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Annie was thinking, the cliché’s always It looked like something out of a movie. But damned if it didn’t look like something out of a movie.

She and John had watched a lot of movies and TV together, and end-of-the-world shows were a favorite. Films like Dawn of the Dead , 28 Days Later , I Am Legend , The Road , television fare like The Walking Dead and The Last of Us . Empty streets, at least until the zombies came out from around a corner.

Who needed zombies? Annie thought. What had really happened here was scary enough.

She was driving into a town where history stopped twenty-three years ago. More than four thousand souls had once lived here.

Grown up, gone to school, fallen in love, raised families, headed off to work every morning. Made friends, got drunk, bickered,

shopped, had sex in the back of cars, played Frisbee, met over coffee. Four thousand people who together made up a community,

a complex living and breathing organism.

And in a matter of minutes, it was all over.

But unlike, say, if a nuclear bomb had been detonated, the structures remained, except for those closest to the derailment.

The town was intact, but had endured more than two decades of neglect.

As Annie drove slowly through the streets, the evidence was everywhere. Front yards that were once well tended were now es sentially fields, lawns that had grown into two-foot-tall grasses and weeds. Some houses were hard to distinguish because they’d become completely overgrown with vines and moss, cocooned. Shingles were curled up or missing from rooftops. Weeds sprouted through pavement cracks in the middle of the road. Bits and pieces of trash blew about.

Windows were boarded up on some homes, but smashed in on others, shredded drapes still hanging from the rods, drifting idly

in the breeze. Annie saw a mangy dog leap out of one home’s glassless picture window, a rabbit between its teeth.

Off to the side of one house, a child’s swing set was nearly swallowed up by tall grass. Annie surmised the city was without

power, given the number of dropped lines that crisscrossed the roads, the absence of any working traffic lights.

“Christ!” she shouted, and hit the brakes.

In the middle of the road, directly ahead of her, was a moose.

The beast was unruffled by Annie’s presence. It gave Annie a disinterested look, then strolled majestically past her car,

its left antler passing within a couple of inches of her window.

What Annie might have expected to see more of were abandoned cars—if this were a real disaster movie, they’d be all over the

place—but there were relatively few. Those were probably reclaimed by extended family or insurance companies, although she

did see an old pickup truck parked at the curb as she started coming into the downtown business area. Who would want to buy

a used car from a town where everyone died? Annie supposed if the price was right...

She could see a more dense cluster of buildings ahead, what would most likely be the downtown area. But she wasn’t going to be able to get to it in her car, as a once-towering oak tree that must have been downed during a storm sometime since 2001 blocked her path. She’d have to go on foot; there was a gap between the road and the tree she’d be able to duck under.

So she stopped the car, killed the engine, and, with more than a little trepidation, opened her door and got out.

What struck her was how quiet it was. Other than the rustling of some leaves in trees that were still standing, there was

barely a sound. When she closed her car door, several blackbirds she’d not previously noticed took flight from a nearby yard,

making her heart skip a beat.

She stooped to get under the downed tree, then walked slowly toward the downtown stretch. Even though there was no one around,

she did not feel safe. What if another moose showed up? Would that dog with the rabbit in its mouth see her and consider a

change in its dinner plans? Annie’d never been much for guns, but she wouldn’t have said no to one now if someone offered.

She found herself standing in front of the Lucknow Diner, the windows all smashed in, the door open. She took a step inside,

shook her head in wonder as she stared at the empty stools and booths, cushions ripped apart, stuffing pulled out by birds

and animals looking for material to make their nests. A sign above the counter read you can’t beat our coffee!

Annie could have gone for a cup right about now.

She emerged from the diner, looked about. A dry cleaner, an optometrist, a card shop, a florist.

It all seemed strangely familiar.

And then it hit her. This was how Charlie had arranged and labeled the buildings on his train setup. Everything was in the

same place here as it had been on the floor of Annie’s studio.

Charlie had been building Lucknow .

If Charlie was here, she believed he had to be nearby.

“Charlie!” she shouted as loudly as she could, hands around her mouth in a makeshift megaphone. “Charlie, I’m here! It’s your mom!”

Her voice echoed down the deserted street.

And then she saw something that was, at least for this street at this time, incongruous.

An illuminated storefront window, across the main street from the diner. Something in the display area was moving. Annie looked

up, read the sign above the window:

choo- choo’s trains .

Unlike the abandoned businesses, this storefront looked as well kept as it would have the day it opened. No missing letters

in its name, the sidewalk out front swept, the window glass not only intact but clean.

Slowly, she crossed the empty street, and as she got closer she saw that there was a train running continuously on a loop

of track on the other side of the glass. In the window, a lit sign:

open .