A/N: Hello, my beautiful ducks.

Well. Are we still in the mood for a virus induced apocalypse? Lol.

Thanks for waiting. You know it's taking me forever to update as it is, but when Covid hit… Well, I work doing intake for food stamps and medi-cal. We couldn't BREATHE for a couple of weeks.

Things are calming down on the work front. I hope all is well and everyone is staying safe.

Edward chuckled to himself, the sound breaking up the monotony of their footfalls crunching on dry pine needles.

"What?" Bella asked.

"Did I ever tell you I had an obsession with abandoned places?" He shook his head. "Obsession is the wrong word. An interest, I guess. I looked them up online, read about them, put a couple on my bucket list kind of thing."

"I always wanted to visit that abandoned Wizard of Oz theme park." She smirked at his raised eyebrow. "What? You think you were the only one with an Abandoned Places Pinterest board?"

He grinned. "They're all fascinating, but the one that got to me was this city in Japan that got abandoned after a tsunami knocked out the nuclear power plant. People were in the middle of their day when they left. There's a school with tiny backpacks still lined up. It was just a few years ago. That seemed impossible to me then."

As he spoke the words, they emerged from the tree line into a parking lot. An unpleasant chill went down his spine at the sight. Parked cars in a parking lot. It shouldn't have been such an eerie thing to see.

But they were abandoned cars. The world around them was still. Quiet.

Even now, it felt wrong.

"Abandoned theme parks were creepy when they were just pictures," Bella said, glancing around with her typical wary expression. She readjusted the pack that held the gently babbling Aaron. "Who would want to come here now that the whole world is abandoned?"

"Only we crazy people, I suppose." He glanced around then back at her and smiled. "Thanks for indulging me."

When he realized where Bella's carefully plotted map would take them, Edward was sure he'd never convince her to make a detour. He'd gone a full day hardly talking, plotting out every argument he could think of in his head. The words were barely out of his mouth before she agreed.

"Hope is important for survival too." She shifted Aaron and held him out to Edward who took the child. Unencumbered, Bella crouched low and then sprang into the air, grabbing a bar on top of the RV they were standing by. Legs kicking against the side, she scrambled up onto the roof.

Edward shook his head. "I could have done that if you'd asked."

"I got it," she said, not looking at him. She stayed low at first, ever cautious. Slowly, she stood up, using the added height to see across the lot for as little good as it would do. Even from her vantage point, she couldn't possibly see far through the trees. For his part, Edward tilted his head up and drew a deep breath through his nose. He smelled fresh air and damp baby. No fires nearby that might indicate people. It was getting to be solidly summer, but the north was cold.

He bounced the baby and watched Bella do her thing, waiting patiently as she surveyed the land. He was eager as he'd ever been to be out of the parking lot, across the street to the park.

Hope, Bella had said. Necessary.

Dangerous.

This kind of hope wasn't wise. The kind of hope that ballooned too big too fast and for no tangible reason. When it popped… man, was that going to be devastating. The fall might just kill him.

He swallowed a lump in his throat as he watched Bella slide off the top of the RV, her legs dangling for a moment before she dropped to the ground. "It's quiet out here. Normally, I'd think a theme park would be a hot spot." She nodded her head in the direction of the road. "But this is no Disneyland."

"Disneyland was set up to be its own city." Edward was irrationally relieved he got to use one of the arguments he'd prepared. "And it's surrounded by a metropolis of millions of people. I think this whole county has 150,000 people."

"And it's dead cold in the winter up here. Not many would set up permanent camp." Bella nodded and took Aaron back. "Go ahead. We'll meet you."

He nodded and swallowed thickly again. He took a deep breath, but before he could head off in the direction of the theme park, Bella stopped him with a hand in his arm. The touch sent a thrill through his body. He stared a beat at her hand, small and gentle on him. He looked up and found a rare expression of tenderness on her face. "It's a chance of a chance," she said quietly. "If there's nothing there, it doesn't mean anything."

It was exactly what he'd been telling himself. But more than needing to hear the words out loud, her familiar touch did wonders to quiet his raw nerves. For a moment he could imagine Bella was someone who genuinely cared about him; someone who cared for more than just survival reasons.

Her eyes were such a pretty brown.

Shaking that wayward thought off, Edward let her words ground him. "I know," he said.

With that, he set off, turning only once when Aaron called out to him in his baby babble. Edward waggled his fingers at the baby, promising he'd be back soon, and hurried down the path. He stopped at the highway, struck again by how much the world had changed. There was no sound but the wind. The only car in sight was one in the dead center of the road; abandoned where it should never have been able to stop.

Shaking that off, Edward continued across the street to the entrance of his theme park destination—Silverwood Theme Park, set just outside the town limits of tiny Athol, ID, North of Coure d'alone.

In a world without cell phones, without the internet or the US Postal Service, communication was all but impossible. People had resorted to something much more primitive.

As he traveled, first with his team and then with Bella, they had come across the occasional message. In private homes there were notes written on anything handy—notebooks, now-irrelevant mail, walls, counters. Personal notes fading to dust along with the remnants of the life they all knew before.

Amanda — I'm headed toward Mom.

Bae — Boys and I survived. Going to LA. Please be alive.

Meet me in Montauk.

Well-known landmarks often became low tech message boards. The entrance of Yellowstone, the National Park sign, was almost totally obscured by paper tacked on with anything and everything possible. The litter around it had been unreal. And that was the tiny spark of hope that had lit in Edward's chest. Surviving being lost had eclipsed his original mission. The idea has been to make it as far as Chicago; figure out what was going on in the wider world; bring back useful people.

His mission had been to try to find his sister.

When they were growing up, Edward's parents had made sure their children were well traveled. They'd hit the open road every spring break or summer. Hotels usually had a magazine rack covered with pamphlets advertising nearby adventures to be had. Always, when they were in this part of the country, the Cullen kids would beg to go to Silverwood Theme Park.

Who knew why it appealed to them so much. They'd been to much bigger, better parks. They'd been to Disneyworld. But somehow, Silverwood got stuck in their heads. Every time they happened to be in the general area, all three of them begged.

One year, for no particular reason Edward never understood, their pleading worked. His parents threw out their plans to keep on driving and drove to this tiny park, prepared for their children's' disappointment.

It didn't happen. There was just something about that day, some magic. It was no Disneyland but that meant no Disney crowds. There were roller coasters and a water park. That day, there'd been no squabbling between the Cullen children, no fights. It existed in their memory as a rare, perfect day they still spoke of.

So, Edward had hope. Hope that if his sister had passed through, she'd have thought to leave a message. And as he stepped closer to the main gates, his skin began to tingle in anticipation. It was that painful eagerness that made time slow down—like how the plane ride home after a long trip always seemed to pass by in years instead of minutes.

He needed this—the uncertainty about his sister's very existence—to end. Right then, he needed it almost as badly as he needed his next breath. He tried to keep his steps measured as he walked but dropped his packs as he covered the last few yards in a sprint. Bella would scold him for leaving his supplies, his protection, behind him before he knew if there was a danger, but he didn't care.

The entrance plaza was simple: a couple of house-shaped buildings and a row of turnstiles that stood useless now. The buildings were useless too, their windows broken, computers shattered on the ground. This place would have been popular with looters and long ago cleaned out.

But the walls were covered in writing.

The messages here looked different from the ones he'd seen in private homes. Like pages of a yearbook, there was writing in every direction, filling every space. Those who had come first had written in large, can't be missed letters. Mom - Texas. Love, Kass and Dash splashed across one full side. The messages were written in every kind of ink he could imagine, and some kinds he didn't want to think about. Those who couldn't find ink had scratched messages into the wood, often obscuring the ink beneath it.

Edward began to read. As he did, he noticed a profusion of nicknames thrown into the messages there. It took him a moment to catch on. Of course. Common names would be meaningless in a place like this. In a private home, if you were looking for someone, you already knew who they were. Out here, who could tell one Tom, Dick, or Harry from another?

So he stopped scanning for Edwards, Emmetts, and Alices. He heard his sister's voice in his head as he tried to decide what she might write.

Eddard, Teeny-Tiny, Mom, Pops - Chicago sucks in the winter. Stopping in WA. Love Malice and Debutante.

He had to breathe slowly through the pain that radiated in his chest then. He'd have given anything to hear his sister's voice right then, to turn and see her mischievous smile. Malice indeed. He could almost feel the slight weight of her jumping on his back like he knew she would when they met again.

When. When. When.

"Please be here, Mally."

He scanned the messages. And scanned. And scanned. Dary. Enfie. Nif. Sebby. Jersey Scrub. Queen Theen. Eeka. Flower Point. Jeezy. Corky. Jennabootswiththefur. All sorts of nicknames along with plain Jane names sprinkled in.

Not a lot of Alices. No Jaspers.

As he got to the end of the line, heaviness had replaced the hope in his heart. His blood ran cold. He breathed as though through water. A strange sense came over him he had trouble placing.

When he was still a small child, his parents said the things all parents did. "Don't wander off. If someone takes you, we'd never ever see you again."

Like almost everything parents said, it all went in one ear and out the other. Edward lived in a world where he was safe. Loved. When he had wandered off in the past, one of his parents had always been able to find him, as if he'd never been lost at all. He had merely been distracted. His parents, his home, his happiness had always been there, never in any danger.

But that day, he noticed he was alone before his parents did. He swung around only to find everyone as far as he could see was a stranger.

Like all the other inane things parents said, their words didn't sink in. Not until, on one of their many trips, Edward looked up and his family was nowhere to be seen.

The panic had come on him slowly. As he searched, too afraid to call out lest he draw the attention of someone scary, dread began to pool in his belly. His parents' words came back to him, and his little brain had begun to think about what it would mean to never see his family, his home again.

He couldn't. He had no concept of anything but his own reality. It was, to him, an unknowable, black maw where nameless monsters lurked. Fear made his blood run cold and his body began to tremble. His heartbeat picked up, and his throat closed. Tears welled. He wanted his mommy. He needed her. He needed his daddy's strong arms. Desperation clawed at him. He needed all of them now: Mommy, Daddy, Emmy, Ally. All of them. He needed them.

Second by second, his happy existence faded away—unreachable—and the desperation he felt made it hard to breathe. How. How. How? How was a world without his family possible? He would never smile again. Never be happy again. His entire life as he knew it was shattered into tiny pieces, impossible to put together again. There was nothing left but awful, awful, awful. This new reality screamed in his ear with every erratic beat of his heart.

Then, of course, his mother and father found him. The scooped him up, and held him tightly as he sobbed out his terror. And nothing changed. Life went back to normal as it always did.

Not this time.

For years now, he'd been successful in pushing away the impact of what had happened to his world. Everything, the way they lived now, was temporary. A set back. As he'd reminded Bella, all the technology of the world still existed. The world would regroup and reorganize. When everything had what they needed again—food, shelter, education, healthcare and on and on—life would return to what it had been.

And it wasn't as though he'd been oblivious to the utter devastation of life. Getting off the ship knowing there was no stopping death if it were to come for him had been one of the most terrifying things he'd ever experienced. And to watch his stoic sister-in-law slip away, leaving his brother and their tiny son behind? It was possibly the worst moment of his life.

But everything else he'd been able to compartmentalize. His home, where he'd lived before all this, would still be there. All his favorite places—favorite hangouts and restaurants—would still be there. There would be movies to go to and nightclubs to dance in again. There would be vacations. There would be normalcy.

Most of all, his friends, his sister—everyone he had no ability to see or contact still existed. He just had to wait. He just had to survive. This new, terrible world was temporary. It was all temporary. His old life was intact on the other side of the whole situation.

His sister had to still exist.

He was supposed to find her. Like his parents had found him that day he was lost. He would find her and the world wouldn't be so irrevocably broken. The world would go on as it had been.

Time passed with only the lonely sound of the breeze. He wandered aimlessly into the park. Just in case, some numb part of him thought. Though what would have been the point of hiding her message like some Where's Waldo page? People had left messages along every ride. Favorites, it seemed. There was a shattered picture frame showing two grinning boys taken at this same ride in happier times. Edward flipped it over.

I miss you like crazy, was scrawled on the back. He had to close his eyes against the overwhelming ache in his hollow heart.

He moved on, passing dilapidated roller coasters and drop rides. The waterpark had been overtaken-the pools covered in leaves and algae, the chlorine long gone. Memories spoke to him from every turn. Emmett goading him into trying the waterslide though he was terrified. Alice grabbing his hand so tightly he screamed when they went down the rapid slide. Their father having to warn their mother if she didn't stop eating junk food, she would be sick.

Twilight had fallen over the park as he trudged to their agreed upon meeting place: the High Noon Saloon, tucked into the park's Main Street. He shuddered again, trying to shake off the eerie feeling of seeing a place like this-his brain still expected to see it crowded with people-empty, the windows shattered and no one around to care.

Edward's lip twitched as he took in yet another bizarre sight. Bella had started a small cooking fire in between the train tracks that ran in front of the main strip. He blinked and stared. Was that a...chicken on a makeshift spit?

He wouldn't put it past her.

Though it still felt like he was breathing through water, his lungs heavy in his chest, Edward had just a little more energy as he stepped onto the wooden walkway. Silverwood, as could be expected, was set up in an Old West style. If he was in a better mood, he might have appreciated this more-the echo in his step as he walked through the abandoned "town". Just like the scene in the movies where everyone is hiding, waiting for gunfire to erupt.

Emmett would have gotten a kick out of it.

He pushed into the saloon. While it did have a bar it was, of course, a theme park saloon-built to sling juice as well as the local pilsner. It was well lit, though less so with all the dust caked on the window-one of the few still unbroken in the park. He blinked, getting the distinct feeling he was missing something.

Aaron barreled into his legs, happy to see him. Bella, standing behind the bar glanced up at him with a small smile. She glanced up at him from under a cowboy hat. "Well, howdy there, stranger. Haven't seen the likes of you around these here parts."

Edward picked Aaron up, shifting him to one arm. He raised an eyebrow at Bella. "What's happening right now?"

She pressed her lips together, as though struggling to maintain her facial expression. She ran a rag over the counter idly. Her eyes scanned him a beat before she responded, nodding to the stool in front of the counter. "Come sit a spell. Take a load off."

A tingle of amusement wormed its way into his heavy heart. He moved to the stool and set Aaron down on the bar. A strangled sound that was almost a laugh came out when he realized she wasn't just wearing a hat. Oh, no. She was in full gunslinger gear-cowboy shirt, boots, and a holster with an obviously fake gun. Her lip twitched, but she managed to keep a straight face as she settled a cowboy hat on his head. "There. Now no one will think you're some city slicker."

He cleared his throat, still disoriented. Just moments ago he'd been drowning in grief and despair.

And that was the point, he realized belatedly. She was trying to make him laugh.

A spot of warmth, a flickering match in the cold, lit in the center of his being. He smiled gently and tipped his hat. "Thank you kindly, ma'am," he said in his worst cowboy accent.

The hint of uncertainty in her eyes-how long had it been since she'd tried to laugh herself, let alone make anyone else laugh-faded. She cocked her head. "Care to wet your whistle?"

"That sounds swell."

"Yer in luck." She reached beneath the bar and took out some cups. Souvenir cups with the themepark's logo on them, he saw with some bemusement. "Jus' so happens, I found some supplies." She reached beneath the bar again and Edward's eyes nearly popped out of his head.

"Beer? You found beer."

"I was surprised too," she said in her normal voice. "The storeroom was a wreck. It was just luck." She shrugged. "I'm sure it tastes like crap by now, especially since it's not cold, but…"

"It's beer. A beer after a hard day…" He shook his head. "I'll take it."

She opened two bottles and handed one to him. Edward gently took Aaron's grabby hands off the bottle, ignoring his cry of protest, and drank.

"Blegh." It did taste terrible. He stared at the bottle a beat and then shrugged. Tilting his head back, he chugged.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Bella asked quietly, handing him a second beer when he clunked the first down on the bar.

He shrugged, staring down at the bottle in his hand, swallowing down the bitter aftertaste. "Nothing to talk about."

"You didn't find anything." It wasn't a question. "I figured, but you had to know." She reached a hesitant hand out and touched his arm as she had that morning. "No news isn't bad news, you know. It just means she hasn't passed through here."

Edward couldn't look at her. His eyes blurred, and he had to stare off. His jaw locked, but he nodded, acknowledging he'd heard her.

I want. I want. I want. I want.

Edward stood. For a few seconds, he felt crazed. He clenched and unclenched his fists and shook his head hard, not wanting to cry. Some instinct, some cry to action, rose in him. He had to be able to do something. Even if it was just to grab a glass and start shattering things. He had to do something.

Unthinking, he went around the bar. Bella started, but she didn't bolt. He grabbed her, pulling to him in a crushing hug, clinging to her like she was the last person in his entire world because, right then, she was.

Moments went by as he tried to convince himself to stop being an asshole. Before he could let go, though, her hand was soft on his back. His breath hitched, and he began to breathe again. He shuddered as she stroked his hair.

She didn't say it would be okay. Of course, she wouldn't. She couldn't promise that. But she did comfort him.

And she had tried to make him smile.

It was enough to ground him. It was enough for him to find his hope again.

He squeezed her tightly once and then stepped back. He dug a palm into his eyes. "Bella?"

"Hmm?"

"Was that a chicken outside? Where the hell did you find a chicken."

"Oh." She huffed. "Not a chicken."

He sniffed again, calming further, and looked at her.

"It's a duck."

"A duck."

"There were a bunch of them in the…you know…duck pond."

He had to smirk. The pond where parents had taken their little children to admire the duckies. The duckies who were now his dinner.

"Duck and really bad beer," he mused.

What a world.

A/N: I will be back! Hopefully sooner than later.

So many thanks to my group who helped me with names and cheers. We have such fun.