For those that stuck with it from the beginning. What'd you think? I've already started the cleanup and transferring process to script format. And another question. Going forward, please vote... Highlander: The King and I (based on the TV show) Aftermath 120K word sci-fi novel just finished writing (need reactions)

The porch light was the first thing I noticed, three streets out, before I could even see the house it belonged to.

"Did somebody upgrade the wattage on that thing?"

"I did," Jacob said, from the driver's seat, not remotely embarrassed about it. "Considerably."

"It's visible from orbit, Jacob."

In the seats behind us, Rachel and Naomi laughed. David burped.

"I am aware of exactly how visible it is. That was the point." He didn't elaborate further, and he didn't need to. I understood it the same way I understood everything else about my brother lately — some decisions don't need to be defended out loud, they just need to be made, and lived with, and occasionally driven past at night so you can see for yourself that they held.

"Hold!"

The word hit that field like a hand closing around every throat in it at once. Every instrument stopped mid-motion, and I mean stopped — not slowed, not hesitated, simply ceased, the way a recording stops when someone lifts the needle, and in the sudden absence of forty bodies still trying to finish us, I heard my own ragged breathing for what felt like the first time all night. Then the despair washed over me and I knew who and what it was. Control over my bladder became a real battle.

He came up out of the fog itself, or the fog came out of him — I have turned that sentence over a hundred times since and I still don't know which direction the causality actually ran. Not a voice from a cold room this time. Not a presence you had to take Naomi's blood work or a…

I want to tell you we had a plan. I want to tell you that somewhere between the envelope and the fountain, one of us had produced a strategy worth the name, something with contingencies, something Curtis would have approved of if he'd been standing there with his laptop instead of standing amongst six other bodies on the other side of the park. Jacob and I had built off the bones of Curtis's working notes in an afternoon neither of us had wanted to spend that way, and between the two of us, whatever was left of thirty years of learning how to fight.

It was not enough. I want to say that plainly, up front, because I spent most of that night discovering exactly how not enough it was, one wave at a time.

They didn't run at us. That was the first wrong thing, worse somehow than if…

Jacob hung up with Naomi and stood there a second with his hand still on the phone, the particular stillness he gets after talking to her that I'd come to recognize as him physically making himself let go of the sound of her voice before he did anything else.

"She's fine. David's fine." He said it like a checklist item rather than news, because by now it was one — the one item on any given hour's list that reliably came back checked. "She wants us to eat something that isn't from a gas station."

"Noted and ignored," I said, and went back to the board, which by now had more red marker on it than blue, red being the color we'd started reserving without discussing it for things that scared us more than the rest.

We'd been circling the same question for the better part of an hour, the…

David had gained weight. That was the first thing Naomi said when we walked in, before hello, before anything else — not a greeting so much as a status report she'd clearly been saving up to deliver the second she had an audience, because good news needs an audience or it doesn't feel entirely real.

"Four ounces since Tuesday," she said, and the pride in it was almost fierce. "He's off the feeding tube during the day now. They're talking about a room instead of the unit by the end of the week, if he keeps this up." She had him against her shoulder, one hand cupped over the back of his head the way she'd held him since the day he was born, and for the length of that sentence she looked like a woman with nothing more urgent in the world to think about than ounces.

I let…

Curtis had been quiet for almost twenty minutes, which for him is its own kind of alarming, and I finally looked up from the case file I hadn't actually been reading to find him not typing at all, just sitting there with his hands flat on the desk on either side of the keyboard, staring at nothing.

"You still with us," I said.

"I'm doing the math I told myself I wasn't going to do tonight." He didn't look up. "Four people. Missing between two and four days, depending which one you're counting. I keep running the numbers on how long a person can go without water before it stops being survivable, and I keep getting an answer I don't like, and I keep running it again anyway, like the math's going to change if I ask it enough times."

Jacob's chair scraped back so fast I flinched. "They are…

Curtis found it a little after six in the morning, which meant he'd been running searches for nine straight hours without once asking either of us to spell him, and I only knew he'd found something because the typing stopped.

Typing stopping, with Curtis, is an event. I sat up.

"I need you to look at this before I tell you what I think it is," he said, "because I want to know if you see it too, or if I've just been awake too long and started finding shapes in noise."

He turned the monitor toward us. A list. Names, dates, locations, a column I didn't immediately understand labeled with a case number format I recognized because I'd filed enough of our own paperwork over the years to know the county's system when I saw it.

"Grave disturbances," Curtis said. "Reported and unreported. I built the search wide —…

We found her exactly where we'd started looking, which by that point in the week felt less like a good guess and more like the only fact about our lives that had held steady the entire time — Naomi at the nursery window, one hand flat against the glass in the spot Jacob usually occupied, watching David sleep like sleep was a performance she didn't want to miss a second of.

She turned before either of us said anything, which meant she'd heard us coming, which meant she'd been listening for footsteps the way you listen when you've stopped assuming good news arrives on its own schedule.

"Tell me," she said. Not hello either. Apparently that particular courtesy had gone out of style in this family sometime in the last week, along with several others.

We told her. All of it, in order, the way Curtis had made us tell…