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love they gave returned in kind. And if not that, then at least to foster some feeling of caring, of attachment to their home, to their family, to them. That dream had gone unfulfilled.
    These emotions were not a part of her. She didn’t remember if they ever had been, but if they had, they had been burned out by the time she arrived at her new home in America.
    At first it had been “love will conquer all,” “give her time” and various other platitudes disguising their irrational hope. Later it had been counselors, psychologists, even an attempt at medicating her that went nowhere because she wouldn’t swallow the pills. She had no interest in being somebody else. In later years, the attempts to bond her into the all-American family unit had grown half-hearted at best. Eventually, she spent most of her time at her school, just coming back here for the occasional holiday visit or sometimes a few weeks in the summer.
    She wasn’t sure why she had worked so hard to get to this house, to see this wreckage. But what else was there to do when the world fell apart? Maybe she just had to be sure there was truly nothing tying her to her old life.
    Now the home she had grown up in was just the same as the others on this street. It was mostly collapsed, with splintered boards and roof tiles scattered across the street. She stood contemplating the ruins of the house for a moment.
    Suddenly she spied movement out of the corner of her eye. She snapped her head that way, back in the direction from which she had come. Down at the end of the block she saw dog again. It was walking up the sidewalk towards her. When she looked at it, it stopped, looking back at her.
    She turned away, frowning, and regarded the house again. Out of the corner of her eye she watched the approach of the dog. It came all the way up the sidewalk to her. She kept her hand close to her knife, but made no other moves. For a moment she feared it was going to sniff her, or lean against her, but it didn’t. It sat down next to her, a few feet away, also looking at the ruins of the house.
    They both kept that position for a few minutes, until she turned to the dog and spoke.
    “This is not how things are done.”
    She wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but it seemed sufficient. It broke the stasis. They looked at each other for another moment, then both moved into the wreckage of the house. The dog padded carefully over things, sniffing them, satisfying its curiosity, and she followed more slowly, digging through scattered clothes and lifting broken boards to look under them and see if she could find anything useful. The one advantage of having visited here so often was that she knew what her parents had owned, and where in the house things had been.
    It was surprising how many things were either torn and mangled beyond use, or buried too far under the wreckage to be accessed. She did find a pair of sturdy leather hiking boots that had belonged to her adoptive mother. She put them on, replacing the ragged sneakers she’d been wearing the day she left her school. She also found a pair of cargo pants in what remained of a dresser reserved for the clothes her parents kept buying her even though she didn’t want them. They would serve better than her jeans, which already had several rips in them, so she changed into them.
    She found her adoptive father’s gun safe, crushed under a section of roof along with the rest of the closet the safe had been in. The door had sprung open, so accessing it was no problem. The insides were somewhat disappointing. Most of what was left was damaged, and therefore useless, but a few of the best long guns were gone, as were both of her father’s pistols. She supposed her father had taken them out, probably when the Fall began. There had been gunfire all over the city in those first chaotic days. She guessed this meant that her parents had gone somewhere else, and were not buried here in the wreckage of their home. She was not