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“Close enough.” He bent to a long canvas bag at his feet, came out with a rifle that looked like a movie prop, dull metal and rounded plastic curves. “This is an HSD-11. Designed and built here. Open-bolt, selective fire, thirty rounds. Magazine release is here, safety here. It’s fully automatic if you hold down the trigger, but ammo is a problem, so don’t. Single shots and short bursts.”

He held it out, and she took it, shouldered it, keeping the barrel down.

“Good,” he said, sounding surprised. “Good. There are seven more, and ammunition. Runners will bring extra ammo later. You teach them.”

“What?”

“Teach the others. Be careful when you do, the round can be lethal to a mile.”

“You’re not staying?”

“No, ma’am.” He spun on his heel and headed for the truck.

For a moment Natalie just stared. Then, careful to keep the rifle pointed down, she hurried after him and grabbed his arm. “Wait.”

“I have a lot of rifles to hand out, and not a lot of time—”

“Listen,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the others. A pale man in a suit, his thin hair combed with great precision. A pudgy girl in a shapeless dress holding a squirming dog. A statuesque woman with strong cheekbones, her dreadlocks bound up in a brilliant headscarf. Turning back, Natalie said, “We’re all a little scared.”

“So?”

“So, there’s an army headed here, a militia of survivalists and soldiers, none of whom need to be taught

how to use a rifle. What are we supposed to do?”

“Same as the rest of us.” He looked at her, and in that moment she saw that he was frightened too. A boy, just a boy, and like all boys he had played at war, but he had never faced one. “Fight for your lives.”

Then he was swinging up into the open back of the truck and thumping on the side. It pulled away in a huff of warm exhaust.

For a moment, she imagined running after it. Then she turned and saw the others looking at her.

Natalie said, “Right.”

It had seemed so clear in the kitchen, talking to Nick. Telling him that she would join the battle. She’d imagined herself with a line of soldiers, not boys like the one who brought the rifles, but warriors. Tested, calm, ripped. Like Nick’s buddies from the army days. She’d pictured fighting beside them, though really, that had meant behind them.

It wasn’t until the bunker that she realized this war would look very different.

The underground complex was a series of broad gymnasiums with rows of bunk beds, each room connected to the others, each accessible by multiple staircases. Like the air raid shelters she’d seen in old movies, only brighter and cleaner and filled mostly with kids. The walls were bare and the sound echoed, mothers and fathers cajoling and promising and putting on a brave face for children crying and clutching at them.

She’d been so proud of Todd and Kate for not going to pieces. In truth, they’d been stronger than she was. Natalie had started to waver the moment they arrived, and when she saw her son standing with a strained look of duty, hand on his little sister’s shoulder, she’d almost broken. Surely others would fight. They were too young to leave. She would stay, would climb into one of the bunk beds and clutch her kids to her and keep them safe through sheer maternal will.

“No, Mommy,” Kate had said. “You have to go.”

Todd had nodded, straightened. “We’ll be all right.”

They were her children, her babies. She had borne them and nursed them and cut their grapes in half and read them whole libraries of books and applied crates’ worth of Band-Aids. She had a mother’s nearly psychic connection with them, would sometimes wake in the night moments before they called out, or hear their thoughts echoing in her own brain. Right now, her ten-year-old son was telling himself that he had to be a man, had to protect his little sister, and the horror of that thought had nuances that went on for days.

There is no choice here. There was only one way to defend her kids, and while it would indeed involve will, that began by finding the will to leave.

So she’d hugged and kissed them, promised everything would be okay, and made herself walk out the door and wait her turn to talk to one of the harried people giving assignments. A young man staring at a d-pad had told her which van to board, and she’d joined a pudgy girl with a squirming dog in her arms and a statuesque beauty whose hair was bound in brilliant cloth.

None of them had spoken on the drive over. Most had cried at some point. Natalie hadn’t. She was remembering something Nick told her years ago, when she’d asked if he was ever frightened doing the things he did.

“Of course,” he’d said. “Only very stupid people aren’t. The trick is to make it work for you. Use it to make your thoughts clearer and your planning better, so that you get home again.”