The car, an old Dodge Dart, was full of weapons. The woman had a pistol in her clenched hand. He glanced at the backseat: at two teenage kids, their necks broken, their faces plowed brutally into the front seats when they collided with the pole. He turned away, unable to take the sight.

He looked at who he guessed was their father. The man had a box of bullets, still open and on his lap. His arms were heavily tattooed. The dead woman, her body dangling out of the car face up, had a surprised look, as if she might get up.

“My fault,” Howard said out loud. “My fault.” He was crying. “What’s happened to the world?” He yelled the words and looked around him. The street was littered with frozen bodies dusted in snow; abandoned cars, some with their doors still open; and dark storefronts. Nothing moved on the street.

He looked down at the automatic in the dead woman’s hand. He pulled the pistol from her still-warm hand and put it in the box alongside the medicines he’d collected. He heard a car’s motor from far away. The car slowly turned the corner onto Main Street. Howard recognized the old camper he’d run into at the freeway rest stop hours before. He moved away from the car with its horn still blaring and walked toward the approaching camper. It was snowing lightly. He stopped in the middle of the street, put the box on the ground in front of him and raised his hands in the air. He wasn’t sure exactly why he did that, but he did.

The camper, slowly navigating the street’s abandoned cars, finally came to a stop a few feet in front of him. The old man, Jon, was driving. Howard walked to the driver’s side window and watched Jon roll it down.

  “Howard? You can put your hands down, amigo. We’re friendly.”

“Jon,” Howard said. “I’m glad to see you. I killed these people.” Howard nodded behind him at the wrecked Dodge. He had to speak loudly over the sound of the car’s blaring horn.

“Where are you going?” Jon said, looking out in front of him at the smashed car. He could see how its bumper had chipped out a big piece of wood from the pole when it struck. “Looks to me like they hit the pole, Howard.”

“Yes, but it was my fault. My car, it was in the way,” Howard said. He felt exhausted.

“They were probably speeding, Howard.”

“Yes, they were, but it’s my fault.”

The man looked down at him. He opened the camper’s door and climbed down to the street. He was carrying an automatic in a pancake holster. Jon walked toward the car and checked on the family, making sure they were dead. He popped the hood of the car and pulled the horn’s wires out. The blaring stopped. It was quiet again. Jon walked back and looked down into Howard’s box.

“What’s that?”

“Medicine. There’s a cabin, about ten miles from here. I have some friends there. I’m trying to get up there. They needed these medicines.” Howard looked back at the car and saw the dead woman lying half in and half out of the driver’s side. She was facing the sky. He couldn’t stop looking at her.

“Well, we tried going north. There’s just too many of the things on the freeway. We almost didn’t make it back into the mountains,” Jon said. “Seems better up here on these country roads. I’ve picked up more stranded people, too. I’m running out of space. And I’m low on gas.”

“I’m glad to see you,” Howard said.

“I feel like Noah,” Jon said and smiled. “I think we’ve got twenty-five in there right now. I had to turn some kid away back down the road. No more room. Is there a gas station here?”

“Yes,” Howard said. “But there’s no power. It went out a little while ago.”

“Do you think we could stay with your friends? I’ve got a hand pump. We just have to tap into the gas tanks. And we can hand-pump the gas,” Jon said.

“I don’t know,” Howard said. “I can call them. Ask.”

“Could you do that for me, please? I’ve got some little kids in there and they need something to eat. We can’t just drive around forever.”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” Howard said.

“Tell them I’ve got lots of guns and ammo. Maybe that will make a difference.”

Howard nodded.

“It wasn’t your fault, Howard,” Jon said.

They both heard a strange rattling sound. It was a sound that Howard had heard years before, in the Army. Jon turned around and looked down the street. Almost immediately, he knew what the sound was, too.

*   *   *

Gary Summers was two miles from Emigrant Gap on a stretch of country road that was dead flat. It had summer homes on either side, set back off the road. He’d thought of going through the abandoned-looking houses to search for warmer clothes, especially a pair of gloves, but he’d been afraid to. All the clothes at the B&B were way too big for him.

When he heard the M-1 Abrams tank, he’d stopped pedaling and pulled to a stop in the middle of the empty road. It was snowing hard, and at first he was unsure of what he was seeing: the dull, almost gold Abrams tank came out of the white mist, straight down the middle of the road.

He stared at it and blew on the freezing knuckles of his right hand. He looked down at both his hands, his fingers were bright red from cycling in the cold. Both hands were numb from exposure. He’d been unable to find any gloves at the bed and breakfast where he’d found the bike. He’d pedaled down the mountain and felt safer the further he got away from the Phelps cabin and Timberline. He’d not seen any Howlers or any sign of life for more than an hour. At times he’d had to slow down because of the dead bodies and the abandoned cars left on the road. But other than the dead, he’d seen no one.

He brought his right hand to his mouth again as he stared at the approaching tank and blew on his knuckles to help revive any feeling. But he couldn’t even feel his breath. The numbness in his hands was starting to make it difficult to steer the bike.

The sound of the tank got louder. The tank’s wide and ugly tracks rattled over the snow-dusted asphalt. He could see details on the tank more clearly as it approached, its hatches were all shut tight. Its armored desert-colored sides carried wintertime camouflage netting rolled into neat bundles. The exhaust from its diesel engine hung in the thin cold air behind it, giving it an ominous look.

“Thank God,” Gary said out loud. If the U.S. Army had come, it was all going to get better now. He’d done the right thing. He raised his hand in a wave, as he expected the tank to slow and offer him help. He yelled at the top of his lungs. But watching it come toward him, he realized that it was not going to slow. Twenty yards away, he had to pull off the road and out of the tank’s way, or be crushed. He rode off the road just in time. The high sides of the Abrams just nicked his back wheel as he darted down the steep side of the roadway and into a trench that had been cut for summer run-off. A lesser rider would have not managed to keep the bike upright, but he did, riding it out of the trench again and back up onto the road.

The tank had not slowed down. It kept right on rolling down the middle of the road toward Timberline.

An hour later, at a checkpoint set up by the New Freedom Army and Homeland Security at Emigrant Gap, Summers was arrested and turned over to the MPs. He was tagged with a pink marker on his forehead, his bicycle taken from him. He was transported to a shape-up area in Sacramento at the McClellan Air force base.

An hour later, a quiet young man in a US Army uniform tattooed Summers’ shoulder and ass cheek. After he was tattooed, given a paper “dog-tag,” and made to drink a strange metallic-tasting concoction that could be “read” by any patrolling drone. They put him on a bus to Los Angeles.

Gary Summers was officially prisoner number 16,001. He wore the CB tattoo on his right ass cheek and a matching one on his right shoulder in dark blue. It was painful for him to sit in the transport truck because of the fresh tattoo on his ass. They put him to work as soon as he arrived at the comfort station a block away from the landmark once known as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and now named TCL Theatre, after a corporation.