Gone

throughthe back streets to the highway—don’t go near the plaza,” Sam said. “We need to find Little Pete already. I don’t want to have to stop and talk to a bunch of kids.”
    “Yeah, plus we don’t want anyone stealing the cart,” Edilio said.
    “Yeah. There’s that,” Sam admitted.
    “Stop,” Astrid yelled, and Edilio slammed on the brakes.
    Astrid jumped off her seat and trotted back to something white by the roadside. She knelt down and picked up a twig.
    “It’s a seagull,” Sam said, puzzled that Astrid should care. “Maybe bashed into the barrier, huh?”
    “Maybe. But look at this.” She poked the bird’s foot with the twig, lifting it up.
    “Yeah?”
    “It’s webbed, of course. Like it should be. But look at the way the toes extend out. Look at the nails. They’re talons. Like a bird of prey. Like a hawk or an eagle.”
    “You sure it’s a regular seagull?”
    “I like birds,” she explained. “This is not normal. Seagulls don’t need talons. So they don’t have talons.”
    “So it’s a bird freak,” Quinn said. “Can we move on now?”
    Astrid stood up. “It’s not normal.”
    Quinn barked a laugh. “Astrid, we’re not even in the same time zone as normal. This is what you’re worrying about? Bird toes?”
    “This bird is either a solitary freak, a random mutation,” Astrid said, “or it’s a whole new species that suddenly appeared. Evolved.”
    “Again I have to go with ‘so what?’” Quinn said.
    Astrid was on the verge of saying something. Then she shook her head a little, telling herself no. “Never mind, Quinn. Like you said, we’re a long way from normal.”
    They loaded up again and took off at twelve miles an hour. They turned on Third and cut back, distancing themselves from town, and ran up Fourth, which was a quiet, shady, decidedly shabby, older residential street close by Sam’s house.
    The only cars they saw were parked or crashed. The only people they saw were a couple of kids crossing the street behind them. They heard TV sounds coming from one house, but quickly determined that it was a DVD.
    “At least the electricity is still on,” Quinn said. “They haven’t taken away our DVDs. MP3s will still work, too, even without web access. We’ll still have tunes.”
    “They,” Astrid noted. “We’ve moved on from ‘God’ to ‘they.’”
    They reached the highway and stopped.
    “Well. That’s creepy,” Quinn said.
    In the middle of the highway was a UPS tractor-trailer. The trailer had broken free and was on its side, like a discarded toy. The tractor, the truck part, was still upright, but off to the side of the road. There was a Sebring convertible smashed against the front. The convertible had not fared well. The impact was head-on. The car was crumpled to about half its usual length. And it had burned.
    “The drivers poofed, car driver and truck driver,” Quinn said.
    “At least no one got hurt,” Edilio said.
    “Unless there was a kid in the car,” Astrid pointed out.
    No one suggested checking. Nothing had survived that crash or the subsequent fire. None of them wanted to see if there was a small body in the backseat.
    The highway was four lanes, two going each way, not divided, but with a turning lane in the middle. There was always traffic. Even in the middle of the night there was traffic. Now, only silence and emptiness.
    Edilio laughed a little shakily. “I’m still expecting some big old truck to come barreling down on us, run us over.”
    “It would almost be a relief,” Quinn muttered.
    Edilio stepped on the pedal, the electric motor whirred, and they eased out onto the highway, skirting around the overturned UPS trailer.
    It was an eerie experience. They were going slower than a strong cyclist on a highway where no one ever traveled at less than sixty miles an hour. They crept past a muffler shop and the Jiffy Lube, past a squat office building that housed a lawyer and an accountant. In several places cars from the highway had plowed into parked cars. A convertible was all the way inside the dry cleaner’s. It had taken out the plate-glass window. Clothing in plastic wrap lay strewn across the car’s hood and into the passenger compartment.
    There was a graveyard silence as they drove. The only sound came from the soft rubber tires and the strained whirring of the electric motor.
    The town lay to their left. To the right the land rose sharply to a high ridge. The ridge loomed above Perdido Beach, its