me sick. I just knew it. I could barely handle the stench of the grocery stores, which were filled with the putrid air of rotten meat. “Do we have to look?”

  “I suppose we don’t need to,” Hutch told me. “But you can always wait outside.”

  That was basically admitting defeat. Hutch and I hadn’t had a competition going, but if we did, it had been since the moment we met. I cut him free from a seatbelt that choked him unconscious, therefore earning a point ahead of him in some imaginary game. It’s been a rat race to the win since.

  “I can handle it, you ass,” I said.

  He shrugged and reached for the walk-in’s door, pressing in and pulling down.

  Immediately, I knew the smell. I gagged on it, remembering the unfortunate field trip we’d taken during college to San Marcos, Texas. It had been a sweltering, awful day, and no amount of peppermint inside my mask actually concealed the smell. It made it worse, actually. I wanted to retch, but instead I stopped breathing, holding the last bit of air I had in the back of my throat as my eyes watered.

  A pale hand flopped out from the walk-in.

  “Shit,” Hutch muttered, looking down at the employee.

  I shook my head, still holding my breath. “That’s the smell of a dead body.”

  “Have you seen one before?”

  “I was a cop,” I reminded him. “I saw many.”

  None were as bad as the Body Farm, where bodies were scattered across fields in order to study the decomposition. To this day, I had a hard time with harsh smells. Rotten eggs, mold, milk, expired meat. Dead humans smelled like all of it at once. We used to split ourselves off from other mammals and fauna, but the truth was simple: we were all the same when we go.

  “There’s more than one,” Hutch told me.

  I nodded. I already knew what had happened here.

  As with most people, they were probably at work when the Fall began. The sky turned an iridescent, mesmerizing lavender color that appeared to shimmer in the afternoon sunlight. It stopped traffic.

  People looked up, pointing and trying to take photos. Dogs were howling and snarling on their leashes. Everyone had turned their noses up at the sky, so expectant that it would stay it’s glorious pale blue. The sky had been the same colors our entire lives, and then one day, it just changed.

  Minutes later, the first ships ripped through our atmosphere.

  Big-bellied silver fishes, with no fins or engines that seemed to power them. Air around them boiled as they peppered shots from plasma cannons down on major cities, skewering places like police stations and prisons. An EMP blast wiped out the electrical infrastructure, and suddenly humankind as we knew it ceased to exist. We were set back two hundred years suddenly.

  If the Mastodons were the worst part, I would’ve accepted our fate. But what came next were what likely put these people in the walk-in, trying to hide for their lives: the insect-like robots we called Bees. They were bipedal, with large pincers that had plasma guns in the core of their palms. The only way to temporarily disable them was to take out the center of their solar panel wings fixed to their back, and even then, it was about a ten-minute window to safety. So far, I’d never seen a Bee or a Mastodon die.

  Something caused them to all hide, and then they were locked inside and couldn’t get out. The employees slowly starved to death in a walk-in freezer full of rotted, expired food and melting ice.

  I should’ve felt bad for them. I didn’t. There wasn’t anything left in me to feel bad with. The blast took some of it, and the first three weeks on the road with Maggie, Hutch, and Eleanor took the rest. Before we found Eden.

  “Let’s go,” I said, turning away from the hand. There was a silver ring on the girl’s pointer finger. I looked at it for a second, and then had to make myself avoid it. Hopefully it brought her some small comfort in the end, if it was important.

  Hutch picked up the pickles, bundling them in his thick arms, and followed.

  ***

  We had ransacked through three fast food joints, one cafe, and a bar. By the time we got back to the 1953 Chevy truck, the back of my shirt was soaked with sweat and we’d dropped off all of our loot at the corner of the strip mall, double-backed, and now collapsed on the concrete and waited for Maggie. The sky was mercifully clear of that horrific pink shimmer that meant the Mastodon ships were coming, so I decided to lay back and enjoy it while I could. Hutch glowered at the street, per usual.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked after a while. He was a quiet guy, and I wasn’t. The end of the world did not knock out my voice box, to the disappointment of everyone around me.

  Hutch shrugged. “Home.”

  “I told you already. If you want to go, we can go.”

  He nodded once, and that was that.

  I was the only one who lived nearby Eden. What once was Austin was now concrete and rebar rubble, sometimes mixed in with the superheated, glass-like plasma that shot from the Mastodon cannons. Marshall, the self-appointed Head of Security of Eden, offered to let me go see what my old apartment looked like when he learned. I made it very clear: seeing my city die was the last thing I wanted to do. I was comfortable saying goodbye to my old life from far, far away.

  Hutch, though, was clearly not happy with his own situation. Maybe if the roles were reversed, he would go. The Woodlands would be weeks away on foot, but he wouldn’t be alone.

  The problem was that Hutch didn’t want to be the one to say it. I certainly wasn’t going to, and Maggie, God bless her, would rather choke than ever be the one to say it. She’d rather pretend she was comfortable, just like how Eleanor pretended she was comfortable. The four of us would look at each other, though, and no words would pass through the air. But we could see it in each other’s eyes, eating meals together, or in the twilight before bed. I could tell, because I spent the first three weeks of the Fall learning every part of the three of them.

  Something was wrong with Eden.

  And all of us wanted to leave.