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WE LEFT THE SCHOOL THE NEXT MORNING, but by then there were so many rumors swirling it was like its own secondary storm. I heard that there was a revolt against the Committee members at the naval base in Key West, which was why none of them had shown up. Another rumor was that their shelter was destroyed and everyone was dead. Either way, there hasn’t been radio contact with them. We heard from Key Largo, but they had losses as well. Theirs plus ours came to 656 people dead in the storm.

The fact that we haven’t heard from the southern Keys isn’t a good sign.

People who lived in Marathon said their homes are gone, some flooded so badly they’ll never be able to fix them.

The Key Committee members who survived told us the only plan they had: Go to Key Largo and regroup. Once there, we’d figure things out and wait until the folks down in Key West are able to contact us. I don’t think they have any reason for this other than to get a total head count and reallocate the remaining supplies. Some people stayed at the school and started inventorying the supplies left over, getting them ready to be moved up to Key Largo. We set off with the rest of the crowd for Islamorada again. Me, Andrew, Cara, Amy, Henri-Two, Daphne, Kelly, and the seven remaining orphans. There we’ll camp and rest until we set out to join the rest of the settlement in Key Largo.

Andrew held tight to the Kid’s hand, but the Kid didn’t seem like he wanted to let go either. It was a long walk, made even longer by the orphans’ tiny steps. Thankfully a group of older folks didn’t mind the slower pace, so we all stopped to rest overnight. It took a while to get a fire going, but when it did it was a big bonfire that kept everyone warm and comfortable. And with all the fallen trees, it wasn’t hard to find fuel.

We got back to Islamorada today, in the late afternoon. But it looked a lot like the rest of the Keys we crossed along the way. The motel the kids lived in is still standing, but all the rooms on the first floor have been destroyed. We left Daphne and the kids and walked to our house, promising to come back.

Not that we have a choice.

The house we were living in is destroyed, the second floor crumpled atop the first.

Andrew looks at me. “I was thinking of renovating anyway.”

I don’t laugh. It’s not our house anymore. And it never really felt like a home to me.

Andrew picks up a splintered palm trunk and throws it through the half-broken window of our bedroom. I follow with a smaller stick to break apart the remaining glass, then we both climb in. Everything is wet and already smells like mildew. Our bed, sheets, towels, the clothes we left.

Andrew pulls open the closet and the door falls right out of the soaking drywall around it, so he pushes it away. He squeezes salt water from some of the shirts hanging inside. “Maybe we can salvage some of this?”

He points to the collapsible hamper across the room, and I hand it to him so he can throw our clothes into it. I try to think if there’s anything else we might need. And of course there is. I right the side table next to our bed and pull open the drawer. Water sloshes out.

Inside is the leather-bound notebook my mother left me when the superflu killed her. All the medical and general survival information she thought I could use for the apocalypse—and diary entries from before that I read sometimes, just to remember her voice.

“Ready?” Andrew asks, picking up the dripping-wet hamper.

“Are you okay?”

He gives me something halfway between a scoff and a laugh. “The best. I genuinely couldn’t be any better. You?”

Point taken. But I knew that; I just wanted him to talk to me. Because maybe I want to say all the things I’m worried about, too. All the people who could be dead, how we might not be able to survive without the comforts we’ve had for the past few months. How it might not even be feasible to stay here anymore.

“You ready?” he asks again.

I am.

The following morning Cara and I sit quietly in the shade of the motel while Amy and Henri-Two nap upstairs, and Andrew and Daphne keep the kids occupied with playing a four-on-four game of steal the bacon—the Kid is sitting out by choice. We all stayed in two adjoining rooms last night. Daphne and Amy took the beds with a couple of the smaller kids—Henri-Two in a crib that had been on the second floor and so escaped the flooding—while the others just scattered around the floor alongside Andrew, Cara, and me. A couple of the kids had nightmares, and each time Andrew leaped up quickly to check on them, as though he had already been awake.

I can’t stop watching Andrew. How he puts on this face for the kids, pretending he’s okay when I know he isn’t, because they need some sense of safety after everything that happened to them. I know how they feel.

Every day here, I worry about how safe we are. Even if Fort Caroline never finds us, there isn’t anything to stop another settlement from coming and throwing the whole system into disarray. And who knows what that would look like for Andrew and me?

“Do you think I’m wrong?” I ask Cara.

She frowns and shrugs. “About?”

“Sorry. I forgot I haven’t talked about this with you for a while.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t want to get between the two of you.”

“I know that. I’m not asking you to. I just mean do you think I’m wrong about wanting to go to the cabin? I’m not asking you to side with me on anything, just trying to get your thoughts.”

She chews at her lip, thinking. “I think . . . you are not wrong. But I also think you are not right.”

“Thanks, Cara, super helpful. Great talk.”

“Shut up and just listen. You got shot. By the same people I was trying to get away from, and for good reason—the getting away, not the getting shot.”

“I was hoping.”

“So, yes, I think you are not wrong to be worried about staying here. It makes sense to be distrustful. But you should also ask what it is about the Keys that makes you distrustful. I think your idea that Andrew would ever turn on you is obscenely misguided.”

“I don’t think that!”

“Then why is it your way or nothing? You think he won’t pack up and leave with you the second he even hears the name Fort Caroline?”

It’s not that at all. I turn back to Andrew, watching him call out the number two and Taylor and another girl run out to grab the bacon—a throw pillow from one of the hotel rooms—from the faded parking spot line.

I know he’d leave this place behind in a second if it became unsafe. But I can tell how much it’s going to break his heart to do it. He would never admit it, but he was looking for family a long time before he met me.

He left his house in Connecticut after the death of his sister—his last family member taken by the superflu. And on the road in New Jersey he met a couple named the Fosters. He shared food and a fire with them, but that night they tried to rob him. He accidentally killed them while fighting back and from that moment decided he’d go south to Virginia and tell their remaining family what happened to them.

He found me first.

The Fosters in Virginia were long dead by the time we arrived, and I think he still feels the guilt from what happened to their parents—maybe not as often as he used to, but it’s there. And every person we met—Henri; a kid our age at Reagan airport and his siblings; Cara; a girl in a shoe store outside Jacksonville; Daphne; all the kids—he treated them kindly. Not the people in Fort Caroline, though—but maybe he subconsciously knew they couldn’t be trusted.

It wasn’t until we got here, until he started talking to strangers, getting to know neighbors and making friends, that I realized he was trying to find the right people. The people he could make a family with again.

But I knew—thought—our time here was temporary, so I never did. I also didn’t feel the need to. I like everyone fine enough, and Cara sometimes does feel like the older sister I never had, but in my mind we were always going to go back to the cabin someday. It would be me and Andrew—maybe Cara if she wanted to, but if not, I wouldn’t mind as long as she was safe and happy.

Because I didn’t want to be here if things did go bad. I didn’t want Fort Caroline to find us, and I didn’t want to watch this settlement go through the growing pains of rebuilding postapocalyptic society.

Before, if we had just told Amy where her mom was and then left, we would have been fine. We’d have no more ties to the Keys, and we could be happy that we’d completed our mission to reunite a family, then go live on our own at the cabin. Maybe even make a truce with the settlement nearby so they wouldn’t bother us again.

But the longer we’re here, the harder it’s going to be for Andrew to leave. He’ll never stop worrying about these people.

Especially because he already considers them family.

When Cara sees I’m not going to answer her question, she continues, “I get why you don’t want to trust anyone. I feel the same way sometimes. But these people are different.”

“And if they change?” I ask.

She doesn’t have an answer for that. We sit in silence, and for a few moments I think that’s the end of our conversation, but then she looks over at me.

“Since it doesn’t look like we’re going to get Henri anytime soon, what is your plan?”

I hadn’t thought of it. But I didn’t think I’d need to. Without Andrew on the boat, the plan was to come back, and maybe then the two of us could take the boat back up alone—or with Cara.

“I don’t know yet,” I say. “I guess we stay here and try to help wherever we can.”

“And after that? After all this crap between the two of you over the last few weeks, you’re just going to stay?”

No. Staying here was never my plan.

When it’s clear I still don’t have an answer, she speaks again. “If you do leave, I think I want to go with you. At least as far as Maryland.”

“Why?” I know Cara is from Maryland—a town called Easton—but everyone she knew there is dead.

“I honestly don’t know yet. But I’ve been thinking about it, too. My plan was to see how I felt when we went to get Henri and I was close to the Chesapeake. After my family was killed, I just walked. I wanted to get out of there, and any road that took me away was the right road. But now I wonder if I was running away. And maybe it’s time to go back.”

She’s never put it that way before—saying her family was “killed,” I mean. Andrew and I always assumed something happened in Maryland to make her leave, the same thing that was responsible for her PTSD panic attacks. We also assumed it was something bad, but we’d never wanted to pry.

“You never mentioned wanting to go home before,” I say.

“I’m mentioning it now.”

“Is this new or have you been thinking about it for a while?”

“A while.”

Before I can ask Cara for more information, I hear the low whir of electricity and turn to see Rocky Horror pulling up in a golf cart, wires running from the front up to solar panels mounted on the roof. One of the panels looks cracked, but the rest are fine.

Rocky Horror gives two quick, sad beeps of the horn. “Anyone want a ride?”

With the moment broken, Cara and I head down to the road while everyone else watches from the parking lot.

“Not sure you have room for all of us,” I say. The golf cart is big enough to fit about six people; maybe an extra kid could squeeze in the middle, but not the front seat or the bench facing backward on the back.

Rocky Horror shrugs. “No. But the other three I rigged up should carry us all to Key Largo. Long as Ames is cool Britney Spears-ing it and holding Henri-Two in her lap.” As if summoned by her name—or maybe it was the honks—Amy emerges from the room upstairs with Henri-Two and comes down.

Andrew joins us and climbs onto the side of the cart to see the solar panels on the roof. “You did all this in a day?”

“Yes, I’m a genius, I know. But I told you, them kids cramp my style. I am not a fan of camping, and if y’all are really planning on heading up to Key Largo with the rest to regroup and figure shit out, I’m not walking with you like I did from Marathon.” He puts one of his feet on the tiny dash. “And they don’t make these shoes anymore, so I’m not planning on wearing them down more than I already have.”

Amy joins us. “RH, if you weren’t a gay man I’d marry you.”

“If we’re both single in our fifties, you can make a semi-honest man of me. We’ll have a marriage of convenience.”

She laughs. “Love that for us.” Amy turns her attention back to Andrew and me. “Now get in the golf cart. I want to get the hell out of here. Cara, go with them.”

I get in the back with Cara and pick up a chain saw from the floor. “What’s with the chain saw?”

“Mosquitoes,” Rocky Horror says, as if that answers the question.

Andrew gives me a shrug as he hops in the front, and Rocky Horror pulls a three-point turn—dodging a downed tree—to take us back to a storage facility. There are three other golf carts parked next to a pile of broken solar panels, and four rusted batteries.

Rocky Horror hops off and nudges the batteries with his foot. “Salt water fucked up most of the electronics, but I managed to get these three working.”

“Where were they during the storm?”

Rocky Horror pulls open the storage garage behind the carts and points to a ramp going up to a wooden platform. There’s one small two-seater cart remaining on the platform. Beneath it are four more carts pushed against one another, covered in dirt and sand. Their batteries have been removed.

“All the ones down here were a wash. Which sucks, ’cause those two in the back are eight-seaters. But we have four running; should be good enough.”

After showing us how to drive the cart—I struggle a bit at first, since I never learned how to drive a car—we head back to the motel, where Amy, Daphne, and the kids are already packed up and ready. We tie bags to the roof supports and ask the older kids to hold some in their laps. Then we set off for Key Largo, where the rest of the Key Colony planned to regroup and repair.