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“But what about Max? What do we do when it comes down to that?”

I snort. “I've got to get through seven more before then. Maybe one of them will be gone, or maybe someone will shoot me first, or maybe Valor will get whatever they want and cancel the whole
stupid job. Maybe they're just trying to make a point, incite anarchy so that they can squash us. Maybe someone will storm Wall Street, take it all back. Stage a rebellion. Maybe something will change.”

“I wouldn't have pegged you for an optimist,” he says.

“You don't even know me.” I aim for flirty, but it comes out a little sadder and more woe-is-me-ish than I had hoped.

“Who's next on the list?” he asks, mercifully ignoring the very thing I would have ignored if he had said it.

“Ashley Cannon,” I say.

We drag Dave out the back and dump him beside his friend. They're as anonymous as china dolls behind their matching masks, and I'm grateful that I never saw their faces. The high grass is jeweled with dew around them as they disappear in my side mirror.

Wyatt leaves his car right where my mail truck used to be, hidden behind the abandoned mansion. It's exactly what you would expect a guy like his dad to give his son—an older gold Lexus with leather seats and a nav system that doesn't work anymore. My nose wrinkles up just a little bit when I see it, but then I remember how angry he was about his dad. He probably didn't ask for a fancy-ass gold car. I guess he's just as much of a victim of his parents' choices as I am of mine. He'd hidden it a few houses away before he came for me, which tells me how very serious he was when he put that knife to my throat.

It's . . . chilling.

And it's weird, having him in the mail truck's passenger seat, barefoot in his pajamas. I kind of want to ask him if needs to stop by his house for some jeans, because those thin plaid pants are just too flimsy for propriety. At least while he was moving his car, I managed to brush my teeth, put on a sweater, and clean up with some shower wipes. I don't feel quite so exposed now that I'm put to rights and feeling more like myself. But he looks like I imagine a boyfriend would look after you slept with him—rumpled and open and vulnerable. Just being this close to him feels more intimate than I've ever been with a guy. And I can't deal with that right now.

The mail truck's special GPS leads us a few miles away, onto the highway. The fall leaves glitter with raindrops, reflecting a pale, shy sun trying to break through dark clouds. We don't talk, and as I drive, I scan the road for any sign of anarchy or government breakdown. The only hint I see is an abandoned plastic fruit basket just like mine, sodden and crushed by the side of the road. A shudder threatens to yank me apart, but I snap my teeth together and ride it out. It's like when they say a goose walked over your grave, but this was one big effing goose.

How many people know that the government is no longer the government? Where are the policemen and the ambulance drivers? Will they ever answer the phones at 911 again? Are the oncologists and pediatricians still handing out chemo and lollipops? And what
part do the armed forces play in this weird, dystopian takeover? Will tanks soon barrel up the road? What's happened is like something right out of a sci-fi book or movie, except that it's happening right now, and nobody knows the rules and aftereffects yet. Will I ever pledge allegiance to the flag again?

But everything just seems normal. We pass by a Starbucks, a Walmart, neighborhoods and fire stations. There aren't drones or guns or scorch marks. Just regular people in regular cars, going about their regular business, most of them talking on cell phones, which makes me think that mine was purposefully tampered with. The drive-through at McDonald's is packed. My stomach grumbles, but I remember how watery and nasty it was losing my salad yesterday and figure I'll hold off on eating for just a little longer.

In a nagging British voice, the GPS tells me to turn down a scrubby, unkempt road. We pass another abandoned neighborhood where they cleared the land, paved the street, put up the streetlights, and ran out of money after building one lone town house. It looks like a single tooth in an empty mouth, poking up uselessly from the dry red dirt. Beyond that, there's a rundown redneck compound: a combination mechanic, deer-processing business, taxidermist, and, oddly enough, notary public. And that's when it gets really ­country. Wyatt shifts uncomfortably in his seat, one hand holding on to the handle welded to the wall. I can almost see him thinking about jumping out. Poor people must make him nervous.

We turn into a subdivision that has definitely seen better days—probably back in the fifties. The houses are small and crooked, melting back into yards grown high with weeds. Cars on cement blocks flock around them like lost sheep, and the colors are sun-bleached and sad, still dripping with rain. When the GPS snottily tells me that I've reached my destination, I park the mail truck in front of a faded gray ranch and sigh, staring at the threadbare Christmas wreath still on the door. One more month, and it will actually be apropos again.

“So what do I do?” Wyatt's hands shuffle around his hips like he's looking for jeans pockets, and I wonder where he's stashed my other gun.

“Stay here, I guess,” I say. “Just stay out of my way. I know what I'm doing now.”

He sucks air through his teeth and leans back against the passenger seat, which is where the driver's seat usually is. It was weird, driving the mail truck the first time and trying to figure out where the yellow line in the middle of the road was from the other side of the vehicle.

“You think these people deserve it?” he asks.

“Not my business.”

“But if you had to guess?”

“No one deserves to be shot down from behind a fruit basket,” I say, holding in my temper behind clenched teeth so I don't rile up the neighbors. “But my mom didn't deserve to get cancer, either. It
doesn't matter if it's fair or not. It just . . . is what it is. If I don't do it, someone else will.”

“I guess cows don't think it's fair that people eat them.”

“Just let me get this over with so I can eat a burger,” I say, and by the way his nose wrinkles up, I figure he's a vegetarian, or maybe he only eats organic.

I slip into the back of the truck and yank my Postal Service shirt out of the fridge, shrugging into it like it's made out of slime and yellow jackets. It's cold and smells like gunpowder. I keep my chest pointed away from Wyatt as I tuck the gun into the back of my jeans, slide on my shoes, roll up the door, pick up the basket, and get the card ready. The entire process is smooth compared to the bumbling joke I was this morning in Wyatt's front yard.

I jump down, my feet unsteady on the overgrown sidewalk. The Preserve has been running wild for only a few years, but this nameless neighborhood has languished for decades. It's weird to think of people going to the trouble of buying a house and then just letting it go to shit, but that tells me a little bit more about how the economy came to suck. Everybody just took so much for granted.

Wyatt watches me from the passenger window like I'm a wild animal that might be rabid. It occurs to me that I left the mail truck running with my only key in the ignition, and he could easily slam on the gas and get the hell out of Dodge, leaving me without my stuff, my GPS, my other gun, and a way to escape from Ashley ­Cannon's
crappy house before the neighbors show up to take me down, country-­boy style. But he's just sitting on the passenger side, one bare foot up on the dash, and he smiles, just a tiny smile, like he's glad to see me watching him back. Somehow, deep in the pit of my belly, I know he's not going to leave me here, dead in the water, even if it would make his life easier.

The walkway up to Ashley Cannon's house is both completely different and utterly the same as the one up to Robert Beard's house. Yellowed grass pokes up through the cracked and puddle-riddled sidewalk, and the screens over the windows are all ripped up. The house is a faded gray that could have been any color, twenty years ago. I think I'm going to feel worse about Ashley Cannon than I did about Robert Beard. Whatever Ashley used credit to buy, it didn't improve anyone's life very much.

I ring the doorbell, and a dog starts barking and scratches at the door. A guy yells, “I'm coming. Shut up, dog. Goddamn!”

The distinctive
shick-shick
of a twelve-gauge shotgun behind the door silences the barking. It's a pretty common greeting for ­strangers in my county, but sweat breaks out all over me. Balancing the fruit basket in one hand, I whip out my gun and hold it sideways under the basket, my jittery finger on the trigger. Does this guy know what's going on with Valor? Are his neighbors dropping like fiscally irresponsible flies? Will he even open the damn door, or is he going to just shoot me right through it?

While I wait to feel a hole blown in my chest, I struggle to straighten my posture and smile, which feels so wrong and awkward under the circumstances that it's more like a chimp pulling back its lips to show scared teeth. The door snaps open just a few inches, and two black chasms poke out slowly over the chain. Behind the shotgun barrels, the man's eyes are wary and bloodshot.

“That for me?” he asks.

“That depends,” I say with cheerfulness I don't feel. “Are you Ashley Cannon?”

The gun pokes out a little more, and I take a step back.

“Who's asking?”

“Just your friendly postal carrier.” I waggle my eyebrows and lean the basket forward enticingly, covering the gun as I get a better handle on it. My hands are so sweaty that it keeps slipping. My face is starting to hurt from smiling so much. I just want this to be over. And I can feel Wyatt's eyes boring into my back like two red-hot pokers.

Ashley undoes the chain and opens the door enough to stick his head out over the gun. He's your average country guy, in his late forties, wearing a camo hat and sporting a dark beard. There's something familiar about him, but honestly, I've seen a thousand guys like him at the pizza parlor and at Walmart and at church on Sunday mornings, when my mom forces me to go. I look down and am unsurprised that he's wearing a NASCAR shirt.

“Do I know you, missy?” he says, leaning closer and squinting.
But he doesn't drop the gun. A river of sweat runs down my back, but my shoulders are burning and my hands are freezing and I'm about to drop the gun again.

“I don't think so,” I say. “Because I don't know your name, and you still haven't told me if you're Ashley Cannon or not.”

His eyes light up with recognition, and his face breaks out in a snaggletoothed grin as he puts the shotgun down. “You're Jack's girl, aren't you?”

I was cold all over before, but now it's like an egg full of lava cracked over my head, and I can feel my face filling up with red and all my nerves firing at once. I bounce on my toes and swallow hard.

“Ashley Cannon. Yes or no?”

His arms reach for me, and I stumble back. “Of course I am. Don't you remember when you were just a little thing, and—”

It happens so fast that I'm not sure which of us pulled the trigger until I see a hole bloom in his chest, inches from Rusty Wallace's teeth. Ashley fumbles for the shotgun and falls to the ground, his mouth opening and closing like a fish trying to breathe and his eyes all but popped out of his head.

It was me. Oh God. It was me. My finger slipped. I couldn't hold on to the gun, and I squeezed too hard, and I feel like my finger­prints have melted into hot metal. I drop the basket and stare at my traitor hand, clamped around the gun for dear life, the finger shaking like a worm on a hook.

“Patsy,” he says, barely a whisper.

I drop the gun and fall to my knees on his doorstep. He reaches for me, his hand trembling as hard as mine as it makes a clumsy grab for my shirt, for that top button, like he wants to pull me closer.

Oh, shit. Are they watching? Does this count? I can't find his card. Everything is a mess of blood and tears and snot and sweaty, murdering fingers. I yank my face away, point the button down. He's still breathing, but it's no comfort.

Because he knows my name. And even though his lips are moving, nothing is coming out of his mouth except more blood.

“Ashley Cannon, you . . . you owe an assload of money to Valor Savings, and Amendment 7B, and we all know you sure as shit can't pay it,” I say, stumbling over the words and ending in a jerking sob.

His reaching hand falls, and his eyes go dry and empty.

And I am empty.

But the gun isn't. I snatch it up and stuff it down my waistband under my shirt, half wishing it would accidentally shoot me, too. They said suicide didn't count, but they didn't say anything about being so stupid and scared that you slip up and blow yourself a new asshole.

Trembling from head to toe, I find his card in my back pocket, toss it down, and hurry back to the truck. I pull off my shirt and wad it up and sling myself into the driver's seat. Remembering the
signature machine in the shirt's pocket, I pull it out and write ­
Ashley Cannon
in wobbling script and click accept. The machine logs it normally, and I roll it up in the shirt and remember to breathe. But before I can put the truck into drive and break some more laws, if there are any laws left, Wyatt's hand lands on my arm and stops me.