It was one of the teenagers who got the bright idea to go find the apple tree.

Joel didn’t really want to go, and sort of couldn’t, bleeding and laying there in the snow on a continent of ice like he was.

“I got you,” Luke said, and he put Joel’s arm across his shoulders and carried him behind the teenagers crossing the glacier.

The journey was long and it didn’t even last the whole time it took.

The teenagers led the way, dancing and jumping all over the place in their Hawaiian shirts and flip flops, and even Luke wasn’t really that cold.

There were scarecrows nailed to posts driven into the ice like raggedy Christs crucified every mile or so.

They made it almost halfway across the second third of the cold, white, dark, bright grey desert looking for an apple tree, everyone but Joel tripping on ergot, when the continent cracked in half right underneath them.

Luke and Joel and all the teenagers slipped on the ice as the glacier quaked.

The teenagers laughed and rolled around, and a canyon opened up and they fell into it, their voices fading away in echoes like an octopus stuffed into the back of an ambulance with the siren sliding into a whirlpool, or if light could scream being sucked into a black hole.