Free Apocalyptica (Book 2): Ran by Joshua Guess

8
     
     
     
    In the movies, searching for people usually comes in the form of an exciting montage or a beautifully dramatic journey through questionably constructed buildings. In real life it’s incredibly boring. Admittedly our experience was different given the inclusion of zombies, but still. Mostly boring.
    We took the Jeep. I hauled out the small flatbed trailer I kept in the back yard and hooked it up. Jem eyed me when I handed him a backpack. Then he looked through it.
    “Why do we need all this stuff?” he asked, pawing around in the carefully packed food, water, and spare clothes. The clothes I was especially proud of having on hand, since he couldn’t wear any of my stuff. Granted, it was just a few t-shirts I’d picked up in a package deal at a flea market, along with a pair of fleece pajama bottoms, but that I had anything at all was kind of amazing. I ask you, who could resist buying that stuff for just a dollar? No one, that’s who.
    “These shirts are neon orange,” Jem noted. “The bottoms are...”
    “Camouflage,” I finished super helpfully. “The guy selling them called it a ‘hunter’s combo’ deal. We’ll pick you up some other clothes out there.”
    “I still don’t get why we need this,” he said, waving a hand at the bag.
    I shrugged. “Hoping we don’t need it, but I’d much rather have something to eat, drink, and change into should we get stuck away from here and find ourselves hungry, thirsty, and covered in blood.”
    Jem stared at me for a long few seconds. “Most women don’t pack with concerns about starving or being showered in blood.”
    “Most men don’t hesitate to stereotype women into broad categories of acceptable and unacceptable behavior, but you don’t hear me complaining,” I said.
    Jem did the wise thing and said nothing.
    I’d spent the planning stages of the trip multitasking, which by my definition meant doing most of the work while explaining to Jem why and what I was doing. He was a smart guy and understood immediately once I nudged him in the right direction, but he was still having a hard time dealing with the change in context. Jem Kurtz operated in a world based on order in many variations, and all those kinds of order were now pretty fucked.
    I let myself get into a flow of running babble as I checked guns and filled magazines. I reminded myself, when it got a little annoying, that most people don’t have the sort of childhood that prepares them for the end times. Oh, sure, a lot of people out there liked to go on about the apocalypse, but that was usually used as a political hammer or a fund-raising tool. I hadn’t seen any horsemen trotting around, though I graciously stipulate that it’s a big planet and they probably have more important places to be than rural Indiana.
    The Jeep handled most of the junk on the back roads with ease. There wasn’t a lot of it this far into the county, but the occasional spray of random household objects at intersections spoke of families—or possibly looters—taking trucks full of hastily-packed belongings through corners at speed.
    Wallace itself was a different story.
    Our town is pretty small. Not Mayberry small, but definitely still not large enough to require, say, more than one McDonald’s. Or more than three Starbucks. Honestly, I think we could have got away with two Starbucks. Having access to espresso in its infinite configurations within a triangle stretching no more than four miles on a given side seemed almost like too much civilization.
    Where was I? Oh, yeah. Small town.
    First-world community dwellings in the form of towns and cities all follow a similar growth pattern. You have the old, central element that is either—or sometimes both—composed of ancient buildings deemed historically necessary, or the largest, newest structures imaginable. Wallace had both. The absolute center of town was a strip of restored brick buildings with a road a hundred and fifty yards long between them.