Chapter 47
She wandered, finding solace in the rhythm of her footsteps, a familiar refuge whenever her mind felt overwhelmed.
The dog trotted beside her, its leash resting gently around her wrist, moving in sync with her as if they had been companions forever.
The late September afternoon wrapped around them in soft, golden light.
Even though the world looked muted through the faceplate, Charlotte couldn’t help but notice its enduring beauty, a stark contrast to the turmoil brewing beneath the surface.
As she followed the sound of the waves, she discovered the shoreline.
It was an isolated stretch of sand where the only company was the gentle lapping of the water and the yellow haze that hung low, drifting inland on a whisper of a breeze.
At the edge of the water, Charlotte paused to breathe, her heart syncing to the rhythm of the waves.
The haze curled around her ankles, heavy and persistent, as if trying to anchor her in this moment.
She gazed north along the coast toward Atlantic City, the skyline still faintly visible through the thick atmosphere.
The reports from the shelters painted a heartbreaking picture.
The city had suffered immensely, struck first and hardest. The casinos stood as empty shells, their vibrant life replaced by silence, a sobering reminder of the people who once filled them with laughter and hope.
She sat on the sand with her knees drawn up, and the dog pressed against her side through the opening in the suit.
The mask made sitting upright awkward, but she braced her back against a concrete piling from the damaged pier.
The water rolled in and out ten yards from her feet, indifferent to what had happened on shore.
Three days. She counted them backward from the present.
After three days, she still didn’t know where her family was.
They might be alive. The possibility existed, as with miracles.
It wasn’t impossible, but it wasn’t something rational people built their lives around.
If they had survived the impact, reached the basement, been evacuated by some unrecorded route, and ended up in a shelter she had not searched.
The conditional tense had become the only language left to her.
If they were alive, she would find them.
If they were dead, she would find their bodies.
If neither was possible, she would keep searching until her body gave out or the infection finished what the gas had started, but sitting on the sand, Charlotte confronted the possibility she had been avoiding since she saw smoke rise from her parents’ neighborhood.
She might never know what happened to them.
The uncertainty was its own kind of death.
Bodies would have provided evidence and an ending that could be mourned.
Not knowing was a wound with no edges, open in all directions and capable of generating fresh pain each time her mind circled back.
She thought of Sophia’s text message. She thought of her mother at the stove stirring gravy, her father in his recliner watching the news with an expression she should have recognized as worry sooner than she did.
They were either alive somewhere beyond her reach or gone in a way that left no evidence she had been able to find.
She had eliminated only one possibility by visiting the morgue, but the others remained.
The dog shifted against her, sensing the change in her stillness.
Charlotte put her bandaged hand on its head and felt the animal lean into the touch with the uncomplicated devotion of a creature that asked for nothing except presence.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said.
The words emerged muffled and strange, and the dog whined softly.
Neither of them had an answer that mattered.
The haze thickened along the shoreline, rolling inland with patient progress.
Charlotte watched it move across the sand and didn’t stand.
Forward motion had carried her through fire and gas and the crater where her house had stood.
It had brought her to a beach where the water continued its work while the species that had built cities on its edges learned how fragile those cities had always been.
She had reached the end of what searching could do.
The realization arrived quietly. The terrain ahead contained no paths she hadn’t already walked, and continuing meant not finding something new but refusing to accept what the evidence already showed.
Her family was gone. Gone in the way things were gone when the world that contained them had been dismantled until nothing remained but the questions and the people still living inside them.
Charlotte sat on the sand with the dog against her side, her fever burning through her lungs and the yellow haze rolling toward her across the beach. For the first time since Crestview Street, she allowed herself to consider that she had already found everything there was to find.