Laramie

They marched her and Henry in through streets she half-knew from the far side of a childhood, past houses she might once have driven by in the back of her mother's car, all of it changed now, the yards gone to weed and the windows dark or boarded and here and there a house black and caved from a fire no one had come to fight. The nearer they got to the center the more the town showed its new nature. There were guns on the roofs. There were children on the corners who watched them pass with the flat incurious eyes of sentries, and painted signs on the walls in a code she could not read, marks of ownership, of warning, the graffiti of a country run by the young. And then the store.

It was as Papa had told it, and worse, because Papa had seen it two years younger and time had worked on it the way time worked on everything now, always downward. The great flat-roofed box of the Safeway sat behind a barricade of dead cars and shopping carts filled with dirt, and the shelves from inside had been dragged out and stood up to wall the gaps, and the windows were plated over with sheet metal screwed to the frames, and the whole front of the place was strung about with a loose fence of wire hung with flattened cans and bits of tin that would sing and clatter if a hand or a body touched it in the dark. An alarm made of trash. It was, she thought, exactly the kind of thing a clever child would build, who had seen such things in the shows of The Before and had all the time in the world and nothing to lose. They took her through a gap in it that a guard held open, and the tin whispered as they passed, and then she was inside the world the children had made, and the smell of it closed over her.