The two-thousand-plus group of people came to a halt, and Darla and Joselin were near the rear.
“Why do you suppose we stopped?” The question was purely rhetorical; she knew that Joselin knew no more than she herself did.
“I don’t know, but I’m sure glad. My feet feel like I’m walking on hot coals.”
After a few minutes, Franklin, the big guy who had “helped” Darla back to her tent that evening inside the teacher’s bedroom, was jogging up to them. “You two follow me,” he barked, then pivoted and jogged back the way he had come. Darla and Joselin followed in lock-step, in spite of their tired feet. They stopped at an entrance road off the small rural highway they had been traveling on. There were congregated almost two hundred arm-banded men and women, who made up God’s Army. Thomas, their leader, spoke to them. “All right, we shouldn’t have much resistance in this town. I want all of you”—he pointed toward Darla and about twenty others—“to stay here and watch the roads. The rest of us will march down the main road as a show of strength.”
With that, Thomas and the larger group advanced down the rural blacktop, the semi-rhythmic plomp-plomp-plomp of their boots—on asphalt that until a few days ago had seen only the occasional tires of a tourist’s vehicle or a farmer’s pickup—announcing their approach to any who heard. Their next conquest was to be the little town of Fossil Ridge.
24.
Disconnected
As Sally read the journal, her smile grew wider and brighter, her shoulders squared but relaxed. This find was exciting! Its words spoke directly to her. She stopped and reexamined the 150-year-old leather-bound journal in her hands, handling it as if it would turn to dust with one touch; it was made of hardier stuff. Not simply some old book, this journal offered something greater to all of them: salvation. And this whole time it had been hiding in plain sight.
She considered the rush of excitement she felt right now, a feeling she hadn’t experienced since… She peered up to the ceiling of Max’s secret office, searching for that time, just before the Event, when she had found out what was about to hit the world.
She had been out of her element since the Event. She probably dealt with the loss of technology the worst compared to most people. For the last few years, she had never been disconnected from the Internet, other than for the few short hours she dedicated to sleep. Even when she was offline, she still read saved articles or books on her tablet, or watched her cable TV. Her devices spoke to her sleepy subconscious, pinging their messages each night. Whether by her laptop, desktop, tablet, or smartphone, Sally had always been connected and always talking to people around the globe. Only a few weeks ago, her Twitter account told her that she had sent at least a hundred thousand tweets. This was funny since she never even liked telling people her thoughts in a meager hundred and forty characters; she was far too verbose in her writing. She had over two million Google Plus followers, and tens of thousands of Facebook friends. Every day, she received no fewer than five hundred emails, two hundred texts, and at least one thousand notifications from her devices that she was being messaged, emailed, called, or mentioned. Then the Event happened and her life stopped.
She told herself, I have to go cold turkey. These words felt funny to someone who never drank or did drugs, but to her being connected was every bit as much an addiction as drugs or alcohol would be for others. She needed the Internet, and texting, and phone calls. And it wasn’t just personal interconnections, it was her business.
After the first night, she didn’t know what to do with herself. She was lost. Every few minutes, she would check her dead phone to see if something had miraculously changed. Of course it hadn’t, nor would it ever. By the fifth day she was going stir-crazy. She needed something to occupy her mind and her time. Their home only had five paperback books, all of which she had read before on her fried Kindle, along with the hundreds of others she had inside its vault, which had been pillaged by CMEs. She loved her Kindle so much she had bought one for each of her parents, who took to theirs with an equal degree of fervor, adding books every week to their to-be-read list. More worthless devices. I’ll bet they wished they had ordered books from Oprah, rather than buying so many damned eBooks, now expunged for all eternity. She chortled at her mental meanderings.
To break out of her funk, she tried to help out her father and mother around the house, but their job offerings were menial and insufficient to occupy her always-active mind. Every moment she contemplated why this had happened and how awful it was.
One day, she just let go and accepted her fate. She stopped worrying about her devices and started to believe that being disconnected from people she would never meet in person was not something bad. In fact being disconnected became something good. Now people would think about what they were going to say, before they said it. This was so different from most of the emails and texts she had received, and those in truth, she often sent as welclass="underline" cold, uncaring, and with biting words that would never have been said to someone face to face. Now, she expected people would mean what they say. There was no need for bullshit. A sense of peace slowly settled over her.
However, she still needed the mental exercises that didn’t come from building defenses around their home and Max’s, or moving boxes of supplies around. So, she made Uncle Max’s office her own, first consuming all the books on its shelves. Besides the paperbacks, he had lots of notebooks: filled with double-sided printed pages from his top-of-the-line printer, three-hole punched and bundled for their different subjects. Almost all of these, occupying an entire bookshelf, were survivalist tomes and how-to books. He really was preparing for the end times.
One day she opened up the journal. Although the three of them certainly knew of its presence, none of them had ever read through it, only re-reading Max’s letter, the separate loose pages of inventory, and the map of the mysterious place called Cicada. Because the journal was in chronological order, starting with Max’s great-grandfathers’ old notes and writings, these seemed irrelevant to their present day concerns and were ignored. None took the time to read the more recent stuff.
She turned its pages with anxious anticipation.
Starting from the back of the book, like she always read a novel, she thumbed backward through the last several pages, recognizing instantly the owner’s penmanship; these were written by Uncle Max. When she reached the start of this section, she stared at the title: “Read After The Solar Apocalypse….”
Thompson Journal Entry