It has been a long road to find home. After I lost Sam, I drifted for awhile. Literally, for over a year at one point, after I commandeered a larger boat. Most of it blends together into weeks and months of numbness, especially those first few years.

I'm careful with her camera, always charging it whenever I find a working power source. It's all I have left of her. This camera, and my memory of a better time. When we were still innocent to the bitter nature of the world. Eventually, Sam's voice becomes my conscience.

I can't say how I end up in the States or what compelled me to start sketching the ruins of the world. Maybe someone has to. Maybe there needs to be something for after the end and I've always had the need to catalogue lost civilizations. Even if it's our own.

It's so hard to trust again. So hard to let myself go with another person. I tried once, while I was in Boston. But it didn't last. I couldn't trust her not to die. I couldn't trust myself not to fail her and Tess isn't the kind of person to trust easily, either. The only person she came close to trusting is a man named Joel. A bitter man I shared a drink with once. He hadn't talked much.

A few years before I met her I started adding people to my sketches of ruined cities. I capture all the sadness and all the exhaustion, and those sparks of hope that are so hard to kill. It's so easy to let myself believe there's still hope, but I've traveled thousands of miles and there's no place that's safe. No place to call home again. If it's not infected, it's the hunters, but they all die the same. It's one the things I'm best at.

Once, I had expected to never come home again. I relished the thought. Explore and learn, quench a never ending thirst for knowledge. But there aren't many people left who care about the ancient world. The lessons we can learn from the ancients are those that are being taught the hard way now. At first, I'd tried to salvage what I could, from libraries and museums, but there's only so much I can carry, and very few ways to read digital data these days.

I keep drawing the world I find, I keep my notes, I'm so careful with all of that. And when it hits me, that people some day might care again, a seed plants itself within me. It's a hope I latch onto, something to keep me going. The first seed that pushes me beyond just surviving day to day.

With Sam's camera, and with Sam's ghost directing me over my shoulder, I record an oral history of the old world, and the new, and I transcribe their words for the eventuality of when the camera breaks down. It doesn't have much time left. I've had to replace the viewscreen three times.

In Wyoming I nearly end up shot, but I convince the townsfolk I'm not a raider. There's even a familiar face on the wall. That's how I found myself sharing a drink with Joel again. He's older than I remember, but he always had about ten years on me. He has the same lines I do on his face. The ones shared by those of us who still remember life before. Survivor lines. Everyone has them, but the younger generations have them in different places. Harder lines, the lines of children who never had a childhood.

I ask him about Tess, and he doesn't need to say it for me to know. I just didn't expect it to hurt so much. Or to make me so angry. We both go silent, remembering that firebrand bitch. It lasts too long, so I prod him to talk about something else.

There's something different about him. He looks so alive. There's hope in his eyes and I want to know more. This town, the first one I've ever seen that is almost normal, isn't the only reason. He tells me about this girl, Ellie. He makes it sound like he took care of her, but reading between the lines, I think she was the one that took care of him.

The longer I stay, the less I want to move on. I've talked to a lot of the townsfolk, recorded the stories of the willing. It's not easy here. But I've always been one to pull my own weight, and the scientist in me never quite got buried. There's a new kind of society developing here. The future, our future in a post-infected world is going to start here, and in towns like this all over the world and that part of me wants to be there to see it happen.

It's one fall afternoon that I stand on the outskirts and carefully unscrew a bottle. I've carried Sam's ashes with me for sixteen years, but now… Sweetie, I can hear her say. It's okay. You can let go.

I'm reluctant to let go, reluctant to free her. I don't know if I'm ready to stop moving, but I have to eventually, and every day that I spend in this town makes me fall in love with it.

I watch Sam blow away on the wind, and I stand there until there's nothing left to see. I turn around, and there's a girl standing there. She's a little older than I was when I met Sam, with brunette hair tied back in a ponytail. Ellie, I think. This is Ellie.

There's a ghost haunting her eyes, one I'm all too familiar with. "You've got a camera, right? You let… people talk to it, yeah?"

"I do," I tell her, sliding the strap off of my shoulder and reverently rubbing my thumb over a well worn spot on the plastic. Ellie's hand goes to a set of dogtags around her neck. She rubs at them the same way I do to my camera. To remember, and maybe for luck. I smile at her (It's easier to do that than it used to be).

She fidgets as I set the camera up. "Your accent is weird. Are you really from England? Does England still exist? I found some comics that had this guy and he was dressed up in your flag, and he was friends with this blue guy and this girl who walks through walls and they were pretty cool."

"I'm really from England, but I haven't been back in years. I'm not familiar with those comics. My girlfriend would have known about them, but she's…gone."

Ellie mouths the word 'girlfriend' like she can't believe that I'd used that word. There's dawning realization in her eyes. "Sorry."

"It's all right. That was a long time ago, but I think Sam would like you."

That ghost flashes in her eyes again. She's just a teenage girl but her face already has hard lines. It makes something inside me hurt. "Does it ever stop hurting?"

"She'll always be a part of me, but the pain does dull. There's room to let others in, if I chose to."

Ellie nods, her fingers rubbing into the tops of her legs. "So...where should I start?"

"Where ever you want, Ellie." My eyes fall to her pendant. "But if you want, why don't you start with whoever gave you that?" Maybe if she talks about it, it'll be easier for her than it was for me. Maybe this can help her heal. It's been such a long, winding road for me, and I want to make it a shorter one for her.

There's a peculiar sort of way that people warm up to the camera, like they're experiencing a sort of release at letting it all out. I can imagine Sam's smile as it happens.

The girl chews her lip, and then nods her head, focusing on the camera lens. "Her name was Riley."