Read Lost Everything for Free Online

sister had told him this was coming as they stood on the ragged edge of a field. Watched the wind fall across the tall, dead grass, bright yellow under angry gray clouds. A desiccated red barn shaking on its beams. This earth, this sky, will come for us, she said, it’ll get tired of us and come. And what comes after will be beautiful, even if we’re not allowed to see it.
    No wonder it was happening now, Sunny Jim thought. After what we had done.
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    THEY WERE IN THE back of a delivery truck on the road out of Harrisburg with four other people, all down to what they could carry. The highway was broken by craters, clotted with the wrecked exoskeletons of military equipment. The remains of some hard miles. They passed a checkpoint after the sign for the Super 8, where the driver sweet-talked the soldiers into letting them go without inspection. They had nothing the soldiers wanted anyway. Across the river, they could see the lights from the army camp at Marysville, hear the murmur of a bullhorn across the water. The soldiers having to pacify themselves as much as the people they conquered. Soon the truck was swerving along the river valley’s side. The hills to the right steep and jutting, a radio tower’s single signal on one summit. The river to the left, slipping past dark clusters of islands. Betraying nothing of its strength. The southbound lane teemed with a long, unquiet line of people swinging torches and whipping animals. The chatter of confused children. In the places where the highway seemed to hang over the water, they could see up the valley, the refugees’ lights drawing a chain across the foot of the slope. They were taking everything they could and going. The truck with Sunny Jim and Reverend Bauxite in it the only thing heading north. If either of them had glanced outside, they could have seen the looks. The shock and pity, the jokes and prayers. Why would anyone want to go up there?
    They curved onto a long ramp over the water, where the islands fell away, the valley opened out, and the river swelled wide. It was cutting the hill in half, tearing the wound wide. The ridge was ragged with the river’s assault, fell to the shore at steep angles. Covered in foliage, leaning trees. Rocks shaking loose from the bleeding wall. The highway, the giant Clarks Ferry Bridge, a toy amid all this violence. Once it had shot across the gap over the water, the river unperturbed around its monumental pilings. It would have pulled it all down in time. But the war got to it first, took down the bridge’s middle third. The western end then fell all on its own, leaving the eastern end a jagged pier, its length ending in crumbling concrete, bubbled asphalt. Metal beams jutting below. The rubble from the explosion was gone. The river had made its bed with it, and the birds had returned already to the bridge’s underside, built nests in the blackened steel. Their cries bouncing off the water’s sleek surface. All the while, the river dug deeper. Bringing the mountain to its knees.
    Up on the bridge, people waited on the pavement. Pairs, groups of three, of five, with small livestock muttering in cages. A dozen children wandering back and forth from the ramp to the bridge’s edge, trying to make friends. They had a game with a ball of rags tied together until an errant throw sent it into the water. They watched the river take it away from them. Then started playing cards, rules involving slapping, punches in the arm. Evening brought fog that hung in suspense, threatening to become rain. Lanterns and small fires flared. Low voices. Someone humming. They huddled together for warmth as the river seemed to widen in the fading light, gather water far beyond what the Juniata brought in tribute less than a mile away. As if the whole world were water below them, rising into the air. They could smell it, taste it. The earthy musk of plants and soil, curdled by dead fish.
    Near the end of the bridge, a woman had hung a