End Program. James Axler

and his companions trekked across the ruined landscape, following a dirt road that was scored in the soil like a scab. The road nudged through overgrown fields of rapeseed and corn, an orchard full of skeletal trees—the apples withered and dead on their branches, poisoned by the toxins in the soil. Behind them, Progress soon became just a smear on the horizon, the smudge of white towers barely visible beside the winding silver snake of water. Ryan turned back occasionally, framing the ville in his sights and pulling up the magnification mode in his artificial eye. He would see the ville towers if he magnified the image, could make out the three-hundred-foot point where he had enjoyed an audience with the ruling cabal of the ville. How they had built such magnificent structures when all around them was devastated he could not imagine. It was a jewel amid the trash, a single diamond in the dirt.

      Up ahead there was little evidence of human life. No settlements, no buildings. Occasionally they would pass the foundations of something that looked like a building, but it had been razed to the ground so long ago that what remained looked like a floor plan carved into the dirt, more like a game of pick-up-sticks than a place a human could ever have lived.

      Ryan led the way, the SIG Sauer holstered back at his hip, the Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster held across his shoulders like an old days’ milkmaid’s rig. Beside him, Krysty walked along with a spring in her step, still dressed in the white clothes that she had acquired while in Progress, her old clothes folded neatly into a knapsack she had hooked over one shoulder along with her bearskin coat. She wouldn’t need a fur coat out here, not with the sun beating down on what was left of California.

      Doc and J.B. huddled along behind the couple, bickering about some point of geography until Mildred saw fit to pull them apart. Mildred was walking beside Ricky, swapping stories about his childhood on Monster Island, hers in twentieth-century Alabama, where her skin color was still an issue to some.