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Old Man Ferris is talking about winters past and current. Butcher Jack is beside him, but he throws me a questioning look.

I ask May, "What are you writing?"

She lifts the notepad, apparently surprised to find it in her hand. "Oh, I just like to write." But is that enough of an answer? Maybe not, which is why she closes the pad and slides it back into the tight pocket. "When we started out, I thought it would be nice to keep a record. A journal. Maybe I could even finish a book about our travels some day."

"A book?" I ask doubtfully.

Jack has drifted closer. "Of course a book," he tells me. "Don't you think someday, somewhere, there's going to be enough people to make it worth printing new books?"

May nods enthusiastically. "That's going to happen sooner than you might guess."

Jack watches me.

I move my gaze from him to May and back again, saying nothing.

Silence bothers the girl. She pretends otherwise, but I get the strong sense that she feels nervous, intensely aware about this room full of strangers. The mayor emerges from the adjoining room, but May's father remains behind. "I want to go check on my grandmother," she announces. I don't get an invitation to join her, which pricks me somehow. She tries not to look like a person in a hurry, but that's exactly what she is, slipping between other people and past the grinning mayor, entering a room that she doesn't know and making sure that the door is latched behind her.

I stare at the door while trying to make sense of my thoughts.

"You know what's really odd?" Jack asks.

"The old lady's babbling."

"Not in her state, it isn't," he says. Then he gets beside me, saying, "She could talk about aliens and horned dragons, and really, who would care?"

"The girl's reactions were peculiar," I mention. "And her dad's too."

My old friend takes a deep breath.

"What else?" I ask.

"Do you see Winston anywhere?"

A man of his proportions would be obvious, but looking across the sun-washed room, I don't see him.

"The old lady was talking her nonsense," Jack says. "You know, about saving winter, saving the world? And that's when I happened to look at her grandson."

"So?"

"You should have seen his face," says Jack. "Bonf res don't get half as red as those cheeks of his."

"I don't see him now," I say.

"Red-faced," Jack repeats. "Then all at once, the kid turned and practically ran outdoors."

Our history teacher wanted to show us more of the old news recordings -dispatches from the ends of the earth, tearful accounts of American hospitals being filled with the sick and dying. But too many kids went home crying after that first day. Too many of us didn't sleep that night. So on the second day, the new mayor and my mother and several other important bodies sat in the back of the class, watching with us while shaking bodies and military convoys filled the television screen. I didn't remember any of this from my own life. When the Shakes began, my father filled our van with food and drove us north to a lake and isolated cabin. There wasn't any news or Internet for us, which meant that Mom was seeing these horrors for the first time too. When I felt sick, I looked at her. But she just sat there. Stone has more emotion than her face showed. Then came a long story about riots, mobs trying to break into pharmacies and gun shops, and the reporter - a smug fellow with a big cross dangling around his neck - explained how people were hunting for pills and bullets to kill themselves and their loved ones. "Suicide," he said, "has become preferable to a slow miserable death."

I looked over my shoulder again. Mom's face had changed. Pale as milk, she stared at the screen with her eyes narrowed, her mouth set but her body struggling to hold inside whatever she was feeling.

It was the rarest sensation, feeling sorry for that woman.

Another news story began. Instead of people fighting for pills, one man was sitting in the middle of a long table, talking into a microphone.