A/N: I haven't marked this chapter [M] since I didn't think it was that inappropriate, but there is some mild swearing later, so if that's not your sort of thing then be warned :) 

It snowed all through the night. When they woke in the morning it was under a thin blanket of ash and fresh snow and they were freezing. They looked like crystalline effigies. Seulgi rose and brushed away most of the snow and took the satchel and fetched the zippo and began lighting it between her cupped hands for warmth. There was not much flame left. She knew it would be dead soon and then it was useless. Irene took the binoculars and went out from their cover and glassed the fields across the horizon in both directions. Nothing but sedge and ash. It sat in fat grey kerfs along the dirt. Puffs of black dead grass. Damp mist full of vultures or other such birds. Wendy and Joy sat cradling their knees. They were wrapped in the bedsheets and the rancid jackets but it was still much too cold and Wendy was coughing again. Seulgi stood and moved away. She would not hear it. Could not bear to.

She went to Irene and took the binoculars and looked about. Just nothing. Blacks and greys. Dismal becomings of a gorstian dawn. She swung the binoculars west. ‘Do you think we’re still being followed?’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ said Irene.

‘Did they know you made it out?’

‘I hope not. But they would’ve heard.’

‘Heard what?’

‘The gunshot.’

‘Oh.’

‘Maybe they are. We can’t wait around and find out.’

‘You’re right.’

‘We should get moving.’

Seulgi turned back to the others. They were sat with their legs up to their chins and they were shivering. Yeri was still asleep. They had wiped the settled snow from her face and covered her with the peacoat blanket and Seulgi watched a moment the slow eupneic rise of her chest. ‘Please, Irene,’ she said. ‘Just a few more minutes.’

They woke Yeri after some time and dusted themselves down and set off. Forward towards a pale heatless sun and they longed for it. Whitewashed ghoulish children. They climbed the high wall and waded through the fields of sedge and blackgrass and it seemed they would never end. In the afternoon they rested. Seulgi took the water and gave it to Wendy and she drank more than her portion but Seulgi did not say anything. She watched her drinking. The swell of . The jaundice of her eyes. Her trembling lips. Have it. Have it all if you need to. Drink it all and I’ll drink none and I’ll be fine.

The sun had gone by the early afternoon and they were left in dim waning light but there was no wind. They came to a picketfence around a long field and stopped and surveyed all they could see. It was growing dark. Beyond the field a wall some six-feet in height and beyond that a road. It was going east and there were no cars. ‘Over there,’ Seulgi said. ‘We should take the road.’

Irene shook her head. ‘It’s too dangerous,’ she said.

‘What other choice do we have?’

‘We could stick to the fields. Like we have been.’

‘You said it yourself, we’ll freeze. Or starve.’

‘We can’t risk the roads.’

‘We need to find somewhere to eat. Some food. Somewhere to rest. Look at them. Look at us. We’re tired. We’re hurt.’

‘What if someone finds us? What then?’

‘They won’t.’

‘How do you know?’

‘You can protect yourself.’

‘Protect myself.’

‘It still fires.’

‘I know that.’

‘Then you’re protected. We’re protected.’

‘What if they have guns? Or weapons. Whoever they are.’

‘Please, Irene. We can’t keep going on like this.’

Irene sighed. Seulgi’s eyes so full of hope still and why? For what? She turned back to the field. Black and dead. Untouched ash to her ankles. Cold and painful. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘The road, then. We’ll take the road.’

They cleared the field and climbed the high wall. Seulgi and Joy first. They pulled the others over and Wendy last and every time she moved she was coughing and Seulgi could not ignore it and it frightened her. This is why we need the road. This is what we need to find. Something. Anything. Please. Whatever I have to do I’ll do it. She looked up at the sky but it was dark and grey and there was nothing to see. Maybe this is it. Maybe I have been abandoned. But then she turned and looked across the bleak waste and thought: There was never anybody with me in the first place.

They followed the road in the evening light. The moon tiny and fractal and it cast their penumbrae thin as paper across the trail. Their path was hard. The road was in no condition to be walked on. Mounds of earth and chunks of razor rock and concrete all about and the ash. Ash so thick they had to trudge through it and it stuck to them. Not half an hour later they passed the rusted corpse of a sedan. Some model but what they could not tell. Nothing left but the fireblack husk. Nothing inside that hadn’t been set ablaze. When Seulgi ran a hand across the top of the doorframe it peeled in her fingers like plasterpaint. In the air the flat earthen smell of dust. They checked under the hood. Everything had been taken. An empty skeleton. ‘Come on,’ Irene said. ‘Leave it.’

The fields did not end. Untracked flatland far as they could see or believe. Every twenty or thirty minutes they would stop and Seulgi would take the binoculars and look out eastward and then everywhere else and survey what she could. Just darkness and grey fog like some great milkwhite cataract dimming over the world. Naught else to even hope for. No silhouettes in fog. No shimmers. Who walks here among shadow but thee. Who indeed. When it was too dark to see they stopped by the roadside and waited. Figuring out what to do. Where to go. Irene pointed south. Another field. Unploughed snow and mudbrown dirt and ash. Picketed fenceline barrelling out of the blind dark. ‘We need to stop,’ she said. She nodded again to the field. ‘We can’t stay on the road.’

‘We can’t go back to the fields,’ Wendy said.

‘Only for the night. Tomorrow we’ll take the road again. But if they find us here there’s nothing we can do.’

‘If who finds us here?’

‘I don’t know. Whoever.’

‘Right.’

‘Come on.’

She led them to the field and they followed. Exhaustion on their faces. Weak and tender and pained. Pain of the feet and what other mortal instruments. Of the heart, the soul. Spasmodic disease of the mind and could it be fixed, could it be set back. These distant vagabonds. Vagrant drifting spirits. Their own cosmic turmoil and their fleeting innocence and would it soar skyward and beyond and then toward their own stellar rim and then out beyond and then gone and what else. Pale extinguished flame. Light of lights. Do you weep for days gone? Is it in your heart to remember them still? Can you do that? Hope, oh hope. Hope is a poison chalice.

There were no hay bales or mossy rockslopes or any such declines and they camped by the far side of the field next to the fence. It was snowing again but it was light. Wendy coughed into her sleeve. Seulgi took a tin of the chicken and the last tin of whitebeans and pried open the lids with the pocket knife and they ate them cold from the cans and passed them around. They drank a bottle of the water and checked their bags and there was enough left for maybe a week. Eight or nine days if they were careful. Wendy drank more than the others again but none said anything. They had two tins of chicken and the powdered milk and the tin of peanut butter and it was almost empty. That was not enough for a week. Seulgi watched them into the night. They sat there in silence and there was no fire and they had nothing to burn. Irene scooped away the ash and piled it aside and began sorting through the earth. Nothing to burn. Just sere and black and dead. Like everything else.

Joy slept first. Then Yeri. She had not said anything in two days and Seulgi did not know what to make of it. Wendy slept with the peacoat draped over her head and she turned to Irene but Irene was asleep too. She watched Wendy. The rise of her swollen dirtstreaked throat. Her wet breathing. That malignance in her lungs or her chest. Her filthy hair. It had been falling out in patches and she had tried to hide it but Seulgi noticed. Throwing it behind her. Putting it to the bottom of her bag. Ridding herself of it in the early mornings. What was becoming of her now. This frail halfchild. This rawboned forlorn thing. What was even left of her and could it be put right. It hurt not to know. It hurt worse to guess.

She watched Irene too. Had she known her three days or three years? It felt like both. Time without sequence. Such staggering courage but in her heart there was something else. That same fear. Same burden. Yeri felt it and she was sure Wendy too and now this girl and maybe the other and who else, how many more. So vulnerable there in sleep. In silence. She rose and went to the far end of the picketfence and stood not knowing what she was doing. Watching but watching what. The cold black night. Sunless mornings and moons without shade or shine. Some perpetual equinox where all is dark and devonian and nothing exists and all dawns and dusks are one and the same. What chain of events to culminate here and what of the future and of all things borne from this cosmic happenstance? This fateful godless solar axis. She sighed. Hopeless.

In dreams she was at some fairground parkway. Standing there motionless. Move these feet but I cannot. Of course not. She is standing by a row of metal benches and they are the same green as the trees and it is spring. A warmth in the air. Faint stink of rubber and of woodsmoke and something is burning. The saccharine stench of cottoncandy. People passing it about in little bags and gorging themselves. The grass is dense with mud. Dull thud of footfalls. The crunch of dandelions or groundweeds and so much plastic, so many dropped items. A keychain with a bullet on it. A crushed can of Coca Cola. Half of a teethmarked sugar donut. A smouldering sparkler and thank god it’s burnt out. An old coin absent distinct marking and maybe it has some special meaning but she cannot decipher it. She looks up. Everything is happening all so quickly and she cannot keep up. Floods of people and she cannot move, she is bound to this garrulous domain and she will see it through. They are all talking. So many conversations, so much to hear and miss. We should go to that one next. The big coaster. What about the haunted house? No, I don’t like ghosts. And can we get something to eat? A man comes past carrying a baby and he is patting it on the back. Shh. It’s alright. Okay. A woman in a baseball cap on the phone. She’s talking about the rides. About how much fun she’s had and yes, she’ll pick him up later. Around seven. Seulgi looks up. The sun falling. Maybe it’s four. Or just after. A group of kids come past with ice lollies and one of them slips in the mud and drops his velcro wallet and they start laughing. You idiot. A dog without its leash at her ankles but she cannot move and it will not go away. Fat yapping tongue. The stench of on its breath. Then there is screaming and she looks left and there is a row of hotdog houses and burger vans and beyond that a great skyscraper of a structure and it’s going up, up slowly. It waits at the top. This mechanical skyward vaulting phallus and she finds it hilarious. It drops and they scream. One of them is crying. A little girl. She watches them drop as if in slow motion. Everything seems to