“Cold, Daveney.”

  The cold seeps into my dreams, interrupting an otherwise peaceful sleep. The room feels damp. I wonder if we’ve left the window open and maybe it rained. My nightclothes feel damp, so it must have been a bad one. I must have been really out of it to miss it.

  I roll over towards Daveny’s side of the bed to steal his warmth. He isn’t there. It’s all empty, cold wood, slick under my fingertips. I try to be asleep as long as I can, the way I do in the early mornings.

  I want to prolong freedom and comfort, so I hang on as long as I can, but the cold in my toes won’t let me be. I reach out for Daveney again, finding nothing but cold, damp wood.

  Briefly, I wonder if perhaps he’s gone out already.

  "Cold, Daveny," I murmur again, opening my eyes and staring at the bare, rotten floor of a room I don't recognize, falling apart and in an advance state of decay.

  Confused, I sit up, numbly calling for Daveny and trying to process my surroundings. I close my eyes and take a deep breath, as Mom taught me, counting to ten before I open my eyes again.

  I appear to be sitting in a bedroom, but it isn’t mine. I’m on the floor, but there is no carpet, just a few patches of brownish rot with no identifiable color or pattern, revealing rotting wood underneath. Scraps of wallpaper remain, garish flowers like something I once saw in an old Polaroid taken before I was born, peeling, yellowing, and ragged, revealing bare holes in the wall full of rotten wood and the occasional bright green sprig.

  A bed has collapsed on one side of the room. Its mattress is little more than rotten fluff, but the metal remains, rusting in a heap. At its foot is a hope chest, the lid pried away and rotting at an angle from the floor to the bed, revealing stained boxes, sun-bleached shoes (pink pumps, I believe), and some faded, cracked cards with faint images and outlines of people. The floor beneath me slants to the window, dropping several feet, like an obstruction in a video game.

  I stand up and dust myself off. I’m still in my jogging pants and a thin shirt. There is no glass in the window, and the breeze blowing through it is heady and damp, like impending rain. I’m still barefoot and my toes are pink from the cold. Grime sticks to my clothes. I try to brush it away, but it’s easier said than done.

  Careful across worn glass, I slip to the window and look out. I have to remind myself to be calm again, my breath wanting to speed up and my eyes wanting to lose detail. I force myself to look, to pay attention to my surroundings.

  I’m in a swamp. Buildings rise out of the mire, crumbling, leaning, some with some sort of vine strung between them. What appears to be some sort of elephant herd moves below, a big one with short, straight tusks raises its trunk and trumpets. Massive birds circle once overhead, the flock looping once before taking off for the horizon. Vines creep along toppled streetlights and powerlines, the bare metal roofs of cars rise out of the mire. Billboards and signage have fallen down and rest where they fell.

  I spend some time mutely watching the elephants below. I can’t move from the fixed point at the window, looking into an unfamiliar cityscape haphazardly thrown into a bog for some reason.

  The worst part is, I don’t recognize any of it. I can't place any of the buildings. The cityscape doesn't ring any bells. I can't even think of any elephants that live in swamps. A damp breeze cuts through me, making me shiver. The sky overhead is heavy and gray, giving everything a washed-out cast. Small droplets brush against my skin.

  Thunder rumbles, soft but present. There’s a nagging at the back of my head, the voices of my parents, prodding me, reminding what to do next. I almost hear their voices as if they’re next to me, saying the same things they did when I was little, words they thought would get me out of any situation.

  "Minka, keep this under your bed." As soon as I hear that, I react, moving to the collapsed bed and pulling it apart. A vividly brown moth takes flight, and a large, hairy spider with a white abdomen crawls across the back of my hand, docile and mellow. I dig through rotten rags, splintered soft wood, and shards of metal until I find what might have once been carpet.

  I get excited for a moment, false hope when I realize what I'm holding is an old, junked purse, which looks like reddish crocodile hide and feels like plastic. The inside has mostly disintegrated, leaving some rattling pill bottles and a few plastic cards in a cracked wallet. The face on the ID is a black woman I don't know, married, an organ donor, AB-...

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  I read her birthdate several times before putting it away. I'm quite sure it's wrong, or it's a gag ID and I don't get the joke.

  There's nothing here, nothing useful anyway. It’s all mold and rot. The bag was always store under the headboard, near the edge so I could reach it at night. Even if the duffle rotted away, the plastic first aid kit, metal can opener, and firestarter should have remained. The food and water would have gone off, but the packages should still be here.

  “Check the dates like you would the battery in the smoke detector. Make sure it’s still good, just in case.”

  When was the last time Daveny and I had a Survival Stash is Expiring Trail Mix party? When was the last time I went and bought more emergency rations? Replaced the water bottles? I never move the bag otherwise, I even swap it out right here. I sit back and look around. Is this even our bedroom?

  The layout looks familiar, something about the way the closet lines up with the window and the off-its-hinges door, but I don’t recognize anything else. Weird.

  I get off the floor and dust myself off again. I’m shivering. I should start looking out for signs of hypothermia, or something. I should find shoes, more practical clothing, so I go look in the closet. More rot, tattered shreds hanging off rusted hangers slipping off a collapsed beam. It smells, damp and moldy.

  Something blinks at me from a hole in a wall before scampering away. There’s some well-oiled men’s dress shoes on the floor, or used to be, dried and cracked and way too big and dirty for my feet. Sighing, I step back and stare into the closet for some time, and then sit back down on the spot I woke up from.

  I start to wonder if I wait long enough, maybe Daveny will come home. Thunder rumbles out the window, one of the elephants bellows. Rain begins to patter inside, and I’m painfully aware if I wait here for him I might get worse than a chill.

  I try to remember anything useful. Find shelter, duh. Shelter should be warm, dry, and relatively clean. Other animals should not be living there, ideally. Does that come second? Am I supposed to see what fire and rescue are doing first?

  I go back to the window and look down. It doesn’t look like there’s much of a rescue effort going on. I don’t see any people at all, and I can’t hear any sirens or…anything. Just rain and the occasional bellow of a swamp elephant. It’s cold here. The storm’s picking up, making the building creek.

  I can’t stay here much longer. Maybe there’s a way to the bottom? And a dry path out of the swamp? My teeth are chattering. I have to look. The door is off its hinges. It’s splintering across the middle, sagging against the wall. I step past it, mindful of splinters, feeling for soft or sagging spots in the floor, which collapsed in the hall, preventing me from checking the next room or the bathroom.

  I edge carefully down the hole, looking down into a trashed living room with furniture I didn’t buy. The layout is familiar, the master bedroom on one side, the spare bedroom we made our gaming room on the other, and the bathroom in the middle.

  If I could get past that hole safely, I wonder if I would find Daveny engrossed in a new game, offering me second player if it’s co-op and to watch if it’s not. I call out for him and get no response, so I move on down the stairs on my right.

  Suddenly, I’m nearly up to my hip in the floor. Pain cuts through my hips, knees, and ankles, along with raw, red throbbing from my right hip to knee. I can barely feel the floor below under my toes as I catch my breath, shaking all over and spending way too long stuck in the floor.

  I work myself out slowly, listening for creaking in the boards beneath me, or someone coming to find out what I’ve done. My favorite yoga pants are torn and I’ve got some good-sized welts and scratches, probably tetanus, too.

  The floor below the stairs is stable, but damp. The tiles are peeling up, some gone completely and others moved out of place, showing bare cement underneath. I limp into the kitchen, finding the refrigerator on its side, supported by what’s left of the kitchen sink. To my left is the front door, missing entirely and leading out into the swamp, and through the right is the living room, through which I can see the patio doors and what looks like dry land on the other side.

  Given the choice, I pick the dry land, take careful footsteps toward a faded red couch with several rips showing the stuffing and the footrest permanently engaged, completely unlike anything I’d ever owned in my life. The coffee table is nothing but a rusted frame bending in on itself and broken glass. A massive flat-screen television set has pulled off its mounting, causing a hole on the wall and a little of plastic and glass I’m careful to avoid. If I look back into the closet under the stairs, I can see the hole I left in the stairs.

  I go carefully over the glass. Most of it has been polished smooth by weather, eroded away, but I don’t want to make any sudden moves. I climb out onto the patio, with ruined plastic deck furniture, overturned in a heap, and guarded by a cement wall, growing thick with moss in places. There’s a hill on the other side of the wall, easy enough to climb, my toes digging into soft, glass-free dirt. The city continues on the other side. I’m quite certain that this is supposed to be trees, I’ve never explored how thick between our apartment and the fast food or grocery store or whatever on the other side. I’m looking down into a vacant parking lot, with weeds and trees pushing through the cement. It’s damp but not as flooded as the area in front of the apartment, which probably means this is higher ground, or something.

  I crest the hill on all fours, and then sit down cross-legged to brush dirt and a painful wedge of something that didn’t quite break the skin. Lightning breaks overhead, following a small rumble of thunder. I look skyward, watching the clouds darken, and rub my sore thigh. I wonder if someone might be in the tall parking lot.

  It doesn’t look like any sort of business we normally get around here, some sort of restaurant on the bottom and an office building, hotel, or apartment or something on the top, connected back to my building and the one to my left by skeletal walkways.

  I get up and start walking toward it, shivering and bracing myself against the cold. I take steps down the hill carefully, to keep from stumbling. There are cars in the parking lot, none of models I recognize.

  They’re rusted, most without rubber on the tires, the rims bent. Few of them have glass, none of them are SUVs or pickups, or anything particularly large. One has the cover for the gas port hanging open, and instead of a cap or valve it’s a power cord like on a laptop. It’s frayed and dangles limply in the breeze. I feel like I’m being watched, that creepy feeling you get when you’re alone. I steer into the skid by calling out, but no one answers.

  The rain starts to come down heavier, prompting me to hurry, slipping under the awning formed by how the roof meets the wall, standing in the shadow of the building and staring at the menu on display, divided in half between “lab grown” and “all natural.” The lab grown samples are really strange and even pricier than the already outrageous other side, rare and endangered, in one case even outright extinct, animals, many of which don’t even sound appetizing.

  The windows still have glass, but it’s in pretty bad shape. The lock is broken off the door, which is hanging wide open, revealing the waiting area. The hostess’ podium is knocked over and menus litter the floor near benches whose plastic covers are torn or thin in places, but not too bad. With the rain picking up outside, I step inside