Free A Different Alchemy by Chris Dietzel Page B

Maybe they finally realized it was a matter of time until the last guards would abandon their posts and every single military installation would go back to nature anyway.
    The evening news was happy to have something to talk about other than the end of the world. After the Area 51 announcement was made, the exodus toward the clandestine base was discussed every night.
    The people in Reno were so excited to see what secrets were there that they stopped waiting for the Portland community to join them. Two months later, when the people of Portland did finally arrive at Reno, the entire city was already empty. The people of Grand Junction drove straight through Utah without restocking on supplies because they wanted to see what secrets were so incredible the government had to hide them all these years. Even one of Jeffrey’s neighbors would leave the neighborhood suddenly because he wanted to see an alien for himself.
    The government, thinking it had been doing something nice for the people, something to offer a distraction, didn’t realize the effect the news would have on everyone; even people in the cities that would one day become the final southern settlements packed up for spontaneous road trips. A series of vans left Los Angeles to see what was in the Nevada desert. The same thing happened in Houston and Miami, the news giving people a different kind of madness to take their minds off the insanity of a species slowly dying off. At no other time during the Great De-evolution would so many vehicles head north instead of south.
    After hearing of legendary expeditions to map the western frontier, of gold rushes out west, of races to the moon, people couldn’t resist one last adventure, and they paid for it. Families that had already safely relocated amongst large groups of people found themselves back on the roads again, stuck on the side of the highway with flat tires once more. A group of three minivans became stranded in the middle of Death Valley National Park. All of the passengers died. Countless cars were abandoned on the long, barren stretches of Route 40. Two men, excited to see what was fact and what was fiction, disappeared near Yosemite National Park and were never seen again. A husband and wife and their two Block children all died of dehydration outside Flagstaff when their car broke down and no one else stopped to help. Hundreds of stories cycled through the country. Everyone knew someone who had gone to see what was in Area 51 or had a friend that knew someone who died on the way.
    The mysterious base that everyone had seemingly known the location of when it was a secret, suddenly became hard to find. A trio of men took a wrong turn and died on a desert road just outside Caliente, Nevada. A woman, her Block sister sitting idly by in the passenger seat, drove back and forth between Reno and Las Vegas three times before her car finally broke down near a lake with no name. Trapped in the woods surrounding the anonymous lake, the woman was attacked and killed by a bear. Her sister was eaten an hour later by a pack of wolves. A couple from San Diego got stuck on the side of the road and thought it best to attempt the hike straight through Death Valley. Surely, they couldn’t have thought they would make it, but memories of old episodes of “The X-Files” drove them forward anyway. Their sun-bleached skeletons would remain in the desert over the final decades, without another person ever setting eyes on them, until even the final settlements eventually died out.
    The people who did successfully arrive at the abandoned base faired little better. Most of them had driven the last stretch of road on flat tires. A few were forced to walk the final miles after their car couldn’t travel any further. None of them had a way to leave the remote facility once they were there. The base’s Humvees had been taken when the last government personnel abandoned the facility. Everybody was stuck there. And for that reason, the