The Ray house is the only one still standing on Caryton hill when Vic and her girls come screaming up it in their old Jeep Cherokee. Seeing that roof, seeing those walls, as whole and white and neat as she left them, is a hot needle of hope in Vic's arm.

Mark is dead, buried somewhere in the smoking pile of sticks and bricks and twisted siding that was their home. The girls don't know. Why tell them? If any of them are alive tomorrow, they can find out then that their Daddy's gone.

The Jeep fishtails to a stop in the middle of the Ray's lawn, leaving long esses of pulped grass and dandelions behind it. "Out out out!" Vic yells, as the low clouds burst out in salmon and gold, aflame with the false dawn of another impact. She spreads her arms across the girls' ducked shoulders, pretending that this could somehow protect them. She starts counting, one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, waiting for the sound to hit.

She hurries the girls inside and down to the basement. Micah Ray is down there, with her wife Maryanne. They are singing together and holding pillows. The chin-straps hang loose from the bike helmets perched on their heads, looking so out of place that Vic wants to laugh. Instead, she sneezes. Over the past few hours, since the world started ending, Vic has gotten so accustomed to the stench of burning plastic and meat that the tickle in her nose from regular basement musk is a shock and a benediction.

A fortress of pillows has grown up in the center of the basement, beneath the steel beam that supports the floor above, as far as can be from the mortared stones of the foundation. Vic sniffs and sneezes again. A rumble grows, like far-off thunder, but rising. Ten-one-thousand. Not too close.

"Micah! Mary!" Vic yells over the roaring of the sky. Mary startles, and cries out with terror and then joy. "Vic!" She runs to hug the girls. She takes her bike helmet off and puts it on eight-year-old Becca. It is much too big. Mary bends to fix up the strap, and looks up at Vic, searching. Vic shakes her head at the question in Mary's eyes, and Mary's face squeezes shut with a pain Vic cannot yet allow herself to feel.

The fort is almost finished. Floral couch pillows and a mold-spotted futon stand ready to hold back the shaking of the earth and the fires of the things that fall from the sky. Vic tells the girls to get in. Micah and Mary make space between them. Vic kisses them all then wrestles the last mattress up on top. Pretending again.

"Mom?" says Jenny, her oldest, all of thirteen.

"Going to get Nana and Papa. You three stay here."

Jenny taps on her phone and puts it to her ear and waits. And waits. Vic's stomach falls a little farther with every ring.

"No answer," she says. "What about Dad? I can try—"

"Stay." As Vic runs up the stairs, the windows flash and the ground heaves and rings like an enormous gong, and she almost falls. The house gives an alarming creak as it settles. A new crack crazes through the foundation to her left. She goes the rest of the way on hands and knees, coughing out dust.

She runs to the Jeep, thinking she is six kinds of a God-damned fool, but her parents might still be alive and she will be God-damned if she's going to leave them. She has second thoughts, of course, and thirds. Maybe she should stay with the girls. Maybe she's stupid, thinking the Ray house is older and stronger than the rest, instead of just luckier. Maybe the right thing would be for her and the girls to jump on the pyre of their home and all die together. Maybe it would come to that, in the end. But not yet.

The Jeep won't start. Vic curses and pounds the wheel. The needle was getting down near empty after she fetched the girls from school, but she can't be out of gas yet. Vic gets out, pops the hood. Something must have shaken loose. She's not sure anymore if she's thinking about herself or the old Jeep when she thinks these things.

All of those kids, standing out on the soccer field, looking up, staring at the rubble, crying, hugging, screaming. She only took her own.

Vic shakes her head and clenches her jaw and gets under the hood. She's checking the plugs when she hears it.

It is not a sound she can place. She has nothing to compare it to. Maybe the crackling groan of a falling tree, as played by an orchestra of bells. It's so loud she can feel it as much as hear it. At the same time, a light from behind throws her shadow up and over the Ray house. It stretches to touch the clouds, without a gap, a shadow on clear air. It looks like a cheap special effect, a toy monster clumsily green-screened in someplace it doesn't belong. She turns, half expecting to die before she sees—

A hundred yards down the hill, a steam-wreathed figure rises from the center of a fresh depression. It rises and rises, taller than an old oak. Despite its size, it moves with grace, a delicate unfolding of legs and arms from the pit. Legs, and arms, and wings.

These are not the feathered wings of a bird, nor the membranous wings of a bat, nor still the powdered confections of a butterfly. Their otherness is sharp. They bite the air, dig into it like fangs and hold.

The creature turns to her. Within what at first seems a sheet of formless flame, Vic discovers a face no less human than her own. Colorless, burning eyes look down and Vic's brown eyes look up to meet them.

The sky quiets.

"What," Vic screams at it. "What the fuck are you doing?"

Its burning brow creases with concern, or maybe pity, or maybe just confusion.

"Can you stop? Can you please just fucking stop!"

It cocks its head at her like a curious dog, and then climbs into the sky. The ground shakes and Vic falls. The creature's wings have left long rents in the air, dripping a dark radiance. Where it strikes the earth, it boils away, taking the grass with it, leaving gray dirt boiling with maggots.

Vic watches for a while. She can't move. She can't remember what it was like to be able to try to move. Then the Jeep's engine sputters and turns over, and someone lays on the horn.

Vic rolls over, crawls, stands. The hood of the Jeep is still up. Jenny is at the wheel. God dammit. Vic is already yelling "Get back in the house!" before she has convinced her feet to move. She slams the hood down, wrenches the door open, and grabs Jenny by the elbow. Then she gets a look at Jenny's face.

"Slide over," Vic says.

Jenny slides over. "Where's Dad?"

Vic shakes her head.

Vic takes the Jeep down the hill, towards town. Twice they have to stop and backtrack because the road is gone or blocked by wreckage. Vic is getting worried about the Jeep running out of gas. Jenny keeps dialing, never getting an answer.

Without warning the Jeep slews and tips, the sound of its shattering windows lost in the explosion. Lying sideways in a pool of spent airbags, Vic can hear only bells. She cries Jenny's name.

Her hands find the clasp and she pops out of her seatbelt. Jenny's face is bloody. She's hanging from her lap belt, limp, but she's breathing. Vic lets her down. Jenny's phone falls from her hand. Vic tucks it in the front pocket of her shirt. Mark's shirt.

She puts her foot on the console and pokes her head out Jenny's window.

One of the things that fall from the sky is walking towards the Jeep. This one is more human-sized. Its wings hang in shreds and silver ichor drips from a cut across the forest of eyes that make up its face.

Vic pulls out Jenny's phone and with shaking hands, snaps a picture.