The highway ran flat as a blade... as long as the blade was an ancient, rusted one with lots of pot holes and cracks.

Heat shimmered off the asphalt, as the afternoon sun beat down on it relentlessly.

"The heat isn’t getting any easier to deal with," grumbled Lachlan, staring out the window. "I never thought I’d say this, but I almost miss the ice and snow."

"I’m just wondering when the rain will come," shrugged Elias, as he looked down at the map in his hands and then back up at the endless road in front of him. "It’s not normal for there to be this much sun and heat here with no rain."

"I find it interesting that you are still trying to apply logic to our current situation," chuckled Alexei as he tested the blade of one of his knives. "Or did you miss the ice age, the lack of time, the lack of dawn or dusk, or the zombies running around like they now owned the world around us?"

Elias was silent for a moment, and Sera felt a bit sorry for him. It was one of the hardest things in the world to overcome... the idea that what you knew was no longer a thing.

By the time she died in her last life, she still hadn’t accepted that the laws of nature, the laws of physics, and the laws of man were no longer the thing that controlled everything. She had prayed every night for four straight years for someone to come and rescue her, and yet... they never appeared.

In this new world, fathers would sell their daughters, mothers their sons for just a bit of food.

Whatever they thought should be normal wasn’t. It was just the fact that they never knew how privileged they were until everything was gone.

Then, there was a new normal.

And even Mother Nature seemed to agree with that idea.

"Then why don’t we just forget everything that we used to know and start learning the new rules," suggested Sera, her fingers raking through Luci’s slime filled fur like it was nothing. "After all, we had to learn what was normal as a baby, let’s just pretend that this is a new start for all of us."

Maybe that was the key to surviving this time around.

"Don’t assume anything," she continued, almost like she was talking to herself. "Or maybe just assume that everyone wants to kill you. Either way, we need to figure out how to go forward. Looking back will just make us stumble."

Taking in a deep breath, Sera felt her creature approve of her words.

She was already doing it, finding interesting things in what she never would have thought about before. She had never really seen a frog in person, now she has.

She had never really had a conversation with someone from the Fold, and now she has.

She never heard someone speaking with her own voice, and now she has.

She had never died before, and now she has.

She was no longer living in a cage of her own making. She didn’t have to please her parents, she didn’t have to submit to Adam and the physical cage that he had her in.

The world was brand new, and she was going to enjoy every minute of it.

The creature inside of her hummed in agreement. It had never known what the outside was like, so it was experiencing everything for the first time with her.

And together, they were going to forge a place for themselves that no one could take away.

Zubair grunted in agreement while Elias hummed and nodded his head. Lachlan stuck up his thumb, but didn’t say anything else, and Alexei was looking at her like he had never seen her before.

"Da," he grunted after a moment. "I agree with her."

"Then that is what we are going to do," nodded Elias, taking a deep breath. Looking down at the map in his hand, he folded it up and put it back in his backpack. "Let’s figure out a new normal for all of us."

The silence in the truck wasn’t thick or heavy, it was peaceful and comforting.

------

The truck ate miles like there was no real place to go, but just driving forward was a type of freedom. Wind hammered through the open window and dried the last phantom of swamp from Zubair’s skin.

Every few minutes the wipers squeaked over a windshield already clean—ghost habit after a night that left no proof.

Sera leaned her forearm on the sill, her fingers slicing the white glare, and her white hair whipped straight back, tangling with the seat headrest behind her.

Luci’s head rode between the seats like a boulder with ears, his eyes half-lidded with only the occasional offended huff when a stray gnat decided to land on his sticky fur and get caught.

Elias stared out of the window, his fingers twitching now that he no longer had a map in his lap. He never really appreciated how much something that you didn’t really think about became a habit before you knew it.

Alexei sat spine-straight, his hands loose even with a knife nearby. His eyes were on the horizon the way men watch a fuse, waiting for something to blow up.

Lachlan had his boots on the sill between the seat and Elias until Zubair cleared his throat once; the boots found the floor like they’d been trained.

No one spoke for a stretch, and everyone was okay with that.

A sun-faded sign flashed by—EXIT 14, an arrow toward a paved road that clearly hadn’t been touched in a very long time. Weeds and grass grew over the road, forcing the concrete to split in random patterns.

Zubair took it without warning. The truck pitched, and loose pavement rattled the undercarriage, and a pair of crows lifted out of the ditch with the bored outrage of birds who’d already seen everything.

Within a short distance, a farmyard appeared. It was clearly long abandoned: the metal gate rusted to a frozen shrug, a silo dented on one side by a storm that must have happened a long time ago, a porch slumped forward as if it was giving up on life.

But the house had good bones, the yard had shade, and the wind found its own way through both.

Zubair cut the engine and the sudden quiet rang.

Luci hopped down first, the weight of him causing a soft earthquake.

He shook with full-body offense at memory, fur turning to storm cloud before it settled.

He sniffed the exact corner of the porch where nothing now lived, huffed judgment, then flopped into the triangle of shadow under the truck like a king discovering his throne.

Lachlan rolled his shoulders and stretched until his spine popped. "In the interest of learning a new normal, I vote we never attend another frog convention. I want a shower, food, and to forget the night that the frogs came. And not necessarily in that order."