“I was so worried about you last night,” she chided me quietly, not wanting to wake the others. There was a hint of accusation in her voice, or maybe I imagined it. “Worried you would fall, or that something or someone would get you while you were… out there, up there. Or that you went up there to…” 

For a moment I felt irritated, but then I just felt good that there was someone to worry about me. And she wasn’t wrong – I had thought about making last night my last one on this plane of existence.

“But babe,” I interjected, not wanting her to finish the thought, “I came back didn’t I? I’m here, I’m okay”. There was that word again. I hugged her, nuzzled her hair, kissed her cheek. She hugged back, and gave me an innocent, clear-eyed smile which seemed direct and unclouded for the first time in a few days.

“I know you were worried, but I had to do it for some reason. Maybe just to prove to myself that I could.”

“I could tell.” Her tone of voice told me that she understood, perhaps better than I did. “But no more running off like that.” This with an exaggerated motherly sternness that I didn’t mind at all, that felt good, in fact. Someone cared about me. Someone was still left to care about me.

Sarah didn’t ask what I had dreamed about, and I didn’t ask what had made her thrash in her sleep. It was easier that way.

Covered in the grey-white blanket of soft sea sky, watching the others stir gradually as the new day dawned, I could almost pretend that we were simply on a camping trip, escaping for a couple of days to the bosom of nature, sleeping under the stars. Even the most cursory glance at the landscape, though, dispensed with this comforting fiction. With the benefit of building daylight, I could once again make out the many craters that lay strewn haphazardly across the beach, the road, the hills, and the villages – courtesy, I guessed, of some Chinese naval vessels on their way to Seattle. We had camped between two large ones that had somehow formed a haphazard, rubble-lined, and yet protected pocket where the last of the shore rose quickly to meet the road, which had fractured into chunks and upturned slabs. We had not seen any ships in days, and in the clear late summer air we could see nothing out on the ocean, but I knew that a person could only see three miles out to see with the curvature of the earth, and naval artillery could reach much further than that. It seemed that this threat had passed on for now, and we did not fear further bombardment, or perhaps I just did not care if it happened again. Dying in an instant, under an explosion while asleep, would be infinitely better than dying slowly, over days, weeks, months, which was what was happening to us otherwise. 

”We’ve got to find someplace to stay today,” I said, trying to sound confident. “It’s dangerous sleeping outside like this.” After a couple of armed standoffs with home-dwellers protecting their property, we had given up on trying to find lodging for a few days. But the nights were getting cold, and it wasn’t safe to sleep outside. This part of the coast approaching Garibaldi seemed nearly abandoned, but we could not understand why – perhaps it was the artillery fire, but the damage seemed minor and localized, like a warning salvo fired to the side. 

“Didn’t have much choice last night,” Aaron replied, wiping his glasses on his t-shirt, the beautiful ebony-black skin of his arms emerging from under a t-shirt that had once been white. “We made bad time yesterday, and nothing seemed to work out like it was supposed to.” That was a pretty good summary of the larger situation, I thought.

“It’s getting cold,” Daniel pointed out, looking down at us as always from atop his six-foot-six frame, two weeks of rough stubble on his face, now almost enough to call a beard. “This ain’t Southern California,” he added ruefully. Even in August the ocean water in Oregon is cold enough to make your feet go completely numb in half a minute or less.

Sarah agreed, “You’re right about that. I got such a chill this morning, after the fire died down and the sun hadn’t come up yet. It went all the way inside of me.” I thought of my sudden start from the schizophrenic dream of the infinite city. “The wind woke me up,” she said. “But there was something else too…” she trailed off, unsure, an uncomfortable gravity in her voice.

“I thought I heard a shout or something,” Aaron responded, and we all exchanged uneasy glances. Daniel said nothing, at least not with words – but his eyes said he had felt or heard something, too, and he didn’t like it much. 

Before the tension could grow any more, I said, perhaps lamely, “Well, then, it’s a good day to find a place.” No one seemed to want further discussion, and we left it at that.