Ryan Westfield - Staying Alive

Max didn’t pay it any attention. Neither did Georgia. They were the only two who didn’t speak.

“What’s the plan, Max?” said Georgia finally, from the driver’s seat.

“Drive,” said Max. “That’s all we can do for now. Everyone else, get your rifles ready.”

John had been walking through the suburbs for what felt like hours. But he had no way of knowing the time.

The sky was cloudy, blocking the moonlight. The suburbs were dark. There were no streetlights. No ambient light from homes. No light coming from Philadelphia.

So far, John hadn’t run into anyone. He hadn’t seen a soul.

Once, he’d heard the rumbling of a truck, probably a diesel. John hadn’t waited to find out who it was or what they wanted. It was probably the rogue militia. John had ducked into a nearby backyard, hopped a fence, and moved a whole street over, changing his direction from north to east.

After a while, he’d gotten out of earshot of the truck, and he started heading north again.

It was hard to keep track of which way he was headed. He remembered how to find the North Star. He’d been taught it as a boy, and for some reason the information had always stuck with him. It had seemed like a neat trick at the time. Now, his life could depend on it. Unfortunately, there was no North Star visible tonight with the heavy clouds.

So he relied instead on his knowledge of the layout of the streets. He knew the pattern well.

At least, he hoped he knew it well.

He was hoping he was heading north again. But he wouldn’t know until he reached Route 30.

He knew he was south of Route 30. Once he crossed over it, he’d know he’d been heading in the right direction. Route 30 ran east from Philadelphia to Lancaster and beyond. It ran right through the Main Line, running parallel to the train line for which the area was named.

Once or twice, John saw candle lights flickering in houses. Mostly, though, there was nothing but tightly drawn curtains. Many of the driveways had cars still in them. Many people must have stayed home, not trying to flee. Or maybe they had, and they’d encountered some roadblock and returned to the relative safety of their home. There, though, they were likely to starve to death. Or meet some even worse fate.

The horrors of the new world in which John found himself had started to lose some of their intensity. John no longer found himself surprised when he saw something horrible, or when he thought of the horrors that the people here would soon face. Everything had somehow been softened for him. It was because of what he’d been through. He knew that and he was aware of it. His mind was recalibrating itself, as human minds do. He was adapting.

But he didn’t know if that was good or not.

John only found one dead body. John didn’t feel anything when he looked at the body. The horrors so far had sapped his compassion completely.

He peered down to examine her, merely out of strategic curiosity. It was a woman in her early 40s. Everything that she’d possibly had of value had been stripped from her. She lay there in mud-stained shorts and ripped t-shirt. Her shoes were missing, and there were marks on her neck. It looked as if someone had forcefully torn a necklace off her. On her fingers, there were marks from where a ring, probably a wedding ring, had rested for a long time.

The thing that should have disturbed John the most was that her skull had been broken open. But he merely studied it, trying to determine the cause of the injury.

He was disturbed by his lack of emotional response. He also knew that he had almost met a similar fate many times. Possibly a similar fate awaited him in the future.

There was no way to know. He was gradually developing his own strange sort of Zen philosophy about the whole situation. Maybe it was his own attempt to deal with what had happened, and to deal with his decreasing sensitivity. Maybe it was just his mind, unused to solitude, running in a different way than it ever had before.

In the city, he’d lost track of how many bodies he’d stepped over and walked past.

But there were more people there. And things had happened faster than out here.

Soon enough, there would be more bodies. And there was nothing John could do about that. He couldn’t change the fates of those here. He couldn’t help them.

The only thing he could do was to try to look out for himself.

John had come up from fairly far south, from where the Schuylkill River had taken him. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the unmistakable Route 30 ahead of him.

He had emerged from cutting through an apartment complex into an area that was less residential and more commercial. There was a gym, a gas station, and a small mini mart.

John approached Route 30 cautiously. It was a large four lane road. Normally, it was jammed with traffic at all hours of the day. Now, there wasn’t a car to be seen.

At least not from where he stood.

But when he moved forward, crossing the road, he saw something about a mile down. He stopped in the middle of the empty road and peered down. He couldn’t quite make out what it was. But it looked a lot like a military blockade. There was a large truck blocking at least part of the road, parked perpendicular to the lanes.

John hurried across the road, taking cover in some bushes on the other side. He hoped that no one had seen him. He waited, unmoving, crouched in the bushes, for ten minutes before he decided to move on.

Heading north, there was a long curvy road that ran up a large hill, towards Valley Forge Park. Beyond that, there was the King of Prussia Mall, which at one point had been the largest in the country. Maybe it was the third largest now. John couldn’t remember, not that it mattered much anymore.

John followed the road, staying parallel to it. He moved through backyards, keeping as far away from the houses as he could. If he made sure to follow the road, there wasn’t a chance that he wouldn’t be heading north. That was an advantage given the cloudy sky.

John didn’t stop to eat or drink anything, even though he was hungry and thirsty. He knew it was important to get as far away from the suburbs as possible while he still could.

Up ahead, there were two possible routes. John could cut through Valley Forge Park, where George Washington had camped out for a winter with his men, avoiding the British who had occupied Philadelphia. Or he could cut through the mall and surrounding area. There were houses around Valley Forge, but there were also huge swathes of open land that he could hide out in. It could be a good place, but then again… who knew what could be waiting for him there in the woods.

John remembered going to Valley Forge as a kid with Max. They’d somehow gotten hold of some fireworks that were illegal in Pennsylvania. Maybe a friend had bought them on a family trip or something. John couldn’t remember now, and it didn’t matter anyway. But he thought about it as he walked, and tried to remember. The memory wouldn’t come. Another one of those lost moments. Seemed appropriate for a lost civilization.

Or almost lost. John wondered if there’d ever be a chance to rebuild. So far, things had gotten so far out of hand so quickly that he didn’t see how it would be possible. At least not for a long, long while.

Valley Forge was only about fifteen miles from Philadelphia, far enough away that it had given Washington and his troops a safe haven. The way the landscape had worked, they would have seen the British coming from miles away. But that was long ago. What had been farmland then had been developed.

John’s other option was to cut through the King of Prussia Mall area. Its advantage was that there weren’t many homes there. That could cut the risk of exposure—the fewer people there were the less likely John was to be seen.