Mandy had been the most convincing. After all, they’d found that they loved each other. She was carrying his baby. She had the most say of anyone. And she hadn’t wanted him to go.
Max’s reasoning had been that he wasn’t going to be away for that long. It wasn’t like he was leaving permanently to join up with some distant militia. He was going to be there for a few weeks. Add on a week of travel at either end, and it was just several weeks really. No more than six, Max had told Mandy.
He’d told her how he was doing it for their child, and she’d asked him how he could possibly leave her while she was pregnant.
It’d been the toughest decision Max had ever made, and he’d told her that. The idea of restoring order, of starting to squash the chaos, was just too big a draw.
Because while there hadn’t been many attacks on the camp since the hordes several months ago, and while the masses had for the most part died off, it wasn’t as if the world was safe. Far from it. Along with the rumors of Grant and his militia and plan came rumors of other groups forming. Groups of vile men and women. Groups who wanted nothing more than power. Groups of the types of people that society had, before the EMP, hemmed in and tried to control.
Without someone with a plan, without some good people standing up for what was right, the world was only going to get worse. More violence. More chaos. More horrors.
In the end, Mandy had agreed that he go. Better before the baby was born, anyway.
So far on his solo journey, Max had barely seen any sign of any living person. He’d come across some animals, the odd herd of deer, a couple of lone rabbits. Plenty of birds. He hadn’t shot at them. He had enough food, and he didn’t want to draw attention to himself.
The moon had been waxing as he walked, so it was only getting brighter at night. It was easy enough to see. But he did, in many ways, crave the sun.
It was cold at night. It didn’t matter how many layers he wore. The chill seemed to soak through right to his bones. The only thing that made any difference was keeping up a fast pace. Normally, the sound of his own boots on the ground was the only thing he heard.
It was lonely, left in the dark with just his thoughts. Dark thoughts of what the world might be like for his child if he didn’t succeed on his mission. Dark thoughts of what might happen to Mandy if the world kept turning the way it was turning. He couldn’t shake the horror stories that had floated over to their camp along with the other rumors. Stories of people who ruled through fear and torture. People who had sick minds. People who had been, in some way, cast aside or slighted by the pre-EMP society, and who now found an opportunity to seek their revenge on those they believed had harmed them and held them back.
Max was exhausted from a full night of hiking. His leg was hurting him, and he’d been popping aspirin at four-hour intervals to help keep the pain from becoming unbearable.
Dawn had already hit.
Max should have stopped an hour ago. But he’d wanted to push on. He’d barely noticed the light starting to creep up around him.
The sun wasn’t yet up in the sky, but the world was once again illuminated.
It had rained off and on throughout the night, and Max was wet, not to mention sweaty. And getting a little overheated from the walking.
And he had a lot to do before he went to sleep. He needed to look over his maps. If he’d calculated things right, he should be only a day away from Grant’s camp. That meant that he had to strategize more, think things over. He didn’t just want to walk in there without his plan fully formed. Of course, he’d been thinking his plan over since he’d left Mandy and the others. But there were always last-minute details to hammer out. He needed time. Time sitting down with a pen and paper and a map.
Sometimes it helped to write things out. Sometimes it helped to see the map in front of him, no matter how much of it he had committed to memory.
The long nights of exhaustive walking made it harder for him to visualize things like the map in his mind’s eye. Not to mention harder to think clearly without writing down the ideas.
All night, Max had been walking along a little two-lane country road. He’d been staying about ten feet off of the shoulder, walking near the tree line.
There’d hardly been anything at all. Just the occasional abandoned gas station. The occasional little run-down country house.
And he wasn’t expecting to see much more until he arrived at Grant’s camp.
But what he saw now made him stop dead in his tracks.
His finger reflexively went inside the trigger guard, pressing ever so slightly against the trigger.
Up ahead, down the wet road, there was an old Jeep parked horizontally across the road. A car could have driven around it, but it would have had to get very close to the Jeep, not to mention drive partially off the road.
Max guessed that there was a good reason someone wouldn’t want to get their vehicle very close to that Jeep.
It wasn’t there by accident. It looked purposefully placed. It was a strategically advantageous location, right at a bend in the road, with the trees particularly close to the road and nothing else around for at least a mile in either direction.
No one appeared to be there. But Max knew someone was. Probably more than one person.
Max stayed as still as he could. He’d have rather been on the ground, but he knew that if he moved he’d be more likely to be seen.
Possibilities raced through his head.
Who’d put that Jeep there?
Was it Grant and his men? Maybe their project was bigger than Max had expected, with bigger boundaries? Was this Jeep an outpost of a well-ordered militia camp, or was it something else entirely?
It may very well could just be a couple of murderous rogue bandits, waiting for their next victim?
If that was the case, Max didn’t have any intention of going down easy.
2
Sadie’s mother was asleep in her little lean-to. She’d been up for most of the night, keeping watch over the camp. She’d come in to wake Sadie up, passing her a half-full Thermos of coffee that she’d used herself during the watch.
No matter what, Georgia never let Sadie or James sleep in. As she always said, there were always chores to do. Georgia, or Max for that matter, didn’t tolerate healthy kids just sitting around doing nothing.
Dan, the only other “kid” around, didn’t need to be told things like that. He never needed to be woken up, and he never needed to be told to gather firewood. He was always on top of it all himself, always looking for some way he could help, some way, no matter how small, he could contribute.
In a way, it was annoying. But it wasn’t like Sadie and James were any slouches themselves. Sadie’s own attitude had changed considerably. She felt as if she was a different person. In fact, if she could have met the version of herself from before the EMP, she would have been annoyed with herself, annoyed at her own spoiled attitude.
Before the EMP, she’d taken everything for granted. And now? She was thrilled to get a Thermos full of leftover coffee from her mother’s shift.
Before the EMP, she wouldn’t even have liked smelling the coffee. It had just seemed like some gross adult drink to her. But now she joined just about everyone else at the camp in drinking coffee throughout the day.
Sadie couldn’t remember exactly who, but someone had come across a huge store of instant coffee on one of the supply-getting expeditions. There was enough coffee that they could all drink a few cups a day for the next couple years.