And the night, though dark, lay barren on the wastes, the moon illuminating all that stretched out beneath. A single man, a lone wanderer, lay out his bedding for the night as the night grew steadily older. He dared not start a fire for fear of looters come to steal his car away and sell it for heavy cash.
He’d set out on the first day of May, just two months ago when the fires had finally started and the cities had gone alight. When he’d looked out his window that Sunday morning and seen the whole of Seattle lit up like the Fourth of July, he’d known he’d been too late. But still, he set out, packed all his meager belongings and a few supplies into his Volkswagon Jetta (on a two year lease) and set out for the so-called State of Freedom. Somewhere in the back of his mind, subconscious thoughts had nagged him too quietly to be heard that Fox News had just said there was such a sanctuary, a reestablished military base, just said so to calm the panic and fear of collapse spreading from neighborhood to neighborhood like the Black Plague.
As he roared down the freeway, and as all the fires of Heck raged around him, he realized one thing, and only one thing.
He might as well be the last sane man in the United States of America, heck, the world (there had been rumors of catastrophe in other countries after all).
And as the Jetta’s fuel supply decreased, he realized another thing.
He had no plan.
When he finally stopped, out of gas, he had simply gotten out of the car and prayed, to whom, he knew not, as he had never been a true man of God. And as he put his hands behind his head and stared out into the dust of the horizon, something like a light penetrated the darkness of his thoughts, and suddenly he knew.
He’d take the back roads through the center of the United States, cut through Idaho, Montana…stick to the U.S…., Fox had definitely said Canada was a mess, and he didn’t have a passport, didn’t want to deal with the Border…
Through Iowa, Montana, Missouri, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia…it would be Heck that final stretch through the Colonies to get to Loring, up in Maine…
The man sighed as he realized there would be no way to get there in time before the base filled up, safely before the greatest country in the world went down the drain, and…definitely not easily…
When thunder cracked in the cloudless sky above and the hot rain began to pour, however, the man knew that it was his only hope.
He turned over onto his side and stared out into the dark as the memory faded, and the comforts of the modern world once again succumbed to the wiles and animalistic ways of man turned monster. Two months, only two months, and already two months and yet he was only in…Montana…
Slowly, sleep slipped over his head like a sheet, and as the twinkling light of the stars above turned to black, the pungent odor of ash floated on the wind, and as every night before, and every night after, the rot smell of society lingered in his nostrils as he was sent off once more into his nightmares.