“Ms. Holland!”

I awoke with a start. My entire yurt was pitch-black but for the silhouettes of two figures outside, cast by candlelight onto my walls. One of them was rapping his knuckles insistently upon the wooden frame of the door. I did not recognise his voice.

“Kathy Holland. Are you in there?”

Silently I rolled out of my sleeping bag, slipped my hand underneath until I found the gun, and concealed the cold metal under my nightgown. It had been nearly twenty years since the Pandemic, and strangers to town were harmless more often than not, but old habits die hard.

“Open the door, or we’ll open it for you.”

You wouldn’t.

With a sickening crack the door flew open. In the doorway two men stood against the dark of night, clad in impossibly well-ironed suits. “Ms. Holland,” the taller one said, shining a candle on my face.

At this point it was impossible to ignore them, so I gave up.

“Who are you? Why are you here in the middle of the night?”

His face bore no expression. “Did you produce Annie, Jr.?”

Annie, Jr. was the talk of the town this week—the school finally had enough students this year that we could put together a play. As the town’s English teacher, I stepped in to teach drama and rallied the other teachers and parents to the cause. So yes, I was the producer. We opened last weekend to rapturous applause, and I was so proud of the children. Perhaps these men had been in the audience?

“Did you come to see the show?” I asked.

“Not really, no,” he said. “We are from Music Theatre International. Are you aware that producing a show without a valid licence is illegal and subject to criminal punishment?”

“What?” How on earth did MTI still exist? The Pandemic had claimed upwards of 99.9% of the world’s population. Countries were no more. Laws were no more. Long-distance communication was no more—nobody had heard anything from east of the Mississippi since the Before Times. What was MTI doing in the post-apocalypse?

He held up one of our printed Playbills. “Under federal copyright law, not only are you, as the director and producer of this unlicensed and unauthorised production of Annie, Jr., held liable, but so are the entire production staff, cast, and crew, whether or not they knew they were part of a willful violation of copyright law.”

(Ammar and I had briefly talked about licensing. A corporate lawyer who moonlit in piano bars before the Pandemic, Ammar was the town’s music teacher and our music director. His considered opinion? Even the tax collectors had stopped harassing us by Year 2, and that’s how you know a country’s given up on existing. No way they can enforce copyright. Let’s just put on a show.)

“With all due respect,” I ventured, “I didn’t even know you guys still existed.”

“Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”

These men were beginning to annoy me unduly. “The law? What law? You guys say ‘federal copyright law’ as if there’s still a country.”

“Willful refusal to coöperate will not help your case, Ms. Holland. The facts of the matter are, you failed to obtain a valid licence for your production.”

“And what is it we were supposed to have done? Trek all the way to New York, or whatever remains of it, to get a production licence from a company that probably doesn’t even exist anymore? Just to be able to put on a show for these people, these pandemic-ravaged people in our neck of the world?”

“Ms. Holland. You used another person’s intellectual property illegally without properly compensating them. That is theft.”

At this point I had had enough of these visitors and their legalese blather. “You know what? I doubt you’re from MTI at all. We haven’t heard any news out of New York for years, and suddenly MTI shows up in the middle of the night? And how are they supposed to know about us from so far away?”

“We see everything,” said the short one, speaking for the first time, in a reedy, soul-shrivelling voice. “Including the gun.”

The gun. I felt for its mass under my nightgown, but it wasn’t there anymore.

The short one drew it out from behind his back, its barrel glinting in the candlelight. “You’re coming with us, Kathy.”