It's a two-and-a-half-hour drive north to the border, but time pa.s.ses slowly when you're terrified and disconnected.

We encounter toll booths every twenty minutes, and I'm thrilled to see them. Not Dallas-he breathes out a sigh after we pa.s.s each one. I know we might be caught for kidnapping, but if the police catch us, the worst they'll do is turn me into a zombie. I'm more afraid of being eaten or sold by the locals. Cameras and guards have always been there to protect me, or so I thought. In their absence, I fidget and groan in the backseat until Mom has to shush me.

Most of the houses we pa.s.s are dark, but the odd one is lit like a billboard. I figure those homeowners are waiting to ambush any cars that break down. A few cars pa.s.s us on the highway, headlights blazing like demon eyeb.a.l.l.s. I expect each one to slam its brakes, skid to a stop and tear up the highway after us, scythes and pitchforks hanging out the windows.

That doesn't happen. No one notices us at all.

"Will you stop with the groaning?" Dallas mutters.

"You're keeping your sister awake," Mom adds.

I am never going to make it in a town without walls.

"Why can't we cross the border at Buffalo?" Dallas asks when we start heading east.

"Too risky," Mom says. "Rebecca says Freaktown is the safest border crossing left."

Dallas and I groan in unison.

As we approach Syracuse, the toll-booth operators smile at us. "Christmas shopping?" they ask.

After Syracuse, the highway leads to nowhere but Freaktown and the border, and the guards are not so friendly. "Where are you headed?" a butchy white woman asks at the last toll. She surveys our salt-and-pepper family with a scowl.

"We're going to a funeral," Mom says.

Hopefully it won't be our own.

EIGHTEEN.

We hit Freaktown sooner than expected. I thought we'd see blackened forests or glowing craters or shanties on the outskirts, but there's an ordinary town ahead, flat and dated, at the end of an empty highway. There's an official welcome sign that says the population is 120,000, but it's at least thirty years old. It's been painted over with the words, Welcome to Freaktown, in six-foot letters. I shiver when the headlights reveal the sign. Not because I'm scared of Freaktown, although that's true enough, but because the bottom of the sign is scrawled with the word, WITHSTAND. We're driving slowly. The sign does not blur by. I am not imagining things. The word WITHSTAND stares me in the face in my darkest hour. It's like G.o.d is talking to me. I don't like it.

The highway turns into Freaktown's main street, the only route to the bridge north. The road is broken and b.u.mpy but not much worse than where we've come from. There's no other way to go forward. "Maybe we should wait till morning," I suggest.

"Don't be silly," Mom says. She turns down the high beams, dials up the heat, checks that the doors are locked. We breathe shallow and cringe into our seats.

Abandoned fast-food restaurants fringe us on both sides: Denny's, MacDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell, Dunkin' Donuts, Arby's, Jack in the Box, Pizza Hut, A&W, Baskin Robbins, Quiznos, Domino's, Hardee's, Dairy Queen, Roly Poly, Church's Chicken, Burger King, dozens of them side by side with gas stations, empty for twenty-five poisoned years. Bits of siding, lights and drainage pipes are torn off the exteriors, and if we had the b.a.l.l.s to stop and look inside, we wouldn't find appliances. But the sh.e.l.ls are intact, happy and colorful after all these years under a brutal sun.

I've studied North American history but I've never imagined anything quite like this. This is a landscape paved in grease and gasoline, prosperity and peace. A world where everybody had a car and a doctor and a right to an education, where entire lifetimes were spent in weekend shopping sprees and drives to the beach just to look at the waves. It boggles my mind, the number of people with cash required to make this street exist. "What do they eat here now?" I ask. "Do you think there'll be roadblocks?"

"Shut up," Dallas says. "You'll scare your sister."

"She's asleep."

"Shut up anyway."

"They're not going to eat us, honey," Mom says, but really she doesn't have a clue.

After the last fast-food restaurant, the road climbs a hill. Mom slows at the crest, expecting to descend into total darkness. But the town below us flickers with light. Smoke rises from chimneys, windows sparkle in a rainbow of colors.

"Oh my G.o.d," Mom whispers. "I forgot it's Christmas."

She eases the car down the slope.

Freaktown does not look like the Freakshow footage. It's just a rundown town, probably rundown long before the disaster. The main street is lined with three-story stone and brick buildings with stores on the bottom and apartments on top, nineteenth-century stylinga"patterned brickwork around the windows, recessed entrances, wooden awnings. The original signboards have been painted over in several languages to read, Doctor, Appliances, Food, Housing, Trade, Clinic. Most of the gla.s.s in the display windows is still in place, and where the windows are broken, they're boarded up and painted to look like vistasa"forests, oceans, fields of wheat, white gabled houses with rabbits in the yard. This is not what reality programming led me to expect. You need a fully functional brain to transform a broken window into a view.

"What's their power source?" Dallas asks.

Mom shrugs. "Solar?"

"It could be fish oil for all we know," I mutter. "Do they have guns?"

The streets are wide and clear. We're the only car moving. A few ancient vehicles are parked at the curb as if someone might hop in them to deliver pizza at any moment. No one does. You'd think it was three in the morning instead of ten thirty at night.

There are no joggers, no partiers, no criminals, no one.

"Where are all the freaks?" Dallas asks.

"We must be in the wrong part of town," Mom says.

"Wrong for those who want to find freaks?" I ask. "Or wrong for those who want to stay alive much longer?"

Mom ignores me. Dallas rolls his eyes like he really is my father. I don't like sitting in the backseat.

"There's something going on ahead," Mom whispers.

We're in the heart of town now. The alleys are strung with colored lights, doorways hung with wreaths of vines and dried apples, stumps of old telephone poles topped with straw dolls shaped into angels and steel wires bent into stars.

People emerge from a building up ahead, dozens of them, maybe hundreds. They pour out of ma.s.sive double doors onto the sidewalk, pushing strollers and wheelchairs into the street fifty yards ahead of us.

"Were they waiting for us?" I ask.

"It's a church," Dallas says. I don't know if that's an answer.

They keep coming out, some on crutches, some carrying babies, some with their arms draped around others. They look more united than any people I have ever seen. They fan out along the road and turn to us, caught in our headlights.

Mom idles in front of the church. I stick my face to the window.

Two men in long ministerial robes follow their congregation outside. They stop when they see us, their hands lifted halfway up to their neighbors' shoulders and held there as if they're waving. Beside them is a nativity scene made of painted wood and a white sign that lists the hours of Christmas sermons in English, Spanish, Mandarin.

Blankets cover the strollers and wheelchairs and some of the people on their feet. Others wear bulky coats with scarves wrapped around their heads. It's hard to tell who's normal and who's freakish. They don't look like Freakshow contestants. They just look poor and sick.

They stare at us like they're scared, like they've been caught in headlights before. They don't scream or surround the car. They don't beg or steal our stuff. They just stare in silence. And then they step aside. An old woman close to the car waves her arm with a graceful flourish and everyone clears a path for us to travel.

Mom drives so slowly that I make eye contact with people as we pa.s.s them. A mother bends over her stroller and raises the enormous head of her deformed child, murmuring soft words and pointing at our car. A girl Ally's age with bulging eyes lifts her straw angel to my window and makes it dance. I give her a thumbs-up and she smiles. I smile back at her and wave. Suddenly everyone I pa.s.s smiles and waves at me, and I hear a hundred shouts of "Merry Christmas!"

"It's just a town," I mutter as we leave the crowd behind with their rundown storefronts and heaps of garbage and recycled decorations. "I don't think the world is exactly what we've been told."

Ally wakes up when we get to the border, like there's a tracking device in her patch and she's alerted to the fact that she's leaving zombie territory.

We glance at her nervously. She looks around but says nothing, asks nothing.

There isn't one other car at the border. I was expecting long lines of people pacing beside their vehicles, babies crying and moms hushing toddlers, old people asking what's going on, police ushering suspicious drivers inside for strip searches. But there's just an empty road blocked off by metal gates with two armed guards standing directly in front of them, staring at our car. A squat brown building to our left houses more police officers, computer networks, jail cells.

"All right, everyone," Mom says as she pulls into the light. "Someone will ask us questions now. Just answer them calmly."

Dallas bounces his leg up and down, twists in his seat, scratches at his wig. Mom lays a hand on his shoulder. "Just do what you've been doing for the past two months. You're Patrick Connors. You're taking your family out of the country. Understand?"

He takes a deep breath and stills. He flips down his visor and catches my eye in the mirror. I watch with amazement as my father's face says, "Here we go."

There's a knock at Mom's window. She rolls it down.

"Good evening, ma'am." The guard has a thick accent I can't place, some part of the world where the income is low. He takes us in with big brown eyes fringed in lashes so thick he looks like he's wearing mascara.

"Good evening," Mom says.

"Pa.s.sports please."

She pa.s.ses him all four. "We have these too," she says, holding up our id cards. He looks at the cards curiously. "These are first issue," he says. "We just got ours up here. They're a little different."

"Really?" Mom asks.

He nods. "You'll get the new ones when you renew, I expect." He hands back the cards and looks through our pa.s.sports so thoroughly I a.s.sume we're the only car that's pa.s.sed his way today and he's short on reading material. He opens each one and stares from the picture to the person three times, reads the description and stares back at the person, then flips through the pa.s.sport to see where each person has been, which in all our cases is nowhere.

"Do you understand that you're about to leave the country?" he asks.

"Yes," Mom says.

"Where are you headed?"

"We're going to visit my niece." Mom clears her throat and forces a casual tone. "We have some papers for her from her mother. She died. My sister, I mean. Not my niece."

The guard's eyes move while Mom speaks, pa.s.sing over each of us. "Do you understand that this is a one-way border at the present time?" he asks as he stares at Dallas.

"I do," Mom says.

"And the only means of returning to this country is via your emba.s.sy through a reintegration process that takes ten to twelve weeks?"

"Okay."

"And you are responsible for your food and lodging during the entire ten-to-twelve-week waiting period?"

"That's fine."

He taps our pa.s.sports against his palm and says, "I have to run these against a criminal database and then you're free to go. You have your car registration?"

Mom tugs the paper from her visor and hands it to him, still folded.

"Thank you." He disappears into the building.

"I think he's a zombie," I whisper. "Did you see his eyes?"

"It's hard to tell with adults," Dallas says. "But he didn't search the car."

"No one cares if you take problems out of a country," Mom says. "It's smuggling them in that's hard."

"Do we have to do this again on the other side?" I ask.

She nods. "Just past those gates is another set of gates."

"And past them?"

"We'll see when we get there."

The guard is back and he's brought two friends, a tall black man with a pencil mustache and a stocky white woman with cropped blond hair. They stand with their hands clasped behind their backs while the mascara man approaches. "Mrs. Connors? Mr. Connors? We have reason to believe you're harboring a minor who is not your child."

Mom stares at him, dumfounded.

"You must mean Dallas Richmond," Dallas says.

"Yes, sir. Is he in this vehicle?"

"No. Our son wanted to bring him, but he didn't want to come."

"Do you know his whereabouts?"

"I believe he went to Texas."

"Step out of the car, please."

They don't take us into a room and shine lights in our faces, ask questions, check our stress levels. They stand us up at the side of the road, cold and isolated. It feels like they're going to shoot us.

The tall guard and the woman search the cara"under it, on top of it, inside it. They remove our bags and open each one, shift the contents around with gloved hands. They unroll my tent, pat it down, roll it back up. They flip down the backseats of the car and lift up the floor of the trunk to reveal a spare tire no one knew was there. They even check under the hood, as if we might have a six-foot kid curled around the engine.

The mascara man asks us about Dallas.

"I told him he'd have to leave with his own parents," Mom says.

"He didn't want to come," Dallas adds. "It was our son who wanted to bring him."

"He said Coach Emery told him to try out for the Dallas football team," I say. "He's been confused since his vaccination."