Into the Country

"Been off looking for America, have we?" Thea rummaged around the fridge and came up with some stale tortillas and bean dip, which she set down in front of him.

Leroy took a considerate bite of tortilla but passed up the bean dip, where some kind of mold-culture Armageddon was going on. "America isn't a real country anymore," the young traveler said. "It's a genetic code. There aren't any towns and cities out there, just housing tracts and chains of discount stores that come up over and over again like proteins in a string of RNA."

Thea thought he meant amino acids and maybe DNA, but this was still pretty impressive for fifteen-and-a-half. "Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Toys-R-Us, Blockbuster," she supplied. "Like that."

Leroy nodded and passed her a notebook in which he'd been keeping track. The sequences went on for pages, name upon name.