“For the first time ever, I felt ashamed of my species. The volcano had taken our homes, our food, our automobiles, and our airplanes, but it hadn't taken our humanity. No, we'd given that up on our own.”

“Then, we waited. Waited for the noise to end. Waited for the house to fall on our heads. Waited for something, anything to change.”

“Maybe we were ghosts of a sort, spirits from the world that had died when the volcano erupted.”

“I felt bad about dirtying their comforter with my nasty clothes, but who knew what might happen later. If something else bizarre went down and I had to run, I sure didn’t want to do it butt naked.”

“Condoms instantly shot to the number-one position on my mental list of must-find survival supplies, far ahead of food, water, and a way across the Mississippi River.”

“The most important part of seeing Darla every night wasn’t the fooling around. It was the few minutes we talked while holding each other, the feeling of security I got with her, the feeling of being understood and loved. Before the eruption, I wouldn’t have believed that I could cuddle up every night with the girl who starred in my dreams and not be totally preoccupied with sex. But the trek across Iowa had changed something. I wanted, needed to see her so badly that it woke me up at night. But making out was incidental to my need – nice when it happened, but secondary to the simple pleasure of sleeping beside her.”

“But even more than I wanted to check out and give my emotional wounds time to scab over, I wanted to live.”