She knows that winter is coming. She knows she won’t survive. But for now the cool air of her last fall is merely bracing as she looks down over the long dirt road, the fences, the walls. Beneath her feet, the hillside is solid, the grass still hardy and green over a thin layer of soil. Beneath that, rock and concrete, steel and safety. In front of the blast doors, a layer of carefully spread soil is unmarked. There have been no search patrols, no hasty exits. Not since hers; not since that silent, sneaking, midnight departure, as if fallout didn’t fall in the dark. As if radiation couldn’t slip past her to reach those she left behind. To reach him.

Those inside the shelter know that she won’t wander far, that there’s no other safety within a hundred miles, and no way for her to reach it without the trucks locked deep within the shelter’s garage. She thought there would be at least a token effort at rescue. Was there one? she wonders. Was he scratching, clawing, calling her name as they held him back? Or did he just sit dumbly, staring at lead-lined doors, knowing there was no point? Did he come to the door to peer through its dim lead-glass window just in case she somehow changed her mind and wanted back in? Or did he cower with the rest of them in their deep caverns, breathing rancid air and trying not to feel grateful that she’d gone?

She stirs at last. She is grateful. If the price of his safety, of expiation, is high, well, it’s a seller’s market for expiation these days. Still, she studies the large metal doors before she stands, slowly, and makes her slow and careful way back to the crude lean-to where she spent the night. The cool air is a fading blessing, a final reminder of the spring that was, the spring that doomed their lives. Some earlier than others. There’s no one above ground to fear her sardonic tone, to feel its bite. Just as well; there isn’t room for more fear in those dark caverns.

It’s unfair, she knows. They’re right to fear. Fear the winter, fear the war that brought it on, fear the death it left behind. The radiant rems, the sassy sieverts, the flaky fallout, the invisible sparkles of delightful death. The gamma ray goblins, though she knows better, knows the gamma rays are gone, knows the excitement has moved back up the alphabet to longer lasting alpha and beta particles. And where would the alphabet be without them? Is light-headedness a symptom? Is she light-headed? How should one act at the end of the world?

She peers west, toward the darkness. The sun is almost gone behind the clouds on the horizon. They’re closer than yesterday, certainly. Past the mountains, and if that’s true, then it’s almost over. The end is nigh!

“The end is nigh!” she says, so that someone will have said it. Can the world end otherwise? It sounds flat, insufficiently dramatic. She puts her back to the trees, faces the hill of the shelter, stretches her arms to the sky. “The End is NIGH!” she shouts. Better, if a bit lonely, and probably mystifying to the elk that live around here. She waves in their presumed direction as she turns back to her camp.

It will be cold tomorrow. It’s a foolish thought. It will be cold for the rest of her life. Not long. At least there’s that. She hears a rumble, and wonders whether it’s thunder, but there’s no sign of lightning. Maybe just the wild horses down by Murderer’s Creek, and good luck to them.

She gathers more firewood, to be ready for tonight, and tomorrow. She looks again at the long dark bank of cloud that hides the mountains, hides the sun. Even central Oregon gets clouds sometimes. Even here you can’t always see Mt. Jefferson or the Sisters. Or the sun, for that matter. Seen or not, the mountains are still there. The sun is still there. Portland? Well, that’s another matter. Even Bend might be awarded a missile. Just a little one, but they seem to have plenty. And nothing will escape the fallout.

She wonders, as they all did, if they might have been better off further east. But the clouds that way are just as thick, and to the east there’s nothing but flat between her and Boise. South is Reno, north is Spokane. There is no safe place, and never was. Maybe North Dakota, but who wants to live in North Dakota? Or die there.

Besides, if you have to die, and everyone does, what better place than Malheur? Not the county; the forest, but it works the same. Tragedy is tragedy, and that’s what Malheur means.

He told her that once, over fresh lemonade at that place in Bend . “The Lovely Leaf”—a tea place, but she had juice, disdaining the green tea that stained his teeth grey. They’d met at the bookstore next door, where she was deciding between a book on radiation poisoning and one on radon levels in Oregon caves. She forgets now which one she bought. Maybe neither; it doesn’t matter now.

She brought him home, eventually, after several carefully hinted chance meetings at shops she liked to visit, places he liked to eat. He lived in Bend, when he wasn’t off consulting in foreign parts. What he consulted about was a little vague, but maybe it really was ‘capacity building for private-public partnerships at the municipal level’. How could you tell, with something like that? It was a portable job, anyway, and he moved to join her at the compound south of Dayville when they married.

“A compound,” he snorted. “What is this, the sixties?” But they were used to being mocked, and they put up with it until he worked his way into the group, until he pulled his weight stocking the shelter, swapping out old cans, stacking new ones, regardless of what he thought. “Never thought I’d live with survivalists,” he said. But living was what it was all about.

Living. She dumps her load of wood. Too dark to get more now. No point, really. More or less, it couldn’t possibly make much difference. But instinct is strong, in the long term. Moral choices are one thing, fatalism another.

A squirrel chitters above, and she cranes her neck to look. Just a splotch of darkness now, dark red fur against dark grey trunks, dark green needles, dark blue sky, but a reminder that there is life here still. ‘Where there’s life, there’s hope,’ and other helpful aphorisms.

“What are you doing for the winter?” she asks the squirrel, but he’s gone, scampered off to count his nuts, or tell his family about the funny human with her stick collection, and to commiserate about what a chilly spring it’s turned into.

It’s an uncomfortable night, tossing and turning on a bed straight out of the survivalist manual—pine boughs ‘stem’ down for comfort, no spruce because spruce needles are ‘pokier’. No dead leaves to use as filler, because it’s spring. Technically, anyway, and the trees haven’t gotten the message about their impending death. Regulation bed or not, she sleeps poorly, and when morning finally comes in a dim grey light, she’s no better rested.

“Happy morning,” she mutters as she crawls out of her dew-covered lean-to, remembering as she stands to shield her head from the fallen trunk that makes the lean-to’s spine. She looks for her squirrel friend, but he’s not around. Long gone to his morning chores, perhaps. The clouds in the east are closer, and she realizes that it’s well past what should be sunrise, though the sun is still well hidden. No doubt the radiation is sleeting through her already. In science fiction novels, it always sleets. Radiation seems incapable of falling, or raining, or hailing. And the snow will be here soon enough.

Breakfast is a handful of spongy morels. Raw, they’re covered with bacteria, but yesterday she was too depressed to worry, and apparently a raw dinner did her no harm. A false morel, now, would be full of natural monomethylhydrazine. Rocket propellant. One of nature’s little jokes. Ironic to be killed by what, for all she knows, powers the missiles that fly here from Russia, from here to China. But she knows real morel from false, and these are real. A drink from the nearby creek rounds off the meal. She has no filter, but drinks regardless. A dose of giardia could make her unhappy, but it won’t kill her. Not even if it could kill her.

It’s near mid-day when her belly cramps. Just the food, she assures herself, dropping another load of firewood on the pile that surrounds and covers her lean-to. Just food, she thinks again, and wonders why it matters.

He brought good food with him when he came. Not in a basket, but in his head. Mysterious dishes from Moldova—sarmale (which turned out to be better dolma), or colțunași (which were really ravioli). Familiar things with different names, but also channa masala as good as any Indian restaurant, and Venezuelan arepas that made you realize just how great fried corn flour could be. Or arepas filled with channa, which she invented herself. “Channa from heaven,” she called it, and he laughed. Not so long ago. Early spring, when they were still in love. And maybe still are. Maybe.

A noise brings her back and she looks around. It comes again, a curious whuffle, like a … A horse! She peers cautiously over the lean-to, toward the open meadow that borders the road. A rich chestnut flickers through pine branches to her left, and she watches unmoving as a young colt emerges. “You’re a pretty one, aren’t you, boy?” she whispers. “And young.” The colt’s shining coat is marred at the neck and shoulder. The withers, maybe; they’re around there somewhere. Whatever they are, they’re torn and bloody. “Called out the old man, did you?” Obviously he hasn’t won.

She’s seized, suddenly, with the desire for companionship, for a partner to see out her last days with. Days that when she left the shelter she thought would be short and lonely. Horses are curious, and they’re hungry. Hungry. What to feed him? She almost laughs as she runs through her inventory of… essentially nothing, while the horse is out there in a meadow of long grass and wildflowers. Yes, but my head is full of food. She crawls slowly to the other side of the lean-to, where she can watch in comfort. Come investigate. With nothing better to offer, she thinks about fruits, carrots, horse-tasty things, and projects the thoughts toward the colt, now hidden by trees. But telepathy not only doesn’t work, it makes her hungry. Stupid psychic powers.

Soon, she hopes, the wind will shift, sending her scent winging to him, because that’s how scents travel. Wafting, maybe, if the breeze is weak. He’ll smell it either way, amid the other human scents of the shelter, and their desperate efforts to finish it last week, to turn it from a ‘let’s be ready in case someday’ to a ‘we need those filters working so we don’t die’.

Come on, she calls to the horse, let your curiosity loose. Come check me out. But verbal telepathy doesn’t work either, and it’s not until hours later that he comes around. By then, she’s given up and gone down the hill to check out the crumble of flint they spotted when they first bought this land decades back. After an hour’s search, she’s found a few good pieces, and proven that between them and her steel watch, she can make sparks. Fly, sparks. Fly.

Sparks flew when they first moved into the still-unfinished shelter, when it was clear that war was coming. With China for sure, they all knew that. Or against China. One or the other, but China was involved. Triggered by those Japanese islands. Or Taiwan. Or maybe something with Russia. It was confusing, there at the end, with the internet offering everything and nothing. Once in the shelter, the radio picked up mostly extremist freaks. “Like us,” he said, admitting at last that he was one of them and they’d been right. And once, across all frequencies, the order to evacuate, to find safety in the hills. Too late, far too late. And then nothing, as the ionosphere was disrupted.

They barely noticed, what with Chuck bringing his cousin, and Marge her in-laws, and Juliet her new beau Chien, who might not be Chinese, but was certainly Asian. “ ‘Chien’ means ‘dog’ in French,” Chuck had said, but Juliet said it meant ‘fighter’ in Vietnamese, and then they’d all been quiet for a while, while they tried to figure out how to feel. War and Vietnamese together meant bad, didn’t they? Bad memories, guilt, sorrow. The fact was that none of them was old enough to have been alive in the ’60s or ’70s. So they let him stay, at first.

But when they counted up the supplies, did the calculations, there was one too many. One too many for bare survival to their milestone date, their best case calculation of when they could emerge, based on data that’s partially complete and wholly inadequate—the date they argued and voted and fought about, and backed up with spreadsheets and hyperlinks that didn’t work. And when the calculations showed the gap, they fought and argued again, but the numbers didn’t care. The spreadsheets didn’t change. And Chien was Asian, and maybe they were fighting the Chinese, and he wasn’t family, really. Not yet.

“Well fuck that,” he said to support Chien. “I’ve been to China myself. I made you all a Chinese hot pot meal two weeks ago.” Because that was when Juliet had told them that she was pregnant, and she and Chien were in love. “So throw me out, why don’t you?” And she knew he meant it, from the way he didn’t look at her. The way he didn’t say, ‘My wife doesn’t love me. My wife isn’t carrying my child. My wife cheated on me with some random man from town.’ Cheated herself. 

She sits now, striking sparks too hard and watching them fly. It’s still spring to the plants. Despite the chill in the air the ground is moist, the brush green and light. Little risk of fire. Little chance of it.

He didn’t catch fire, didn’t erupt when she told him what she did, confessed before the war could kill her with secrets left untold. He just turned away. Started to shake, sitting on the narrow bunk they shared in the shelter dormitory, saying nothing in response.

“It was nothing,” she blurted. Nothing. The cliché of every affair discovered, the burden of every country song, every story of loss and despair. ‘Making nothing out of something,’ went one of them. Nothing. As if that made it better. She watched his shoulders shake, watched him cry as she told her side of the story to his back, the classic tale of loneliness, of boredom, of idiocy. She’d read his back, saw him thinking of her, of love, of their future there in the dark, of the people he could have died with instead. Of their stupid arguments about his tea and his teeth. And then the shelter meeting, and the argument about oxygen and Chien. She foresaw in his silent march to that common area meeting how he meant to go, to force the issue now, with this new turn in their relationship, to make them exile him instead. So she beat him to it. She left the next morning, with nothing but a note, and a spread of soil at the gate. An early warning system to show whether anyone might’ve followed her out. If he might have. And, eventually, to show her if he didn’t love her anymore.

She strikes a few more sparks, wipes her eyes. Self-pity; always attractive. What a prize you are. But life goes on, even for cheaters and liars and self-pitiers, even in war. And most important, life goes on for him. Whether he still loves her or not, he’s safe. She’s achieved that much.

The horse is still there when she gets back, nosing around her campsite, as if he’s found her psychic strawberries. Actually, there are wild strawberries, she remembers, and blackberries. Lots of blackberries. They’ll be great in summer, should there ever be one again.

“Shame we’ll miss it this year, eh boy?” she says quietly. He heard her approaching, she knows; his ears told her that. Now, he flares his nostrils and slowly edges away toward the meadow. From the corner of her eye, she watches him go. “Outcast, hmm? Just like me.” A lovely metaphor. Except that Metaphor’s herd kicked him out, while she kicked herself. “That’s it,” she tells them both. “Crying time is over. Dinner now.”

The strawberries are a good idea, and she heads out to the meadow to look around. She saw some over by the edge of the road, near the fence they put around the shelter. But it’s too early, and they’ve just barely flowered. Standing there, she looks over the low concrete bulwark to the shelter doors and her warning system. Has her spread of soil been disturbed since yesterday, or is that a trick of the light?

“I miss you,” she mutters, as if he’s standing behind the door, reading her lips, as if he opened it, tentatively, fearfully, to look for her. “I’m fine,” she lies. “It’s pretty out here. I found morels.” Because he’s the mushroom enthusiast who knows about morels and cauliflowers and corals and black trumpets and hedgehogs—which are all mushrooms despite the names. Because they said they’d spend their retirement gathering mushrooms and berries and making vegan cheese together. “There’s a horse.” Because she promised him herds of wild horses, but they never saw any, and he claimed they were invisible.

There’s no response, no flicker of a wave through lead-glass, no swing of the door. Nothing to indicate anyone still cares. She sighs and goes looking for morels. Cooked, tonight. With some roots, maybe, despite the lack of berries.

Metaphor whickers at the smell or sight of her fire, but he stays in the meadow. It’s rich grazing, for a while at least. Maybe he’ll stay with her, keep her company. Watch me die. Maybe. But he could survive. Survive the winter, anyway. If it’s short enough, which it won’t be. Beating the radiation will be tougher.

Her cramps have gotten steadily worse over the day, and she sits now, replete, with her hand on her abdomen, waiting to see if cooked food will help. An hour later, she knows that it won’t. Whether caused by diet, radiation, guilt, or something worse, the pain is back, worse than ever.

She sleeps intermittently that night, waking for a few minutes at a time until the cramps fade. It is cramps, even though her period isn’t due, can’t be due.

In the morning, Metaphor leaves her, heading down the road in a nervous trot, ears back, nostrils flared when he looks back. She watches him go as she dully buries the bloody traces of her miscarriage. Does it count as a miscarriage, after barely two months? It’s hard, remembering how such timings mattered. You knew this was coming. She did. Knew it from the moment she left the shelter, sacrificing her life for his. Her life and … its. Two for one. One guilty, one innocent, for another whose only crime was losing the spark. There was only room for one anyway. But she knows it’s untrue, knows that the family would have let her keep her baby, her white, non-Asian baby. Any baby, really. She doesn’t buy into the cult of parentage, but knows that at a time of death, birth is a celebration. It’s instinctive, she supposes. Just like mourning. It was like an abortion. But it wasn’t really, even if it was.

It’s not the baby she mourns now. It’s his happiness, which meant hers, which meant their future. He wanted children. She’d been willing. Hadn’t told him she was pregnant in all the rush around the war, the shelter, the argument. The betrayal. Though really that was months ago. But she dreaded the inevitable, “Is it mine?” Which of course it was, but he wouldn’t think so. Why should he? And now she’s twice a killer. Or will be soon.

She can’t be bothered with breakfast, feeds the fire instead. At last, just for something to do, she walks slowly to the shelter. She eases slowly over the bulwarks, steps slowly through the wire gate she left open. The cramps have lessened, but there’s nausea to replace it, and a headache that won’t go away. Her vision blurs from time to time, and she can’t tell whether it’s from tears or pain.

Her crude warning system is spread into a low fan against the gravel of the road. She stands in the tracks of one of the trucks they drove in, but her mind is too fogged to make sense of it. Maybe someone opened the gate. Maybe it was … she struggles for another explanation, gives it up. It means something, but she doesn’t know what. Can’t bring herself to care. I’m a murderer, she thinks, though she doesn’t really think so. Who’d check on a murderer? “I like your teeth,” she offers, suddenly and wide-eyed, although she can’t remember why this is too important to be left unsaid.

The dark comes early tonight, barely afternoon, and she drags her tired body back to camp. Metaphor is back, and it lifts her spirit to see him, his strong, glossy body alert to her every possible threat. She bows to him and settles by her fire, low but still burning. It’s cold now, and she adds more wood. The blaze destroys her view of the colt, but the cheery warmth is welcome, and she shares its coziness with the horse, pushing out waves of comfort for whatever it’s worth. Deluded. But so am I.

After another dinner of toasted mushroom and creek water, she vomits. There’s red in the mass, though it looks brown by firelight. That was quick. Nausea, headaches, other aches, weariness, now blood. Classic symptoms. “See you tomorrow,” she tells Metaphor. She hopes he’s healthier, that his wild blood will hold out against human-wrought evil, that he’ll survive. Optimism for the win!

In the morning, the body is still, and the horse avoids it, with its smell of death and illness. The wounds on his withers bleed freely, and he walks gingerly now, as he heads down the road to safer pastures.

At noon, during the few hours of sunlight, the door to the shelter opens, and a tall, thin man steps quickly out. He checks his dosimeter ring nervously, then sets off at a determined pace down the road. At the entrance to the meadow, he sniffs, then searches until he finds the fire behind the hill, runs toward it.

When he finds her body, he sits abruptly, one hand covering his mouth, and then hugs her to him. “I was wrong,” he says, at last. Wrong to be angry, wrong not to follow, wrong not to love. “So wrong and so late—” His voice catches and he sobs , turning the ring on his finger like a prayer wheel. Then, “I gave up tea,” he offers, a promise he repeats over and over until he can’t speak.

Evening finds him there, stiff and numb, holding his lover and waiting. Waiting for the winter.