KIA

Watching the soldier's hardened face slowly soften as Sarah and Raven held out a warm slice of pie, I found myself recalling a scene from a Korean film I had seen a long, long time ago.

That line seemed to come back to life as a cold, hard truth in this dying world. Ideology, conviction, even national borders — all of them crumbled easily before scarcity and hunger, exposing themselves as empty slogans.

By the time our column began preparing to move again, the atmosphere at the state-line checkpoint was nothing like it had been at the start. The lieutenant in command ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠simply stood by the roadside, watching with a complicated expression as the two groups mixed together. It was the smiles that bloomed over a slice of pie, and the soldiers bursting into laughter at Dave and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Frank's jokes.

As the lead Stryker rolled past the checkpoint, Hawkeye leaned out of the turret hatch and rendered a silent salute. The lieutenant hesitated for a moment, then straightened his posture and returned it. A wordless greeting, soldier to soldier.

Starting from that, the truckers following behind one by one stuck their hands out the passenger windows and waved. Some gave a thumbs-up. Some tapped a short blast on the horn. It was a gesture of reconciliation, crossing an invisible line drawn across land that had been thick with suspicion.

The Utah soldiers who had at first just stood there awkwardly began, little by little, to open up to the greetings from the endless procession. When one young soldier waved awkwardly, it started with the man next to him — and then every soldier at the post was waving back at us. They were not seeing off a mere column of refugees. They were sending off fellow survivors walking a hard road together.

Then Matthews's radio came through.

There had been concern that helicopter takeoffs and landings were drawing too many eyes and slowing the column, so a separate scout team had been stood up. I gave Matthews a short acknowledgment and reset my grip on the wheel.

We had left Nevada behind, but the view beyond the glass had not changed at all. The same endless, barren desert still unrolled along both sides of the road.

I glanced down at the radiation meter without thinking.

Jed had said anything under 1.0 microsievert was no problem in the short term, but a nameless dread still ran down my spine. It felt as though the invisible death closing in on us was moving faster than we could run.

Whether the radio knew my anxiety or not, jokes kept leaking through it now and then.

Gunner laughed.

"At first I figured those two didn't fit with you, Chief. Looking back, I think I get why you like them."

"Haha. In what way?"

"Hmm. How do I put it? There's nothing shifty about them. You know how people are these days — hiding things, pretending they've got what they don't, that kind of stuff."

"That's true. Though Frank puts on a bit of an act, doesn't he?"

"Nah. Frank just acts like he's got what he's actually got. Hahaha."

We ran like that for a long while, and off to the right of the road, far out, a vast gray sheet of water slid past — Sevier Lake, mirroring the ashen sky like a looking glass.

Nearly three hours without a stop, and we finally reached Utah's first town, Delta. Even so, the restlessness in my hands pushed the column a little harder.

Rolling through Delta's quiet streets, I felt a brief, almost guilty relief at the traces of civilization. How long that peace would last, no one knew. We were simply standing on a journey that could not be stopped.

Even so, I could not ignore the fatigue settling over the column. And yet the number glowing on the radiation meter in my hand was a heavier warning than any exhaustion.

I picked up the radio again.

The word Mormon pulled a memory of Korea up out of nowhere. Blue-eyed missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, white shirts and name tags. After I got out of the service I had attended that church for a while, on the simple idea of learning English, and I had no bad memories of it. The other memory that came with it was that Utah was Mormon country — their holy land.

I watched the two truckers drop out of the column, and we kept rolling without a stop.

Hours of unbroken driving later, we finally reached the promised bivouac, just before Route 50 met Interstate 15 — a little past Holden, if you went by the road. Matthews and his men were already there, Humvees and an armored vehicle parked on a wide shoulder that opened onto flat ground, red guide wands waving the incoming column in.

It was empty wasteland. Their presence alone made it feel like a fortress.

Under the vanguard's guidance, the trucks began to move into the promised Laager Formation. A giant tractor and trailer folded into an L and parked; the next truck took its tail and made another L, and another, building a vast circular rampart. The trailers became the wall, while each truck's engine bay and sleeper were bent inward, sheltered inside the ring.

Into the steel fortress taking shape, the Union members' pickups and caravans filed in one after another. In the meantime the two trucks that had peeled off rejoined the assembly and slotted in the last pieces of the wall. And when two Strykers finally took position at the entrance like gatekeepers, our own citadel — a place to pass the night in the middle of the wasteland — was complete.

I watched it in silence and thought how right we had been to drill emergency movement and strongpoint defense in advance. Watching the Division, a military organization, and the Union, a civilian truckers' cooperative, move as if they were a single body, I felt a deep satisfaction.

Standing there over the finished fortress of steel, I found myself remembering the day we had first conceived this formation and trained it.

"From now on we're one team, but on the road we can scatter at any time. We need a column and a formation that lets everyone execute the same promised actions in an emergency."

In front of a ring of bewildered truckers, I laid out small wooden truck models in a circle.

"We're going to call this the Laager Formation."

Bill added his piece.

"Ha! That's what the pioneers used in the Old West, circling the wagons against Indian attacks?"

"That's right."

"That's perfect. We're pioneers looking for new land ourselves — driving trucks instead of horses, facing raiders instead of Indians…"

Mike chimed in.

"No reason we can't use the wisdom this land's ancestors built to stay alive."

From that day on, laager was more than the name of a defensive formation. It became the word for the Polaris Union's way of surviving as we crossed this barren country.

And though this was the first laager we had actually built since those drills, I could already feel an invisible order and trust in the way the men stood watch at their posts, topped off fuel, and took their short rest — without waiting for a command from the staff.

Watching them, I traced the road we had come in my head.

We had started in Yellowknife, Canada, dreamed briefly of settling at Jake's farm in California, and been washed as far as Tahoe by the great earthquake. Just as the thought that we might be all right settling in Carson and Fallon had begun to take root, the Palo Verde nuclear plant had blown. So we had left the unfamiliar hospitality of Carson and Fallon, driven through the night across US Route 50 — the loneliest road in America — passed Austin and Eureka, and finally caught a short sleep in Ely, at Nevada's eastern edge. And today we had run east again, crossed the Utah line that Old West outlaws would have ridden, and built a laager here, just before entering Fishlake National Forest.

We were standing now on the gateway into the heart of Utah. To the east, the vast Pavant Range blocked the way like a folding screen, and beyond it Salt Lake City, the state capital, lay a little more than a hundred miles off. Turn south, and Interstate 15 stretched away along the barren basin into the distance.

To the north were the remnants of civilization that had survived the Great Winter. Beyond the desert to the west, the aftershocks of the great earthquake still remained. And from the south, the abyss of radiation was slowly spreading.

We were standing on a brief refuge, on the fault line of every one of those dangers.

I measured it on the map. From the moment the last of the column had left Fallon Camp, we had covered seven hundred kilometers in a little over twenty hours. Colonel Gibson's wife had traveled eight hundred. More than a hundred vehicles — and not even on an interstate. On a two-lane highway.

I was still sketching the road ahead in my mind when the radio came alive again. It was Ryker, who had gone out on a perimeter recon after the bivouac was secured, before the sun went down.