The End of Cake

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes...?

—Shakespeare

Make the cake you’ll serve with pride.

—Betty Crocker

CHAPTER ONE

I stand there on the side of the ridge, staring down into the wasted valley below, where all I can make out through my crappy binoculars are a dozen shattered boulders, a three-mile expanse of cracked clay, and the very top of a McDonald’s arches—two yellow islands sticking out of a gray, lifeless sea. The air quality, of course, is terrible, and it’s getting worse the further down into the valley we go—a pungent mix of sulfur fumes, alkali dust, and melted plastic. The sunlight barely makes it to the ground through the urine-colored fog that coats the valley floor. Behind us, a cold wind rushes down from the ridgeline above, scouring everything in its path like a hail of frozen Brillo pads.

All of which confirms the opinion I’ve had for the last 18 years—the post-apocalypse fucking sucks.

We’ve been on this desolate trail, Bob and me, for I can’t even remember how long. It feels like months. Maybe it is months. We’re exhausted. We’re hungry and thirsty. We have little hope of surviving much beyond the next two weeks. And we can’t stand each other.

“Dude! Wait!” Bob’s voice floats up the trail behind me, a demanding whine that’s been scraping at my nerves ever since we left the village—well, since we were kicked out of the village—an endless stream of kvetching and keening, which is beginning to feel like something worse than the apocalypse.

If Bob is the future of the human race, then maybe we should all just jump off a cliff into the nearest pool off flaming magma and be done with it.

Ignoring him, I push ahead down the trail. His calls only grow louder.

“Dude! Seriously! Not even kidding back here!”

We were never friends, Bob and I. Before we were cast out of the village (for very different reasons), our relationship was limited entirely to those times when Bob, with nothing else to do, would show up at the bakery I ran out of my hand-built shack and expend enormous amounts of energy making fun of me. You’d think that in the post-apocalypse it would be really hard for someone to be a spoiled jerk, but somehow Bob’s figured out how to do it. Maybe it’s his youth (he’s only 21); maybe it’s the big pile of Thrasher magazines, rescued from a destroyed mall, that helped form his worldview; maybe it’s heredity—the asshole gene passed down through generation after generation of over-privileged slackers. Maybe it’s just the apocalypse itself, the sense that nothing matters, least of all civility, in a world that has thoroughly and holistically gone to shit.

“Dude! Stop!”

He’s actually running now, huffing up the trail like someone twice his age. Wait, that’s not fair—I’m twice his age, and I’m always way ahead of him. (Despite the ruined state of the world, I actually try to exercise occasionally. Bob, not so much.)

“Fuck, dude, there you are.” He comes to a wheezy halt, leaning one hand up against a splintered tree trunk, as if to keep from falling down. “I seriously need to chill, bro. And I’m totally famished. What do we have to eat?”

“Um, we don’t have a lot, partly because we had breakfast less than two hours ago.” I sit down and open my pack and root around inside it—because I know that Bob will keep pelting me with complaints until something, anything, hits his stomach. “We have 3 cakes left. You can have a quarter of a slice, but then that’s it until dinner. Okay?”

“Cake is lame, dude.” Bob slumps down on the side of the trail, reminding me of a hamper of dirty laundry dumped out all at once. He leans an elbow on a flat rock, sticks his boots out and grins at me.

Bob may be ignorant about pretty much any subject you might care to bring up, but when it comes to getting under my skin, his genius is unparalleled.

“How many times have we talked about this before?” I say, with a reflexive sigh. “You don’t actually know anything about cake. Therefore, any opinion you might have of cake is completely worthless.”

“Give it up, Pete.” Bob pushes his dopey grin out to the edges of his face. If it weren’t for this grin, which gives him the appearance of the classic village idiot, he wouldn’t be a bad-looking kid. A mop of shaggy blond hair, squinty blue eyes and a perky little nose give him a look that was once commonplace on the beaches of southern California half a century ago. And if he ever worked out and got rid of the baby fat that pads 40 to 50 percent of his body, he might actually look like one of those now-extinct surfers.

“Cake is over, homeboy. Dead and gonzo.” He grins wider. “Especially now that you’ve been banished and can’t make it anymore. You’re the last of your kind, bro.”

“That is not true. I will make cake again—I promise you that.” I wave a hand through the air, shooing Bob’s words away like a cloud of radioactive gnats. “Anyway, cake is not something that can die. It’s eternal.”

“Dude, you’re hilarious.” He shows me a well-practiced smirk. “Jake was going to outlaw cake even if we hadn’t gotten banished. He probably has already.”

“Please don’t mention that name to me ever again. No one can outlaw cake. Cake is part of our civilization. Cake is happiness. Cake is joy. Only a misanthropic, self-loathing asshole, such as Jake, could even think about outlawing cake.”

Jake was the tribal leader in our village, as well as a giant barbed thorn in my ass. He was a prime example of the self-righteous, self-absorbed meathead, one of those obsessive athletic types who see in the apocalypse a validation of everything they’d being doing before the world turned into a steaming pile of waste: the spinning classes, the paleo/no-sugar diets, the Tough Mudders and hot yoga, the smug selfies on Instagram. The kind of people—and it’s amazing how many of them survived the apocalypse—who actually seem to revel in the world as it is now, carrying hand-carved spears, wearing loincloths, and dragging women into the woods to fornicate. Jake may have engineered my removal from the tribe, but he can’t stop me from making cake. He will take away my pans and mixing bowls only when he pries them from my cold, dead hands.

“Too late, dude.” Bob rubs his pink nose. “You were the only one making cake, and now you don’t have your bakery anymore, so it’s over—get used to it, homes.”

“I’m not the only one.” I close my eyes and take a deep breath—an essential part of my Bob-coping process.

“Huh? Oh, you mean your friends’ village on the other side of the Wastes? Larry’s tribe, right?” Bob perks up a little. The idea of finding another village, where he can resume his obnoxious, mooching ways, is a source of great comfort to him. “How many more days till we get there?”

“Quite a few, unfortunately,” I say. “We can’t even really think about it until we get across the Wastes. Which isn’t going to be any cakewalk, let me tell you. We’ll be very lucky to make it across alive.”

Bob guffaws. “Ha, cakewalk—you’re funny. All you ever think about is cake. Okay, whatever. I’ll take that half slice now.” He shrugs and holds out a grubby hand, as if he’s actually doing me a favor by reducing my stock of precious cake.

It’s physically painful to give it to him, but knowing it will shut him up for at least a few seconds allows me to do it. Then I sit back and watch him eat it, much the way people visiting a zoo before the apocalypse would watch the animals at feeding time. Bob crams the cake into his face and violently works his jaws to get it down his throat, as if worried that another hungry animal is going to try to take it from him.

I climb to my feet.

“Let’s go,” I say, shouldering my pack and starting up the trail. “We’ve got a lot of walking to do before nightfall.”

With a groan, Bob wipes the crumbs from his mouth and hauls himself section by section to an upright position. “So how many days to the Wastes?” he asks, hurrying to catch up with me.

“Bob, I told you, first we’re going to the mall to try to find you some gear. There’s one about a day’s hike up this trail. At least there was two years ago, the last time I came this way.”

Bob shrugs. Clearly, being prepared for the horrifying and/or life-threatening difficulties we’ll likely to encounter over the next few days is something he is steadfastly uninterested in.

“What time’s dinner?” he asks.

***

Having rarely left the comforts of our old village—such as they were—Bob has no idea what lies ahead of us. Fortunately (or unfortunately) I do. I’ve been across the Wastes before. I know what things live out there, and I know how critical it is to avoid every last one of them. The part of the wilderness we’re in now isn’t bad by the standards of the post-apocalypse. There are still a few trees standing upright, a smattering of hardy oaks and maples, which are doing their best to grow leaves and angle their branches up toward the meager sunlight. You might even see some fairly normal-looking critters skulking through the underbrush—a raccoon or a squirrel, possibly even with only one head—going about the arduous task of finding uncontaminated food. Sure, there are plenty of stretches of dead forest, the occasional polluted lake, and the toxic ruins of our once highly touted civilization, but for the most part life here is supportable. We had a decent farm in the village, where we grew wheat and barley, carrots and potatoes, some cabbage and lettuce. I was able to make my cakes using the village’s wheat, eggs from the scrawny chickens we managed to keep alive, honey from our beehives, the wild vanilla and cinnamon I found in the woods, and my homemade vinegar and baking powder. Life was hard, but it was doable—with the obvious exception of the aforementioned meathead Jake, who ruined everything.

Out in the Wastes, a two-thousand-square-mile expanse of unadulterated apocalyptic awfulness, there are horrors Bob can’t even conceive of. The worst dregs of what’s left of humanity—sociopathic survivalists, messianic militia, doomsday cults, misanthropic nomads, etc.—have taken up residence out there and actually embrace the kind of Mad Max–lifestyle that’s really their only option. Belief systems that once could find expression only in the deepest and most unregulated depths of the Internet have become fully realized, championed by those who’d always felt alienated in the globalist, pop-culture, celebrity-driven, social-media age of the early 21st century.

So yes, the Wastes are to be avoided at all possible costs, but that’s exactly where we’re headed. My old friend Larry, who split off from our tribe six or seven years ago, has a village in the Eastern Woods, on the other side of the Wastes—at least he did a few years ago, the last time I visited him. Despite everything, I honestly hope Bob gets there one day and sets himself up with the same comfort and lack of responsibility he enjoyed in the old village. I haven’t actually told Bob this, but at some point out there in the Wastes, our paths are going to diverge. I am headed north, pursuing what may very well be no more than a ghost—one that has haunted me for two and a half years.

The first inkling I had of this ghost came from a craggy old trader who would pass through our village every three or four months, hawking the usual assortment of dry goods, tools and clothing scavenged from ruined malls and big box stores and from other, less savory places no one else dared to go. On one of his visits, as I was perusing his wares, my eyes fell upon a well-used cake pan. Turning it over in my hands, I noticed a hardened scrim of yellow batter along the bottom inside edge—clearly a post-apocalypse baking event.

I asked the trader where he’d gotten it, and at first he was a little evasive—traders rarely like to divulge a lucrative source of goods—but finally he gave in and told me he’d procured it from a tribe of nomads in the north of the Wastes, in a place known as the Hollows. These nomads apparently had no use for cake pans, other than to drill holes in them and use them to filter water, and they were happy to part with one for a reasonable price. But where had the nomads gotten the pans? Unfortunately, they were a little shifty about this. All they told the trader was that the pans had come from the Baker, a mysterious entity who lived in the very center of the Hollows, but whom no one had actually laid eyes on.

Whenever the trader passed through, he always had some item just for me—a measuring cup, a mixing spoon, an icing knife—often showing a hint that it had been recently used, a pale dusting of confectioners sugar, a light film of oil, a hardened dot of icing.

Other rumors trickled in. One of our hunters returning from a long-range hunt in the North swore she’d met someone who told her about recently eating a cupcake. A cupcake! Of course, since Jake was the chief of the hunters, in addition to being tribal leader, it was entirely possible that this was just another ruse to get rid of me or have a little fun at my expense. But it didn’t matter. The image of the Baker had taken root in my brain; the story had taken possession of my soul. I knew that one day I would have to go in search of this cake-making specter and find out for myself if the stories were true.

I just didn’t realize that that day would come as soon as it did.

Having been banished from the Village—having lost my bakery, the only thing that had kept me going from one shitty day to the next—I have nothing else now except this quest, this last chance to find out if there’s still hope for cake in this defiled, desecrated world. I will find this Baker, wherever he or she may be. Or I will die trying.

***

We continue along the trail, our legs growing stiff with exhaustion. It’s important to make as much progress as we can, but already the afternoon light is failing, and very soon we’ll have to find a place to camp for the night. It’s not a great idea to sleep outdoors in the post-apocalypse—crazy storms with 100-mph winds and violent lightning can come out of nowhere—but we don’t have any choice. Until we reach the mall and outfit ourselves properly, we’ll have to take our chances.

Deep in concentration—sniffing the air and listening hard for any sound that might be of human or other predatory origin—it takes me a while to realize that Bob is calling my name. I ignore him for a while, basically because, for a variety of reasons, I think it’s important to do so, but soon enough I hear the discordant smack of his feet and the wheeze of his overburdened lungs as he rumbles up behind me.

“Dude,” he rasps. “Dude, I need to take a break. I’m like … totally … dying.”

“We just took a break,” I say, without slowing down at all (in fact, just to be a jerk, I actually speed up a little). “We need to make at least another three miles before we camp. Seriously, we do not want to stay in this part of the forest for any length of time.”

“Huh?” Bob jacks his eyebrows up in concern. “Why not?”

“Oh, man, there are all kinds of terrors around here. We’ve been really lucky not to have run into any so far.”

“Wait, seriously?” Bob swallows thickly. “I thought the bad stuff was all in the Wastes.”

“Nope, there’s plenty right here where we are.” I’m trying hard not to crack a smile—as big a douche as he is, Bob will believe literally anything that comes out of my mouth. And it’s really hard not to take advantage of that. “You just don’t know what’s going to jump out of the woods and try to turn you into dinner.”

“Fuck. Like what?”

“Well, let’s see. Rabid eagles, for example.”

“Rabid eagles? What the shit are rabid eagles?”

“Oh, they’re motherfuckers, ridiculously huge—10-foot wingspans. They come swooping down on you out of nowhere. See, before the apocalypse, they just ate pigeons and rodents and fish. But something happened to them during the apocalypse, turned them totally psychotic. Now they’ll attack anything that moves. And they love liver, especially human liver.”

“Dude. No way.” Looking entirely freaked out, Bob searches the skies above us.

“Course, there’s also plague rats,” I say. “Those are always fun.”

“Plague rats?” Bob works to control his breathing. “For real?”

“Oh sure, great big swarms of ’em. First thing you hear is a sound kind of like distant thunder, and then the next thing you know they’re all over you. Even a small swarm of them can reduce an adult human to a skeleton in about a minute and a half.”

“Oh … my … fuck.” Bob’s eyes dart back and forth from one side of the path to the other, no doubt searching among the gray ferns and tangled undergrowth for beady red eyes and pointy snouts.

“The list goes on and on,” I say.

“Are you really serious?” It’s clearly a plea—Bob hoping against hope that I’m only making fun of him.

“Jesus Christ, Bob.” I shake my head. I can’t take it anymore. “Of course I’m not serious. Rabid eagles. Who ever heard of such a dumbass thing?”

For a long moment he continues to look at me, as if he’s lost the power of speech. “That is so fucked up, dude,” he says, finally, in a wounded voice. “Like, I’m already pretty tense here. That could’ve seriously pushed me over the edge.”

“And I’m banished,” I shoot back. “So we’re even.”

I quicken my pace.

Stumbling once, Bob rights himself and hurries to catch up with me again. “Hey, wait, dude, come on.” The urgency in his voice—or maybe it’s a little tinge of fear—keeps me from making another wisecrack, even though at least three of them are trying to jump simultaneously out of my mouth.

“Come on, hold up.” He slaps at my elbow. “You’re just still pissed at me, aren’t you? For all those times I came down to the bakery and joked about cake. You’re holding a grudge.”

“Um, yes, I am. Absolutely.”

“I mean, what the freak, bro?” Bob shakes his head, frowning. “Why don’t you just let it go? Let pythons be pythons.”

“Ah, that would be bygones.”

“Huh?”

“Let bygones be bygones. Oh, never mind.”

“Whatever, dude. Point is, you should forgive me. We have to work together here. Like, for survival, bro.”

“Forgive you? I’m supposed to just forget all those times you tormented me? Easier said than done, Bob.”

“Come on, don’t be like that.” Bob shakes his shaggy head. “We’re both banished. So we should be like a team. A post-apocalyptic dynamic duo.”

“No, Bob, I’m banished,” I correct him. “You’re on the run from Jake, who for whatever reason wants to kill you. Remember? That’s a very big difference in our current situations. If we run into Jake out here, I’ll be fine—my exit from the village pretty much settled things between us. You, on the other hand, will die a very slow and painful death, possibly over a period of days or even weeks.”

Bob stares at me for a moment, and then slowly shakes his head. “Dude, that’s harsh,” he says.

I shrug. “Welcome to the post-apocalypse.”

***

The craziest thing about the end of the world is that none of us ever actually figured out what caused it. In all the old Hollywood movies, there was never any doubt—it was a giant asteroid, or a great flood, or aliens from space. But when the real thing happened? We had no fucking clue.

I was on my way to work, stuck in traffic as usual and listening to some shitty music on the radio. The next thing I knew my car was literally flying through the air. The ground rippled, the air filled with dirt and debris, and everything went dark. I felt like I was being sucked into a vacuum cleaner, and I remember thinking, with only mild surprise, wow, a tornado—I never imagined I would die by tornado.

Weirdly, of course, I didn’t die. I woke up to find my car half buried in dirt and other crap, the windshields smashed, the air bags deployed. I was pretty beaten up—definitely a couple broken ribs, a split lip and a big lump on my head, but otherwise I was okay.

Total fucking miracle.

For a long time I just sat there, assuming that first responders would show up any minute and take me to the hospital—I was going to have an amazing story to tell people at work the next day. But a couple hours went by, and no one showed, and finally I dragged myself out of the car and found myself in a world I no longer recognized.

It’s hard to describe those first days and weeks after the apocalypse, as I stumbled around trying very badly to keep my shit together. Everything I remembered was gone, as if it had been simply erased from the surface of the Earth. The entire landscape was gray, covered with ash and cinders and other unidentifiable debris. I’d been on my way into a midsized Midwestern city—there’s no point actually naming it—but it was gone. Just completely fucking gone. Which made me think that the journey in my car wasn’t a few hundred feet but a few hundred miles—a reverse Wizard of Oz, going from the brightly colored, LED world to one that was as monochromatic and desolate as Depression-era Kansas.

The crazy earthquakes we had about three times a day didn’t do anything to help my mood—I probably should’ve been killed on 25 different occasions. When not cowering in a fetal position while the world caved in around me, I saw insane, unbelievable things. From the crest of a small mountain range, I saw, to the north, a fire that ran from one horizon to the other—maybe it was the city I’d been commuting into on the day of the apocalypse. It was hard to tell. It looked like the place where Hell had broken through the crust of the Earth and unleashed its demons on humankind. I went the other way.

Then, a few days later, coming to the top of another peak—which I was pretty sure I’d hiked before—I found an ocean—water as far as I could see. Before the apocalypse, oceans had generally been confined to the east and west coasts and weren’t encountered in the middle of the country. Again, I turned and headed in the opposite direction.

Finally, I found people, a bunch of them all wandering in a line, and with no more than a nod here and there I got on the back of the line. It was the beginnings of our village. For a few weeks we kept wandering, scavenging what stuff we could—there were still buildings standing here and there, and we gathered up supplies, tools, canned goods, whatever we could find. Eventually we got sick of wandering, and decided to make camp. We found a river that seemed relatively uncontaminated, and we started to build.

Jake showed up one day with a small group, and we took them in. We continued to scavenge, and Jake and his crew hunted, and then we started up some crops. I decided to start making cake—I’d always loved baking, but the idea just hit me one morning, as I lay half asleep in bed. It was like a vision, like a spirit coming to me in a dream and telling me what I had to do—I woke up actually smelling cake.

I started collecting ingredients, and then I started to bake. My first efforts involved using a pan over an open flame. I ended up with crunchy pancakes. So I started playing around with ovens—it took me forever to build one that held a constant 350 degrees. But once I got it down, the rest fell into place. My first cakes were pretty tough, more like big scones than cakes, but as I experimented with different binding and leavening agents, I began to achieve a modicum of fluffiness. Water and a dozen pounds of powdered sugar salvaged from a destroyed Walmart gave me a good supply of icing. The bakery opened for business.

Eventually, as more survivors joined us, our little group became a village, a bone fide community. At least until Jake took over the tribal leadership and decided to get all despotic on us.

So what actually happened to the world? We never found out. Did we nuke each other? Possibly, though none of us showed any signs of radiation sickness. Maybe it was an asteroid—we’d always been worried about one of those. Maybe it was a gamma ray burst from a collapsing neutron star halfway across the galaxy. Maybe the super volcano beneath Yellowstone finally decided to blow. Who knows? Personally, I prefer to think it was something we never even knew about. Something deep in the Earth itself, a perfectly natural, self-cleansing process.

The Chewong people of Malaysia believed that the world would occasionally turn itself inside out, like a giant snake shedding its skin. There’s actually a scientific theory to back them up. It’s called Earth-crust displacement, and involves the sudden, dynamic shifting of the lithosphere, the thin layer of dirt and rock that covers Earth’s gigantic core of swirling magma. I like to think our planet can do this at will. Eighteen years ago (at least I think it was 18 years ago; keeping track of the days isn’t so easy now), the Earth decided it couldn’t take any more of humanity’s bullshit—our expanding cities and garbage dumps, our drilling and digging, our toxic emissions and deforestations—and went and shook us off all at once. The way things were going right before the end—the global warming, the endless wars and terrorism, the immigration crises, everyone at each other’s throats for reasons we barely understood—it was a perfectly understandable choice.

Clear the slate. Reset to zero.

Earth, rebooted.

***

After a short (cake-less) break we keep going, but we make only another mile or so before darkness falls. Night comes on with unsettling suddenness in the post-apocalypse—no pretty sunsets, no twilight, no dusk. One minute it’s the usual ashy gray daylight, the next you’re plunged into pure blackness, unable to see more than 6 inches in front of your face. So while there’s still a hint of daylight left, I pick out a decent campsite—a relatively flat area at the foot of a rocky ridge that will hopefully protect us against any storms—and we make our way toward it through the thorny underbrush.

It doesn’t take us long to set up our camp. All we have for cover are two ratty blankets, one to spread out over the ground, the other to wrap around ourselves. I don’t like having to sit close to Bob, let alone spoon with him—at this point, we’re both getting pretty pungent—but I have to admit he does radiate a generous amount of body heat.

Dinner is a meager affair. I started out from the village with a decent supply of food and water, most of it given to me by my former fellow villagers, loyal cake customers one and all. But since Bob showed up about 2 weeks after my banishment, literally crashing out of the woods like a hunted moose, the supply is starting to grow disturbingly light. In addition to my three cakes, I have maybe half a pound of smoked squirrel meat, a dozen hard biscuits, a jar of roasted vegetables, four granola bars, and a few handfuls of dried mushrooms and berries. I have about a gallon of water, which will have to be replenished, somehow, before we head out into the Wastes.

Bob doesn’t entirely understand the concept of rationing. After a chunk of smoked rabbit, a biscuit and three mushrooms, washed down with two slugs of water, he looks at me expectantly.

“What’s for dessert?” he says, licking his lips. “Yo, bust out some cake, homeboy.”

“Cake is lame,” I remind him.

“Gimme a break, dude.” He laughs heartily. “We’re not in the village anymore. You know I never had anything against cake. All those times I was railing on you, I was mostly, like, trying to get a certain female person to notice me. You know who I’m talking about, bro.”

“We don’t need to talk about this,” I say, concentrating far more on the dried mushroom I’m trying to break down between my molars. “Your fantasy life—not to mention your very warped concept of love—aren’t topics I really want to discuss right now. Or ever, actually.”

“Weren’t no fantasies, bro. That shit worked. That shit got noticed.” Bob kicks his legs out in front of him and releases a great, rolling belch. “Why do you think Jake wants to kill me? Because Jess digs me, not him. That’s why.”

I can’t help a loud sigh. It’s been clear for many years now that Bob has some serious social disorders—as well as a debilitating lack of self-awareness—but in the few weeks we’ve been away from the village, he’s shown a startlingly loose grip on reality. Jess was Jake’s woman, another over-muscled, humorless hunter type, of which the tribe had an unfortunate surfeit. I have no idea what Bob saw in her, other than the obvious—the long blonde hair, the tight abs, the powerful legs—but she was so far above his social station that his crush would’ve cute if it hadn’t been so delusional.

“Okay, before you go any further,” I say, pausing to swallow my mushroom with an audible gulp. “Just stop. I’m your only audience now—and will be for at least the next few weeks—so you can just stop with the bullshit stories of your sexual conquests, especially as they relate to people we’re never going to see again.”

“You think I’m lying. Well, like, I’m not.” Bob looks at me with an expression somewhere between insulted and smug. “This is straight truthing, homes.”

“First of all, truthing is not a word,” I say. “Second, please stop. I’m asking you nicely. I’m saying please.”

“Okay, so why does Jake want to kill me?” he demands. “Answer me that.”

“Bob, this is not a mystery. It’s because you’re an asshole. I don’t know the specifics, obviously, because I wasn’t there when he chased you out of the village, but I can guess. Jake is kind of unhinged—your typical sociopathic, megalomaniacal control freak—so while I might just rant and rave at you, he’s going to put a spear through your neck. That’s the meathead philosophy. Kill first, ask questions later.”

“Jake ain’t all that,” Bob says. “I could totally take him.”

“You know, the scary thing is, I think you actually believe that.”

“No doubt, bra. I’d beat his ass down, because I got love on my side.”

“Okay, that’s just embarrassing.” I hang my head for a moment—because it really is too painful—and then look up sharply. “You need to drop this shit. Forget about Jess, who’s probably forgotten all about you already—if she even knew you existed in the first place. Seriously. We’re going to be heading into some fucked-up places, and I can’t have you daydreaming or jacking off behind a bush when we need to be on high alert, when one wrong move will be the difference between living and getting flayed and eaten. Okay? Out here, there is only one reality, and that’s what’s directly in front of us. Everything else is gone.”

“You’re wrong, dude.” Bob’s eyes narrow. His expression turns serious. “Jess loves me, and I love her. And one day, once you and me are set up at the new village, I’m going back for her. She’s my woman. I’m going to claim her.”

“Oh, God.” I’d give anything right now for a pair of noise-cancelling headphones—any kind of Bob-cancelling technology at all. “Can you even hear yourself? Supposing you could actually make it back across the Wastes alone, and then get into the village undetected by Jake or any of his meathead horde, Jess would disembowel you and hang you with your own intestines before the words, ‘I claim you,’ were even out of your mouth. Bob, listen to me. Just let it go. Once we get to Larry’s village, I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding some poor thing with really low self-esteem and a weakness for ski-slope noses who will perfectly happy to mate with you—as frightening a concept as that is.”

“You think I’m totally lame, don’t you?” Bob phrases it like an accusation. But it’s a fair question. “You never had any respect.”

“No,” I say, biting into my second mushroom cap. “Why should I? All I ever saw was you making fun of cake, doing everything you could to make my life miserable, and just generally being an asshole to everyone you interacted with. What’s to be respected about any of that?”

“Dude, you had no idea what was going on outside your bakery. You were always too deep in cake. You couldn’t see anything else. You barely even knew anyone in the village. You were like a hermit, dude.”

“That’s bullshit. I did a lot of things besides making cake.”

“Yeah, like what?”

“Like … well, all kinds of things.”

“Name one.”

“No, fuck you,” I say. “I was one of the original members of the tribe. I was helping build the village while your mother was still wiping your ass.”

“So tell me this, dude. Who lived in the shack two down from you, the one with the yellow door?” Bob offers me a challenging grin.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I’m trying to make a point, bro. Answer this one question, and I’ll never mention Jess again.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.” I think hard for a moment, trying to visualize the trail leading past my shack, but already the details of the village, and the people in it, are fading from my mind.

“Oh,” I say, when the memory finally comes back to me. “Sure, it was Fred. And his wife, Delia. They ran a small kindling business out of their backyard.”

“Wrong.” Bob’s grin widens self-importantly. “Fred and Delia lived on the other side of the trail, on the river side. The shack with the yellow door belonged to Stanley, the toolmaker. He was out in the woods a lot collecting stuff for tools, so maybe you didn’t see him that much. So I’ll give you another chance. Who lived down the other way, in the shack on the left, just after the fork in the trail? You know, one side of it was covered in vines.”

“Vines?” I think about it for a moment, but then quickly give up. “No, fuck off. This is bullshit. I’m not playing your stupid little game. How about we just stop talking? Why don’t we do that instead?”

“Already made my point.” Bob shrugs.

“No, you didn’t. You’re talking shit. You’re full of shit, Bob.”

“Dude, it’s so obvious. Ask anyone about you. They’ll all say the same thing.”

“Well, we can’t do that, can we? Because we’re banished.” I throw up my hands, and then add, “Well, I’m banished. You’re just an asshole.”

Before he can say anything else, I quickly put the rest of our food away, tightly fasten my pack against any nocturnal depredations by either the local fauna or Bob, and snuggle down as deeply as I can into my half of the blanket.

For about ten minutes we lie side by side in silence. I’m incredibly tired and, despite the physical and emotional discomfort of being so close to Bob, can feel my muscles beginning to relax, my thoughts pleasantly slowing. Then Bob jerks violently.

“What about some cake?” he cries out. “Dude, we didn’t have dessert.”

“Go the fuck to sleep, Bob.” It’s all I can do not to shout.

Thankfully, it doesn’t take him long. His grumbling about being rudely deprived of baked goods is replaced after only a few minutes by his alarmingly loud snoring, which sounds like a very strong man ripping apart sheets of canvas. Unfortunately, due to these exertions of his soft palate—as well as to his bullshit quiz—I don’t hold out much hope of falling asleep any time soon and lie there staring up at the black immensity of the sky.

I can’t help thinking about my neighbors in the village. I’m still not willing to concede Bob’s point, because, even if there is a grain of truth in it, it wasn’t my fault. I worked really hard in the bakery, sometimes 16 hours a day, trying to perfect my cake recipes, so that my fellow villagers might have something sweet—something delicious—to go along with their limp vegetables and over-salted squirrel meat. So maybe I didn’t have as much time as I would’ve liked to go up and down the trail, stopping in for cups of tea or having chats in someone’s front yard. Maybe I wasn’t the most sociable neighbor, but I’m sorry, I had work to do. It’s not easy trying to reinsert a little civilization into this gray, barbaric, pissed-on world. A lot of the time, it only gets you into trouble.