He stood in the middle of the road, breathing hard. The photograph of Mira was damp with sweat in his pocket. He took it out. Her face was smudged now, but her eyes were still clear. Find me.
He walked. Roads were memory. Gas stations were tombs. He found a convenience store with its windows punched out and its coolers long since cleaned, but behind the counter, under a fallen shelf, a single can of peaches. He punched it open with his knife and drank the syrup first, then ate the fruit slowly, piece by piece. His body shook with gratitude.
He tucked the photo back into his chest pocket and started walking.
Here’s a story built around your phrase: Hell or High Water as Cities Burn, Zip hell or high water as cities burn zip
He went walking. And the cities burned behind him, one by one, like fallen stars.
Kael had a destination, though it sounded like a joke: Zone Ingress Protocol. ZIP. A rumored evacuation corridor still open out of Norfolk, Virginia—the Navy’s last deep-water port, protected by ships that still had fuel and guns that still had bullets. Everyone said it was a lie. But lies were better than prayers, because lies at least moved you forward.
On the fifth day, he found a road sign: Norfolk – 217 miles. He almost laughed. Two hundred and seventeen miles of burning towns, broken highways, and whatever came crawling out of the dark when the fires died down. Hell or high water , he thought. Already had both. What was a little more? He stood in the middle of the road, breathing hard
High water came first. The Mississippi had swallowed St. Louis before Memorial Day. Then the levees broke around Cairo, and the Ohio clawed its way up through Kentucky like a drowning hand. FEMA stopped answering phones in June. By July, the networks were just static and prayer loops.
Then came hell.
Hell or high water as cities burn, zip.
Then at least he went walking. With his sister’s face over his heart and the taste of canned peaches on his tongue and a three-bullet pistol riding his hip.
He was halfway down a narrow valley when he heard the engine. Not a car—something heavier. He dropped behind a rusted pickup truck and watched as a convoy rolled past: three Humvees, two supply trucks, and an ambulance with its lights off. They flew no flag he recognized. But painted on the side of the lead Humvee, in white spray paint: .
Ahead, the sky was darker. Not from night—from more fire. Another city burning. Toledo? Columbus? He couldn’t tell anymore. They all burned the same. Her face was smudged now, but her eyes were still clear
Behind him, Chicago was a furnace. The skyline he’d grown up under—the Sears Tower, the Hancock, the lakefront towers—stood skeletal against a boiling orange sky. Hell or high water , his father used to say. We go through both. His father was three months dead now, shot in the grocery riots. Kael had buried him in the backyard next to the dead apple tree.
Three days later, he reached the edge of West Virginia. The mountains had saved this part, maybe—less to burn, fewer people to riot. But the sky was still wrong, a jaundiced yellow that made his eyes ache. He slept in a church basement with a dozen other refugees, none of them speaking, all of them smelling of smoke and fear. In the night, a baby cried for an hour. Then stopped. No one asked why.