It’s nice.
I don’t know what would have happened if I’d made it all the way down to Alexandria alone. Jamie coming after me was the best thing that could have happened. I like that he makes the world feel not so awful. And that he might be making me a better person.
Oh shit. I really just fell in love with a straight boy, didn’t I? I mean, it’s clearly been there for a while and I only just noticed, but there it is.
“What?” he asks after I’ve been smiling at him for way too long.
I shake my head. “Nothing.”
“Stop making fun of me, just drive.”
I’m not making fun of you, Jamie. I would never.
I’ve missed this—being able to just drive. We roll the windows down and keep the air off because my dad always said it used more gas—not sure if that’s even true. Sadly for us, there’s no radio. But even with the wind as our only soundtrack, it’s nice.
Funny how little things can feel so big when you haven’t done them in a while.
The car gets us just past Raleigh before the engine finally dies. When we unload our packs, I wipe the message off the back windshield and scrawl my own on top of the trunk.Runs great! Just needs a little gas.
From there, we’re back on foot.
And foot travel takes so long! We even check a few cars along the way—all have been pulled off the highway—but none of the othershave keys in them. We traveled almost a hundred and twenty miles in one day while in the car. On foot, in the summer heat and humidity, we only get about twenty. If we’re lucky.
A couple of days are a wash because it rains so much we have to stop. About two weeks after we found the car we get sidetracked in a small town outside Coosawhatchie, South Carolina. We stop to check for food, but the supermarket is completely bare. The two gas stations in town are empty as well.
We try the diners and the restaurants, but it looks like someone has taken all the food and supplies. Finally, Jamie says we should check a house. We’ve been trying not to break into homes while we’re on the road, because it feels a little like grave robbing. I understand no one is going to be using what we take anyway, but it still feels wrong.
We find two houses that are open, their owners inside but still long gone. Whoever ransacked the grocery stores and gas stations hadn’t gotten around to checking the houses yet, because we find plenty of canned and dry goods to fill our packs.
I say a quiet thank-you to the corpses on the couch and floor on our way out.
That night we stop just outside Hardeeville, South Carolina. It’s nighttime. We’ve eaten and we’re by a stream so our bellies and water bottles are both full. It’s a beautiful night, despite the stifling heat and humidity. Jamie is lying down, his hands folded onto his bare chest as he looks up at the sky. I’m sitting next to him, poking the small fire we heated our food on. We clearly don’t need its heat, but it’s nice to not sit in complete darkness.
“Do you think there’ll ever be electricity again?” I ask.
Jamie shrugs. “At some point. There’s got to be an engineer somewhere in the world who knows how generating electricity works. They might even focus on wind power or something sustainable. Or maybe it will take decades for someone to invent something new.”
“So you’re saying that no matter where we go, our days of hot showers are over.” There’s a water heater back at the cabin. And solar tiles to power it. Sure, Howard and his crew might be a problem, but maybe there’s something else we can give them to create peace between us.
“Unless you find a hot spring.”
Even in the heat I shiver at the thought of washing up in the cold stream tomorrow morning.
“No more internet,” I say.
“I’m actually okay with that.”
“Heathen!” I point an accusatory finger at him. He laughs and swats away my hand.
“The only thing it was good for was looking up stuff you didn’t know. Other than that, it was all just people being assholes.”
He has a point, but I’m not giving in that easily. “You know, if the internet was still around, someone could just look up how to make electricity again.”
“If the internet was still around and I’d looked up your broken leg symptoms online, it would say you were dying of total organ failure.”
“If the internet was still around, we could watch Netflix instead of me just giving you scene-by-scene summaries of movies.”
Though that’s actually one of my favorite games.
