The highway-shoulder wildflowers were the first casualty of that summer’s epochal disaster. Three people noticed: an incarcerated man who’d been on the work-release program long enough to remember last year’s flowers, and a silver-haired couple who were the Joint Custodians of Seed-Saving for the Franklin County Community Gardening Collective, now defunct.

After days of careful deliberation, the silver-haired couple drove along the shoulder beside the dead earth in their battered brown hatchback, the old woman behind the wheel, hazards flashing. The old man, murmuring an unbroken prayer for a miracle, scattered an offering at every mile marker: a scant handful of their last flower seeds.

Alfie, who sometimes had visions, was wringing the sweat from his bandana beside the 730-mile marker. A dust-colored hatchback approached, crunching through the gravel, rolling just faster than he could run, and an unseen hand tossed something from the open passenger window.

At first, Alfie saw only a granulated spray, approaching in a low arc across the colorless morning sky. Then the seeds, suspended for an instant in the shape of a fingernail clipping, descended to the highway shoulder and collided with the stream of sweat sluicing from Alfie’s bandana.

Between stinging blinks, Archie watched as the seeds combined with the sweat in his eyes, the sweat on his hands, and the sweat on the scorched, cracked ground, and germinated in a flash of radicles and cotyledons, seed coats giving way to plumules and stems, roots and leaves sprouting and reaching in a combustion of flourishing neon brilliance as the last flowers on the planet—or in Franklin county, anyway—blossomed, racing to pollinate and set seed as they fell, already withered and shrunken and dead before they hit the ground.

Alfie wiped his eyes and blinked, shouted after the car, gesturing frantically, summoning the hand that had sown the seeds, because he would germinate every last one with his sweat, his body a fountain of holy water; he would bleed and weep life into them if he had to. He would be the miracle.

The car was already gone, clouds of dust billowing in its wake.