I. Animal Husbandry

The day your moms become infected, you’re in your animal husbandry class, taught in the tack room of the barn. Sarah’s mom is holding up a chicken egg, saying, “Eggs are valuable, versatile, and portable. You can eat ‘em, trade ‘em for ammo, or grow ‘em into more chickens, just as long as you pay attention when I’m talking, Kitty.”

“I’m listening, ma’am,” you say automatically. She squints like she’s not so sure. But you’re the leader’s daughter, so she lets it slide.

You weren’t listening. You were thinking how your mom’s favorite mare is pregnant, which is the biggest thing to happen ever. Southern Green has chickens, milk cattle, Nubian goats, and four extremely good mares, but it’s never had a foal before. Sure, sometimes your mom calls you my little filly, but it’s not the same.

“As I was saying,” Sarah’s mom continues, “eggs have a bloom on the outside of the shell that keeps the bacteria out. It’s why we don’t have to refrigerate eggs until we wash them,” and you slip back into thinking about yourself as a tiny filly racing around Southern Green. You wonder if your mom’s gonna give you the baby horse, like a horsey little sister, and you’re lost in anticipation up to your eyeballs when Sarah says, “Mommy, you all right?” and something about her tone pulls you out of it. She sounds funny. If it were Stephanie sounding like that, you wouldn’t’ve thought twice. But this is Sarah, who’s not scared of anything.

“Fine, girls,” Sarah’s mom says, but she doesn’t look it. “I—I had a turn just there. But I’m all right, I’m—”

You’ve read a phrase in books, where someone turns white. Sarah’s mom has turned grey. No, not grey: silver, like the canned sardines your mom traded ammo for once. It would be beautiful if you’d never seen a person turn that color before.

“Girls, you looking at this?” Sarah’s mom says, but she’s not talking about her skin. She points just behind you at the blank wall, the closed door. She looks at it like there’s something there. Like she’s devouring the world with her eyes. “Jaysus, that’s beautiful.” Her voice rattles. “Girls, you seeing this?”

And the worst part is, you think you’re starting to. Something is happening to the light. It’s still bright, but it’s turning grey somehow. Your mom taught you that this is what X-rays looked like, like light itself was turning inside out.

She said this a lot. It was important to remember, she said. It was how you recognized the infected.

You’re not supposed to look at them, ever. That’s how it spreads. But you can’t look away from Sarah’s mom. It’s like she’s a black hole. All the light is bending toward her. Your hair is rising off your shoulders and streaming toward her. Your vision is turning out and out and out. It is kinda beautiful.

There’s a flat sound. You blink, and the room is normal again.

You’re still at your desk, but Stephanie is on her feet. She’s picked up the tack room shovel. Stephanie. Stephanie, who hates the infected, and darkness, and food that isn’t brown. Stephanie, who’s good with chickens, who’s the only one who doesn’t complain when she gets assigned to cleaning the chicken shit off fresh eggs because she says she likes the chance to think and likes the texture of the smooth, round, hard, fragile, warm eggs.

Your brain keeps offering up all these little details to drown out the sound as Stephanie lifts the shovel again. This time it comes down wet.

II. Hand-to-Hand Combat

The thing is, as you let Stephanie haul you to your feet, as she shoves you and Sarah toward the door, it feels like you’ve forgotten all your lines. Like you’re the one—the leader’s daughter, the loud-mouthed, laughing one—who’s supposed to say, “We need to get to the barn, now,” and then, “Can you grab Sarah and pull her along? I think she’s in shock—”

But it’s Stephanie. Stephanie, who makes you slip unwashed eggs into your pockets, fill your bottles with water. She makes you grab your shotgun.

She hustles you toward the stalls. But then she stops, so fast you walk into her. Stephanie’s mom is there. She must have been loading cartons of eggs into the wagon, before she’d have dusted off her hands to come teach your next class.

The cartons are open now; she’s holding the eggs in her silver hands. You watch her drop one. It cracks in a pool of spreading yellow. You’d’ve been switched for dropping an egg.

“Girls, you seeing this?” Stephanie’s mom says, staring in fascination at the wetness that was formerly an egg. “If that ain’t the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen—”

You slip your hand around Sarah’s elbow.

“This way,” you whisper, tugging her toward the far stall. It’s your mom’s mare, sorrel sides swelling with a baby, wider and wider with each big breath. Your mom left her halter on; it’s the work of a moment to hook on a lead rope. Sarah’s bare foot is dusty and cool when you coax her into stepping into the stirrup of your hand, sliding up bareback behind the mare’s withers.

Stephanie’s still standing in the aisle, staring at her mom.

You want to say something. Your mind has gone as dry as an overused well.

“We gotta go,” is all you can think of, and Stephanie nods. Making up her mind about something. Then y’all are running out of Southern Green, mare trotting, Sarah bouncing, Stephanie’s mother still crying, “Girls? Girls, you seeing this?”

III. Horsemanship

You stumble out the gates of Southern Green, three girls on one horse. Two horses, really. Your mom told you it was safe to ride a pregnant horse. She laughed when you asked and said, “After all, I was pregnant with you when I first escaped the infected.”

It’s true. It’s how your moms met, yours and Sarah’s and Stephanie’s. They were in a Lamaze class together, up in the city on the first day of the plague. They drove out into the country together, and when the truck ran out of gas, your mom rustled up some horses and led them to her grandpa’s farm, Southern Green.

They were an unlikely trio. Stephanie’s mom, a karate instructor. Sarah’s mom, former 4H kid turned stay-at-home mom, gardening and canning queen. Your mom, a stable brat who grew up hunting deer with her grandpa.

You wondered if they knew how important those skills would be. Maybe it would’ve been cool to be hardened soldiers with machine guns at first, but they would have starved as soon as they made it to the farm. Knowing how to clean an egg without giving yourself salmonella ended up being more important than automatic weapons in the end. Stuff like that was how you survived.

You’ve never really thought about this before. But you think your moms must have. Otherwise why would they have spent so much time teaching you?

“We should head for the cave on the rise,” Stephanie says. She’s back to business, lead rope in hand. “Where we used to camp.”

She’s talking like she’s been thinking this whole time and decided this is the best thing to do. You don’t know how she’s doing it. Your head is still full of the sound brain makes when it meets shovel.

“I want to go home,” Sarah says. It’s the first thing she’s said since you left her infected mom in the classroom.

You can’t think of anything to say, so you just slip your hand into hers, and she squeezes it. Stephanie is walking ahead, pointing out holes in the trail, so Sarah can nudge the horse aside with her knee. You’re glad she’s taken charge. You’re torn between feeling relieved, and feeling like, if the infected are still capable of opinions, your mom would be let down.

You realize with a jolt that it’s the first time you’ve thought of your mom as infected.

Your moms used to take you camping in this cave, a sort of end-of-semester test. Once she checks to confirm it’s empty, Stephanie finally lets Sarah slide off the horse.

“We’re gonna need a fire,” Stephanie says.

“I’ve got it,” Sarah says unexpectedly. “Not a whole lotta wood left.” But she obediently picks up the pieces you left the last time you camped, takes them out front so you don’t asphyxiate from the smoke.

Stephanie untacks the horse. She doesn’t tell you to do anything. Maybe she thinks that’d be weird, too.

“Goddamn,” Stephanie says, so sudden you jump. She sounds like she’s gonna cry. “Goddamn but I didn’t bring a frying pan. I’m so stupid, how are we gonna cook the eggs?”

Your mouth is moving before you can think, the way it always does.

“Check your pockets,” you say. “Someone’s gotta have a fruit leather or protein bar or something that came out of a wrapper.” It’s a treat your moms give you sometimes, when the hens have been laying well and there’s plenty to trade.

You find it in the pocket of Sarah’s jacket, an empty foil shell that once held gummy snacks. What you don’t say is, cooking eggs in foil’s a trick that only works a couple times. It means you’re gonna have to decide what to do next, sooner or later.

IV. Agriculture

You shouldn’t be able to sleep, curled up on the ground with Sarah at your back and Stephanie on watch. But you must manage it somehow, because you keep having the same dream, over and over. Each time, it jerks you awake like a fish on a hook, then swims back as soon as you close your eyes.

You dream you’re in the little hallway off your mom’s bedroom in Southern Green. The door’s open a crack. You’re standing in front of it, listening to your mom move inside. You can hear her brushing her hair.

You don’t get a lot of time with your mom. She doesn’t belong to you: she belongs to Southern Green. You’re just one of the five people she has to take care of.

You want more than anything to open the door, to sit on the bed beside your mom. There’s something you’ve gotta ask her. It feels like things will work out okay if you can just get inside. But it’s a dream. You can’t even raise your hand to the door.

You wake up with a hand on your shoulder and water on your face. It’s Stephanie. She’s crying so bad the tears are running into her hair. She keeps saying your name over and over, so hard it’s like her teeth are chattering.

You’re scared she’s gonna wake Sarah, so you take her outside. You don’t have a handkerchief, so you take your flannel off and try to get her to blow her nose in it. She’s so out of it, it’s like she’s forgotten how.

“What is it?” you say. Your throat hurts. It feels like you’re still dreaming.

Stephanie sucks in a deep enough breath to say, “I don’t know what to do,” and it sets her off crying again.

You’re scared she’s gonna spook the horse, so you make her sit on the ground. You crouch beside her, put your hand on the back of her neck and make all the soft sounds you make with your teeth to calm a horse. Shushing her until her breathing evens out. It’s easier that way. It saves you from having to think of something to say.

“We didn’t—we didn’t bring any grain for the horse,” Stephanie manages to say. “We didn’t bring any ammo, Kitty. We didn’t bring anything. We’ve only got enough water for two days, then we’re gonna have to do something about it. But I keep turning it over in my head, and I don’t know what. I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do, I don’t…”

“You need to sleep,” you say, because you can’t think of anything else. “I’ll take watch.” A moment later, you’re not sure why you said it. It’s not like things are gonna be better in the morning.

V. Home Economics

Sarah goes on sleeping. Stephanie lies down; you can hear her snuffling. You don’t know if she sleeps. You sit on the ground next to the horse, listening to her nighttime breathing sounds, turning over what Stephanie said. Over and over as the sky lightens, trying to figure it out.

Your whole life, you woke up when it was still dark out. You ate the food you grew and did whatever tasks your moms gave you. Peeling potatoes, saving a few to bury again someday. Cutting the heads off chickens, eating them down to the gizzards and trading the feathers. Checking the thermometer again and again to make sure you quickened an egg and didn’t kill it.

Some years it worked, and you got gummy candy, vintage MREs, hand-me-down blue jeans. Other years it didn’t, and you learned how to sip hot water to stretch out food, and each time you wanted to cry about it, you couldn’t, because your moms took food off their plates and put it onto yours.

You watch the sky lighten and wish they’d infected you, too.

Stephanie’s back to normal when she gets up. She nods to you like you’re her deputy, the same way her mom is deputy to yours. She cooks some eggs in the fruit leather wrapper. You don’t know if the wrapper survived the cooking. You don’t see it after, so probably not.

“Here’s how I see it,” Stephanie says, while the three of you eat overcooked eggs with your fingers. “We can either go somewhere else and figure out how to survive there. Or we can try to take back Southern Green.”

You think about the other settlements, the ones your moms take turns driving the wagon to along the abandoned highway. You think what it would be like to ride a pregnant mare down shelled-out asphalt you’ve never seen, the burnt-out city spectral in the distance.

Then you think of Southern Green. Door frames carved with marks proving how much you’ve grown. Closet shelves lined with bottles of hydrogen peroxide, quilts your great-grandma made, clean Mason jars. You were born in the living room, a week after Sarah and Stephanie. Whatever it is that makes up the three of you is embedded in that house, that barn, like dirt in grout.

“We can’t take three infected,” you say. “Not by ourselves. We just can’t.”

“Two,” Sarah says unexpectedly. It makes you jump. “Two infected.”

“That’s right,” Stephanie says. “Only two. And I believe we can. Just think of it this way. This is probably how our moms felt, all the times they survived.”

You don’t discuss it more than that. It’s Southern Green or the rest of the world. There’s nothing more frightening than that, not even the infected.

VI. Shooting

At Southern Green, the only thing worth as much as fertilized eggs and pregnant horses is ammo. You didn’t take any with you when you left. Only what’s already in your shotguns.

Your gun has one shell. You know who it’s for. You have to keep forgetting about it, or you can’t do what you need to do.

The three of you come down the trail, Sarah riding the pregnant mare. You and Stephanie keep looking at each other and then away. You think she’s gonna let it lie, but when you get to the gate, Stephanie turns to you.

“You see your shot, you take it,” she says fiercely. “I mean it, Kitty. I’ll kick your ass if you don’t.”

She could, too. Stephanie’s always been better at hand-to-hand combat than you.

You find your mom where you knew you would, in the little hallway off her bedroom. On the north side, where it’s cool year-round in the shadow of the myrtles.

Your mom is sitting on the edge of her bed, facing away from you. She’s holding her hairbrush in one fish scale-silver hand. She’s brushed all her hair out. It’s lying in hanks on the braided rug like pillow down.

Your hands are sweating so badly you’re afraid you’ll drop your gun.

“So?” you ask her. You have to know, in the same way the infected have to see whatever they’re looking at, like it’s your last hope of salvation. “Tell me, since you’re so smart. What am I supposed to do now?”

Your mom raises her head, turns it. You pretend her eyes are looking at you, not past. Not at whatever it is that only the infected see.

The light is turning inside-out, rushing toward you like a tunnel. You feel like one of the MREs your mom got for you when you were little. Like a reaction has occurred. Like something inside you is boiling. 

You think you know the truth now: that none of you are as strong as your mothers. Not as quick on horseback nor as good of a shot. You don’t have that terrible hunger clenched in your teeth that means you will survive. This is your Lamaze class, and you are gonna die.

Your mothers could do anything in the world except make you as strong as them because, paradoxically, you never had to be. They allowed your softness through their strength. Now all that’s left is you, and you don’t think it’s gonna be enough this time.

Your mom’s mouth tips open. For a split second, you’re scared she’s gonna say she’s disappointed.

Oh, baby, your mom says, as the world feathers out in greys and silvers and all the colors no one’s named yet. You’re the shotgun now.

So you take the shot. 

Copyright © 2026 by Nadia Radovich