Free Apocalyptica (Book 2): Ran by Joshua Guess Page A

No cars were allowed on St. Agatha Street, commonly called Agatha Square or just Agatha, which turned it into a pleasant shopping center and thoroughfare.
    Fact: Hector’s, a barbecue place housed in Agatha, was the five-time reigning state champion for ‘best barbecue’ at the state fair. It was a title well earned.
    Growing in a ring outside this quaint setup were the hallmarks of the modern age. Office buildings, a parking structure, the library, and plenty of other concrete blocks posing as modern architecture. A curious feature of Wallace was the change in its population; on a given weekday, it increased by half. This was thanks to the assorted state government facilities housed around town. Small towns have cheap rents, and even rural parts of states need a central location from which to manage a given area.
    From that hard nugget of commercial real estate sprang—sprung— grew the suburbs. Not the way you’re thinking. Not like Chicago or Atlanta, where entire towns are suburbs of the giant-ass city in question. No, I mean the quiet spreads of housing tracts whose reasonably large yards fit on geometrically perfect streets all loosely interconnected by county roads and a similar position on the overall socioeconomic spectrum.
    A lot of people describe cities as organisms, usually like cells. I like to think of them in less complex terms.
    The town of Wallace and the surrounding Louis County were like a boob.
    Hear me out.
    The center of the city, in terms of size, is the nipple. It’s the prominent, obvious part everyone pays the most attention to. Around that is the areola, the band of less interesting but still notably different material marking the buffer zone between the nipple and the rest of the boob in this metaphor.
    Then there’s the county, the suburbs, all of that. That’s just the skin making up the majority of the boob.
    Wait, what size are we talking about here? Uh. Pervert. This is just a visualization. Don’t be creepy.
    The point is that the concentration of human beings in Wallace and the directly proportional volume of debris were both predictable variables. The closer to the center, the more dense it was going to be.
    Except I didn’t think about the obvious. People’s homes were on the outside circle, the largest circle. When you’re terrified of losing your family, your dog, or maybe just your stuff, you get home. Damn the consequences.
    It looked like someone took the level of crazy in Wallace and overrode the safeties to crank it up to eleven.
    “Why didn’t we see this yesterday?” I said, leaning against the steering wheel as I gaped at a three-way intersection packed with stopped cars. Some were wrecked, many others trapped by those wrecks. Every one of them had been ransacked, clothes and supplies strewn about in every direction. Many dead bodies sat inside vehicles, blood splashed inside and out.
    Jem studied the scene. “If I had to guess, I’d say most of them were either at home or got there fast when all the craziness started. Not hard to imagine a lot of people hunkering down and hoping things got better, then making a run for it when they didn’t.”
    I steeled myself against a rising flood of anger and bitter sadness. Jem just looked pissed off.
    “I’m sorry,” I said.
    He glanced at me sharply. “For what?”
    I nodded at the vista of broken lives in front of us. “I made you take me home. If I hadn’t, you might have been out here to help some of these people.”
    Jem chewed on that for a second, then shook his head. “You didn’t make me do anything, Ran. I chose to help the person I actually could help. Look at that out there. Part of my job is—was—knowing how to see the limits to what I could do. Yesterday I agreed with you. Today the world is a much different place.”
    We drove methodically, slowly. Jem mapped out a number of routes using an actual map from my glove box. The problem we faced was the spread of locations where his friends lived. Of