Free A Town Called America by Andrew Alexander Page A

were good people with friendly faces, and it was genuinely a nice place to live.
    Ever since Rick had returned, Chris had become very active in her daily life. She chopped wood, hunted, fished, and hiked every day. She was unmistakably thinner, but she also was in much better shape than she’d ever been. It served to remind her of how lazy people had become in the life before, which was something she no longer was.
    She moved through the street feeling ten feet tall and on a mission. She passed buildings that had burned to the ground and a few that were still standing. When she finally arrived at the town store, she hardly recognized it. The windows were gone, and the inside was black from soot and fire. The thick steel door lay on the ground.
    Inside she saw that the register was open, and the shelves, once full of goods, were empty. Garbage littered the floor, and a burned-out fluorescent light bulb hung from the ceiling by a single wire. Inside there was nothing that could be of use to her.
    Chris descended the back stairs and stood in the small basement storage room. The only light came from her small flashlight, which she seldom used in order to conserve the batteries. It illuminated the room just enough for her to see there was nothing but trash and a spot where someone had made a fire pit.
Squatters
, she thought.
    The next stop would be Amber’s house, which was three blocks away. So far everything had been excessively easy, and Chris wondered whether she was in fact setting herself up for something.
    Outside on the street, she saw that someone most definitely was watching her. There was a man on a rooftop with a rifle, as well as a few people looking at her through cracks in boarded-up windows. One of the windows was in the building where Shawn used live.
    She remembered how she had gone to visit him in his apartment one day and spent the entire afternoon playing board games with him.If only she could have known then how things were going to turn out, she thought.
    Chris walked down Main Street to Ryan Circle, the last place Amber had lived. It was the third house on the right, and she saw it as soon as she turned down the street. The funny thing was that her house didn’t look much different than it had looked before the world had fallen apart. It was a mess then, and it was still a mess. The fence around her yard had fallen over in a number of places, and there was still a washing machine outside her front door. In the driveway was the same car that hadn’t moved in nearly a decade.
    Chris pulled her Colt 1911 from its holster and let it hang in her hand as she moved to look inside the house. The weight of the pistol, how it felt in her hand, and its ability to destroy a person exhilarated her.
    Looking through the dirty window, past the tattered curtains, Chris saw no movement, nor did she see anything that indicated that someone had lived there in a very long time. Around the back of the house, however, it was a different story. She knew she had found her mark: a mean-looking dog sleeping near a large tree. It was dark brown and weighed at least eighty pounds. She knew then she was in the right place, because without a doubt the dog was Billy Bob.
    Past the dog, on the other side of the large fenced yard, Chris saw the outside of the cellar doors. Down on one knee and examining the ground, she poked at a footprint with a stick. The footprint, which looked to be only a few days old, was pointed in the direction of the house.
    The only problem was that damn dog was directly between her and the cellar. Sitting down, Chris tried to think of ways to kill the dog without making too much noise. She didn’t want to shoot it, and she didn’t think making a spear with her hunting knife would do anything but make it mad.
    After considering her options, she made her way around the outside of the fence. Moving as silently as she could, she watched every step so as not to draw attention to herself. At the other side of