Georgia said nothing, but she clearly reorganized that John had a good point, because she stopped in her tracks.
John stopped too.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get a little off the road. We’re out in the open here.”
The sun was starting to come up. Dawn was approaching. And that meant that it’d be more dangerous to be out and about. They’d be more visible. Easier to spot. Easier to shoot. Easier to pick off by one means or another.
They found a little spot off the road, near an empty parking lot, with some bushes and trees around for cover.
John took food and water out of his pack and handed it to Georgia.
“Why don’t you sit down?” said John. “It’s hard to rest when you’re still on your feet.”
He had to actually put a hand on Georgia’s shoulder to get her to sit down cross-legged.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll keep standing. Keep a lookout. All that.”
She just nodded silently and ate her pemmican, taking sips of her water.
John didn’t know what to say. Nothing came to mind that didn’t sound stupid or insulting or downright insensitive.
John didn’t think the chance of finding Sadie were good. In fact, they were downright terrible.
How could they expect to leave camp, head in one direction and find her when there were 360 other points around the circle of the camp that they could have departed from as well?
Their plan didn’t make much sense. And John assumed Georgia knew that.
The initial excitement and adrenaline rush seemed to be wearing off. Georgia had been all geared up, ready to go find her daughter. Now they’d been walking all night and they were tired. Now the plan seemed even more pointless. Now it seemed as if they might just walk endlessly, never finding anything.
John didn’t know what to do. They couldn’t just give up before they started. They couldn’t just let Sadie disappear into nothing. They couldn’t just forget her. It simply wasn’t going to happen.
They couldn’t let her just vanish with a trace. Without retribution.
But John also knew that if he and Georgia just simply continued walking for days and days, never finding Sadie, they’d eventually run into some sort of trouble.
Sure, it was safer to be out these days than it had been several months ago. Safer in the sense that there were fewer people. But more dangerous in plenty of other ways.
And danger would always be there. If they continue on and on, they’d eventually meet their own demise. No matter how prepared they were, no matter how hard they fought, if they continuously exposed themselves to danger, they’d eventually die.
That’s just the way it was.
John held his tongue. He realized that his thoughts were getting ahead of himself. Way ahead.
They weren’t at great risk yet. At least he didn’t think so. They weren’t that far from camp.
If it kept up for a week, and Georgia was intent on continuing, maybe then he’d have to talk to her. Until then, he was with her 100 percent.
John’s thoughts shifted, and he started wondering whether they’d made the right decision in heading to the commercial center.
Maybe they should have stayed closer to the camp, circling around and around, making concentric circles with their tracks.
“What’s that?” said Georgia, interrupting John’s wandering, tired thoughts.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Shut up and listen.”
Georgia set aside her water bottle, grabbing her rifle instead.
John knew well enough to take Georgia’s advice seriously. So he shut up and listened.
He didn’t hear anything for a full half a minute, but he patiently waited. Meanwhile, he got himself ready for a fight.
Georgia, for all her practically minded traits, did have her quirks. And she was stubborn enough not to ever hint at changing them. For instance, she insisted on using one of her old hunting rifles, when something more modern would have been more appropriate, especially for a mission like this.
Then again, who was John to tell her what worked better for her? They were, after all, her own preferences. And it was her own daughter on the line.
John, instead, had brought along an AR-15. Solid and reliable. A good, serious weapon.
John, still unable to hear anything, was moving his eyes up and down the road.
It was empty. Just nothing but pavement. No cars. No people. Nothing.
Maybe Georgia was more tired than she was letting on. Exhausted to the point of hearing things, maybe.
Then he heard it.
A low, rumbling sounding engine
“Shit,” he muttered.
They hadn’t heard or seen a working vehicle in a long time. He didn’t know how long.
There were some vehicles that had somehow survived the EMP. Probably because they were older, and had fewer electronics systems incorporated into their workings. Those that had survived the EMP, though, had, at this point, probably broken down. They’d come across vehicles themselves that would start up but had simply broken down mechanically in ways that they were unable to fix.
The final problem, and the most dire one, was that of fuel. It was hard to get fuel. That was the reality. It could be potentially taken out of gas stations, or siphoned from other vehicles, but there were so many people interested in doing that, not to mention hoarding gasoline, that it had already become quite scarce.
John and everyone else had given up on having a working vehicle of their own. Better to just walk. Not to mention safer. Easier to hide out.
“We need to get back more,” hissed Georgia, in a low voice. “Better hidden.”
John nodded his agreement. And, in fact, he couldn’t agree more. He didn’t like the low rumbling sound that was growing louder now by the second.
Georgia must have had much better hearing than he did, since she’d heard it so much earlier. John knew that she’d been careful to wear ear protection whenever she’d practiced at the range, before the EMP.
Now, there was no such thing as ear protection. They fired their guns when they needed to, not caring about their hearing.
And, for some reason, Georgia’s seemed to have held up better than John’s, he, who’d never fired a gun before in his life before the EMP had hit and had finally realized the importance of firearms.
It wasn’t good to know that his hearing was partially shot. Or not as good as it could have been.
But it was even worse to know that some kind of vehicle was coming in their direction.
Together, they scrambled back farther away from the road. They kept low, crouching down.
There wasn’t really anything that would completely hide them. The trees weren’t thick enough, even at the bases of the trunks.
So they had to settle for getting down on their bellies, hoping that the trees and the distance would help to keep them covered.
John glanced over at Georgia briefly as he tried to get himself set up properly. She was a natural, her rifle somehow always in a good position.
He, on the other hand, had to shuffle and fiddle, trying to get it just right, where the gun didn’t seem to dig into him, where the kickback wouldn’t injure him.
They didn’t have long to wait.
The rumbling was louder.
Soon enough, there it was. They could see it.
It looked improbable. Strange. A weird sight. Almost surreal.
It was a large army transport vehicle. It looked ancient, or at least modern in any sense.
It was the kind of truck that you might spot in an old Korean War movie.
It trundled along slowly, inching down the road.
It was moving slowly enough that a man could walk alongside it at a quick pace.
And, in fact, there were men walking alongside it. And in front of it. And behind it.
John counted six men, all with long guns. They didn’t march like they were in the army, but they walked in a purposeful way, their heads moving so that their eyes could survey the surroundings.