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After Logan is freed from his detention, and after he recovers from the gunshot wound exacted on him by his sister, he has to pick up the pieces of his shattered life. The significant emotional toll that has been levied on Logan throughout his ordeal is evident in the letters he writes to his wife and daughter. The process of writing the letters is cathartic, a therapeutic kind of journaling by which he deals with his grief at having lost his family. Ultimately, he always decides against sending the letters, but the imagined audience enables Logan to work out his thoughts in writing. In his letter to Beth, he expresses both grief and anxiety: “These are hard things to write. I am afraid I will never see you again. And I am equally afraid that I will, and that our connection will have changed too much” (171). Logan is wrestling with an inner conflict as he tries to chart a forward course. The letters also indicate that he is attempting to understand how he has changed. As he suggests, he is not the same person he once was, and he is concerned that the original synergy he felt with Beth has likely changed accordingly. He is also hinting at how Beth herself, upon learning that her husband was killed, will likewise be changed. Logan is beginning to understand that Beth will, at some point, need to come to terms with Logan’s fate and get on with her new life. This sequence during which Logan contemplates the loss of his family adds layers of depth to his character and raises the question of how time can derail once-sturdy relationships.

Crouch explores the physical landscape as well as the emotional in these chapters, using the setting to help establish a dismal, dystopian mood. The beginning of Chapter 8 illustrates one of the novel’s better examples of this. As he drives through Montana on his way to the outbreak at Glasgow, Logan describes the landscape as one of “gentle desolation” and points out the “semi-ghost towns whose only infrastructure were a post office and a grain mill” (196). After identifying a general time period for the first time in the novel, the “mid-twenty-first century,” he adds that the landscape “seemed to exist out of time entirely” and that “the distances weren’t just vast. They felt galactic” (196). Phrases like “desolation,” “out of time,” and “galactic” suggest oblivion, as though life itself is hanging precariously on the edges of it. The descriptions here present the antithesis to hope and help draw out the darker tones of the novel.