“They can’t get to us, can they?” Emerson asked, her eyes inquisitive, the tone in her voice one of curiosity, with perhaps the slightest hint of fear.
I met my daughter’s eyes in silence, the expression on my face a mirror of hers. I turned back to the TV, ensuring what I was witnessing was real, that the cordon surrounding Maripo County had, in fact, been breached, and the Corrupted were now flowing into the wilderness, breaking the perimeter at the border where southwest Missouri converges with Kansas and Oklahoma.
We weren’t safe anymore—I knew it the moment I tapped my phone to life and saw the news alert, covertly peeking at the headline during a lull in the movie that had been streaming on our living room TV. We were fewer than two hundred fifty miles away, so, of course they could get to us, and with no major city along that southern route, there would be little to interrupt them on the way. I felt the world begin to shift in that moment, to slowly rupture like an unstable brain clot. Whatever was to come going forward, it was clear we were never going back to the way it was.
We had been too comfortable with what was happening inside the perimeter from the beginning. All of us. When the tanks and soldiers and helicopters that surrounded the area eventually became round-the-clock news, it should have frightened everyone to their core, triggered in us a signal that one of two things was occurring: either the military didn’t have a steady handle on the situation within the two counties, or that they had it under complete control and were orchestrating its continuation. I’ll admit it: during the entirety of the siege, I believed the second possibility the scarier of the two—the idea that the whims of the government and firepower of the military were all that was necessary to take over whole communities. But within minutes of the breach, when the helicopter cameras began to broadcast the flood of white demons, a seemingly unending flow of mutants disappearing into the cover of the thick forest, bouncing on their haunches like wild white chimps, the abstract fear of tyranny was quickly eclipsed by the more primal one of survival.
