Julia had just been complaining about her feet hurting from walking everywhere, when there was this mountain bike place in a little oasis before you entered the national forest, between a gas station selling firewood and a beer-liquor-lotto party depot. Steven broke a glass window to get in, just like turning a doorknob, and Julia cringed even though there wasn’t anyone around to hear it.

Inside, he lifted the most aggressively built bicycle she’d ever seen off a rack with one hand. “This costs more’n my uncle’s truck,” he said, and she didn’t believe him until he showed her the price tag on the handlebar.

“But that’s crazy,” she said.

“Feel how light,” he said, hefting it up and down like the world’s most unwieldy dumbbell. “Girls’re over there,” he said. “Let’s find one your size.”

He asked her favorite color, and she said she wanted one that was just black. Tough-looking, she thought, and indestructible.

That was when they really started traveling, gliding down mountain roads for miles, not really choosing direction so much as downhill. And after a bit, the land evened out, and it was like a vivid dream, riding through the vacant countryside and looking into nicer houses out of curiosity and not just when they needed food and somewhere to sleep, or shelter from passing rains that were never that cold anyway. Some of the houses had been broken into and obviously picked over, but they never saw anyone alive.

And then one morning, they’d stopped and Steven was doing something to the bikes, turning them upside down and spinning their wheels and squinting, his little wrench set out and mumbling about brake rub and truing up alignments. Julia saw a little house ahead and shouldered her small pack, the one with the pony, and said she’d be back.

The house was almost a cabin, tucked in the side of a hill. She saw windows open and a screen door hanging loose, and thought it must have been gone over already, but she walked up anyway. Inside the doorframe, peeking furry tendrils out into the world, a lush carpet of mold spread across the floor, undisturbed by any footprints she could see.

Inside, the air was musty and humid and made her eyes burn. She put a bandanna over her mouth and nose and squinted. The kitchen appeared undisturbed, even though the window above the sink was open too, letting in a breath of fresh air. The drawers and cabinets were full of scratched silverware and plates, and the sink was empty. A pantry yielded—yes, there it was—peanut butter, canned tuna! Bagged rice! Brightly packaged cookies and cereals! She dumped cans and cans into her backpack; after exploring the rest of the house, she’d bring Steven back.

Her pack a triumphant weight, she peered into the living room. It was as preserved as a museum exhibit, with a fine coating of lavender dust. An old floor-model console TV faced a long sofa, and the fireplace had been used for real fires. Looking closer, she saw fine black-rice grains of mouse droppings along the fieldstones of the hearth.

Frame studio photos on the mantel showed a man in a plaid shirt with his arm around a grinning woman with puffy hair and slightly skewed teeth; they both rested a hand on opposite shoulders of a little girl who looked like she was in first or second grade. She had lost one front tooth and beamed, gripping a plush stuffed pony.

The good photos didn’t yellow, Julia knew, and there was no way of guessing how old the picture was. Probably the girl was grown with kids of her own when the world ended. Something glimmered under the dust beside the photo: a gold-colored bracelet. She picked it up, leaving a blemished ring in the dust of the mantel, and blew. There was a stone set in it, probably a fake diamond, but who cared anymore anyway, if it looked pretty? An engraving read Every Girl Deserves a Pony.

Making her fist small, she squeezed the bracelet on and swung her hand, admiring. She’d never had jewelry, really, and at school the bangles and makeup had been for silly pretty girls, the popular ones, who’d stare if she talked to them as if she had a disease; now she thought, disease—who’s contagious now.

Upstairs, she pushed open the first door, and took a moment to process what she was seeing: lumpy piles under sheets, and on the pillows, messy hair and loose jawbones at angles. She’d been prepared for this. Finding bodies made all the vast absence less crazy, the remains of people who had been here and died.

She left that room alone and went to the next, pushing open the half-to door, her pack swinging. Maybe she’d thought no one else was dead here. But then her pack got so heavy her knees shook.

It was a kid’s room, done in pink wallpaper, and with posters, some framed and some peeling from tacks or tape, of all kinds of horses. Brown, black, white, galloping and at rest, manes draped luxuriously or blowing in the wind. The bed was a tangled nest of sheets and stuffed animals and pillows. A tablet rested upright on the floor, with dolls arrayed before it: pink and purple My Little Ponies, among others, in a semicircle as if watching the dead screen. The little girl herself was a heap in the middle of them, lying down, a few plastic cups and empty Fritos wrappers near her feet.

Shrinking flesh had pulled back, revealing just one missing tooth in front. Julia’s brain stopped, wondering if it could be the same tooth from the photo, if the shot was that recent before the collapse, freezing time in a way. She imagined the rapid-fire series of events: the happy family home from their photo shoot, then the beginning of the end of things, riding it out and telling themselves they’d be OK, and then the disease and the parents dying first in their own bed, and the little girl gathering her animals around. Had her tablet still worked, had she been waiting for it to turn back on?

Julia stumbled down the stairs, choking in the thick air as she forgot to hold up her handkerchief. She was already down the driveway before she remembered the frail bracelet on her wrist. She didn’t know why she hid it from Steven, or how long she’d been weeping when she got back to him, only that it was so much more than she could explain, the little dead girl in her room. Somehow in a dream logic, Julia had been that little girl, and the pretty little house and the loving family was what she’d never admitted to wanting so badly, for her and Shawna both, who was also surely dead out there somewhere, along with all these other whole lives that were now never going to happen.

Julia couldn’t explain to Steven, why she wouldn’t go back when he went to the house himself, to fill his own pack. After that, she didn’t go into houses alone anymore, and he was careful, not asking her about it more.