"Bach, did you always do.... that?" Ava asks while they march. The others lag behind.

“Do what?”

“Well, kill people, I guess – like last night with Sawyer. It seems to come easy for you. Killing. Back before the world ended, were you a soldier? Or, I don't know – were you just some kind of.... killer?”

"No, Ava,” he chuckles, “I was a salesman."

"A peddler? Or a trader? Like one of those evil men that call themselves Human Resources?"

"Well, in a roundabout way, perhaps – but I didn't traffick in people. My ware was a thing called 'insurance'."

"What's that?"

"It was a service – like a promise to help if things took a wrong turn."

"And you made folks pay for that?"

"Not just me. It was a major industry, with many thousands of people doing the same work all over the world."

She snorts. "Sometimes it's a lot easier to see how things got this fucked up.”

When they arrive at the road upon which Human Resources had been traveling it is a mass grave and the sun has nearly set. A dirty green sign designates the road as: HWY 50. They're passing through a place which was once called Canon City. Everywhere Ava can bear to look, she sees stalled cars and trucks and motorcycles and motor homes, burnt-out and riddled with bullet-holes. Tires beyond flat; disintegrated. Dead bodies on board.

This isn't the caravan they escaped. This isn't what's left of Big Traffick, as Sawyer had called it. No way. These vehicles aren't outfitted for war – these were just regular folks. And they have been decaying here for a very long time. A crumbling egg-shell of gray ash sticks to everything like the aftermath of a volcanic eruption. Skeletal drivers sit behind their steering wheels with smaller skeletons in the back, still strapped into their car-seats.

Ellie shambles along zombie-like. Uma and Uri navigate the treacherous landscape hand-in-hand and with their eyes shut. Ava wonders how they manage not to trip – do they echo-locate like bats? Whatever the case, she's jealous. Her eyes sting with tears and she can't stand to look anymore and she seizes white-knuckled upon Bach's poncho.

“Don’t stare,” he warns her, “for your own well-being.”

“What is this?” she asks, her eyes now closed. “Do you know what happened here?”

“A hopeless exodus,” he explains, “similar horrors occurred everywhere.”

“But, why this place?” she wonders. “Why did they all come here to die?”

“This is a highway. They didn't come here, per se. They were going.”

“Bach, sometimes you talk like you're an alien.”

“There is no evidence aliens exist.”

“Yeah, like that's exactly what I mean.” She laughs half-heartedly. “That right there.”

He smiles down at her though she can not see it with her eyes tightly shut.

Mile after mile the road is clogged with the evidence of a decades-old massacre. Ava counts her steps in an attempt to control the nervous impulse to open her eyes and for a while it's working – but her foot kicks something and she can't help but sneak a peek. It's a stray segment of skeleton—an arm or a leg or length of spine—sent skittering ahead along the cracked asphalt, crumbling as it tumbles. She squeezes her eyes completely shut again and tries to imagine anything else. And without warning Bach abruptly halts her march with his outstretched hand and in a single motion sweeps her behind him.

“Let us pass,” he demands of someone Ava cannot see, “or we'll do this the fun way.”

“There's a toll,” shouts a man, some distance away.

“No exceptions,” says a woman, much nearer, a smirk in her voice.

“We have nothing to give you,” Bach explains. Ava peeks and sees the woman standing a few car-lengths ahead, a sawed-off shotgun held on her hip. She wears a tall mohawk and a sleeveless vest which reveals wires festering into the flesh of her biceps. She's like Bach – some sort of cyborg.

“We just got off Big Traffick yesterday,” pleads Ellie. She reaches out to take both Uri and Uma by the hands and starts leading them back the way they just came, never turning her back.

“That's a sad story, but a toll's a toll. There are no exceptions,” the woman explains, gesturing with her sawed-off. “But I mean we're reasonable brigands. I'm sure we'll find something for you to pay with.” Then for a moment it's like time has frozen. The woman is that fast—a veritable blur—and suddenly she's standing right beside Bach, stroking Ava's cheek before she even has a chance to flinch. “Oh, what is this?” she purrs and in the next moment Bach snatches her by the wrist and Ava hears the weird grinding, groaning from within him and the sparks begin to spit out from between his lips.

“Get back,” he croaks.

“Earl!” the woman shouts, “they've got one! An Ava!”

“No shit?” Earl shouts back. He's another twenty or thirty feet beyond his accomplice. He's standing up through a hole cut in the roof of a school bus, holding a rocket launcher on his shoulder, pointing it in their direction. “We're rich!”

“Get away from the girl,” Bach snarls but the woman snatches Ava by the arm.

“If I won't let go,” she cackles, “you gonna zap us both?”

“Nope.”

Ava's ears ring painfully. The whole world is suddenly silent except for her own breathing, shallow and fast. Bach holds the pistol in his fist, its barrel smoking. He has drawn and fired before anyone could react. The woman goes slack and collapses straight down the way a building implodes during demolition, smacking against the hood of a car as she falls and spattering Ava with blood. It is warm on Ava's cheek and it is all surreal and suddenly the sensation is of floating free from her body, dispersing into a trillion bits too small to feel anything – let alone terror.

Bach deftly strips the shotgun from the woman's grip as she falls and pivots and fires a blast at Earl in the school bus to keep him from using that bazooka for at least another second and then he grabs Ava and they duck behind a car. He attempts to pass the revolver to her but she pushes it away.

“You can do this,” he says, “I know you can.”

“I can't! I can't!” she screams, “I don't know how!”

“Just hold it in both hands, like this,” he steadies the gun out in front of him with two hands and pretends to aim, “line up your target in the sights, inhale, and squeeze the trigger.”

“How did you do that?” she asks.

“Ava.” He passes her the gun once more, and this time she takes it. “There is nothing in this world which you cannot learn to master.”

“It's like a game—” she muses to herself, turning the pistol over in her hands. “Like you're my class trainer and you just taught me a skill.”

Bach doesn't pay her any attention. He peeks out from their cover just for a fraction of a second and then he tells Ava, “I will draw his fire and lure him out from his cover.”

“And then I will gun him in the back.”

“Yes, if you are able.” He crouches like a sprinter. “In the back is safest.”

And he bolts out into the open, firing off another shotgun blast mid-stride.

Ava sits with her back against the car, trying to stop her whole self from shaking. She replays Bach's instructions in her mind: hold it in both hands, line up your target in the sights, take a deep breath.

And squeeze the trigger.

Can she do it? Can she kill a man? She looks at the gun and there—suddenly—is a flickering label, similar to that which she saw the night before on Bach's flask:

There's no time to make sense of it. There's no time to wonder if experiencing these various video game elements in the real world means she's turning into one of the lunatic Scum like Sawyer had suggested. Bach is on a dead sprint with Dirty Earl's bazooka trained on him. Gut-check time. Ava raises up with her elbows planted on the hood of the car. Bach veers sharply and Earl is forced to lean out wide to continue tracking him. Ava holds the gun in both hands. She's steady. She peers down the sight. Breathes in.

And squeezes the trigger.

The muzzle flashes and for a fraction of a second it's all math falling like rain before her eyes—angles and trajectories and the roll of a die—and it's all too fast to make sense and then in the next instant Earl's head is blown half off and the bazooka tumbles from his grip and clangs on the ground. His torso bends wickedly and his top-half flops against the roof of the school bus like a jack-in-the-box with his brains eking out onto the highway below, glob-by-glob. Beyond the carnage she sees Bach pop up with his eyes wide, and then she sees him exhale from relief and he jogs toward her. She looks at the gun in her hand with terrible awe. She has killed a man and it was so easy.

“Critical hit,” Ellie says, having suddenly reappeared with Uma and Uri beside her. She looks at Ava the way Ava looks at the pistol. “You really are Ava.”

“Are you okay?” Bach asks. He kneels beside her.

“I don't know. Guess I'm better off than Earl over there.”

“You did great,” he says, “I knew you would.”

“It doesn't feel great.”

“I'm sorry.” He scans the area. “But the gun-play will draw their accomplices. We gotta get outta here.”

“You think there's more of them?” Ellie looks around as if she'll see more assailants any second.

“It is an absolute certainty there will be more.” He turns to Ava and offers the sawed-off. “Do you prefer to keep the pistol or would you like to try the blunderbuss?”

“I can't do anything with that,” she laughs at the thought of it – her, wielding a shotgun!

“Then here,” he unstraps the gun belt and its holster from his waist, ”you should take this.”

Bach leads them off the road and over a fence and through an alley and Ava and the others can hardly keep up – let alone look around. But when she does manage to take in her surroundings she sees that everywhere is devastated, burned, ashen, dilapidated, and foreboding. Not a window unbroken or un-boarded up. Bach halts their advance to peer around the corner of the alleyway. Ava inches up close to him.

“It looks like a nuclear bomb went off,” she whispers.

“That is one possibility,” he answers without affect.

And then he hears something. He cocks his head and holds one finger up to silence them and Ava and Ellie and Uri and Uma all stop breathing.

Suddenly there are voices closing fast from the far end of the alley—back from where they've just come—and Bach grabs Ava with his cold steel grip and drags her so that her feet can barely touch the ground as he sprints ahead. The others clamber after, panicked. And Ava tastes the salt before she even realizes she is crying.

Bach hurries them across a street and around back to the rear entrance of a mother-in-law's cottage and he tries the door but it is locked. Kicking it open would be too loud – their pursuers would find them easily. The windows are all boarded but they scramble around looking for one they can pry open and instead Bach finds a window un-barricaded and with its pane intact. It slides upward smooth and easy – almost too good to be true. He braces with his back against the cottage wall.

“Climb me like a ladder,” he says, and he boosts the others up and in, one-by-one. Then he lifts himself inside and carefully slides the window shut behind.

Inside the cottage it is dark and the stale scent of dust clogs their noses. The only light is from the window through which they've just crawled. As her eyes adjust, Ava sees trash in the corners and a mattress on the floor. Outside, the muffled voices of their pursuers, a conversation which is indecipherable but gut-wrenching all the same.

“They're going to find us,” Ellie whispers, “I don't want to go back to Human Resources. I won't go back!”

Bach moves to her and holds his hand over her mouth but it is too late – they've heard her from outside.

“There's a window over here,” one of them says.

Bach clutches the shotgun.

And on Ava's hip the pistol weighs heavier than ever.