Without Summer Chapter Five
With acknowledgement of the destruction of the city's government and infrastructure, the True Men took to the surface in hunting parties. No one was safe from the pursuit, whether part of a large gang army or hiding alone in an abandoned hovel. Those not killed immediately, were held to be used as slave labor, those not used for labor were sacrificed. Not all received a clean death however. There was no food for such a large group and some tribes among the True Men, more hungry and practical than the others, hunted for meat among the Outsiders.
The raids were surprisingly swift and tactically systematic in nature. They started in the center and worked in a slow spreading radius. The lucky ones managed to escape before the tide came down upon them. Slowly, the True Men took control of their Promised Land one street at a time.
-The Years Without Summer: A History by Unknown
Six months after J-Day:
Finished packing her bag, Andy got up to pack Juan's things. Afterward, she wondered over to see how the boys were doing with their packing. It had been months since Andy convinced Juan that it was safer to leave rather than to stay at Novel Escapes. Then main hold up with their leaving was that they did not have enough supplies to make the journey assuming delays. Several weeks of heavy foraging netted them a slightly larger supply. In retrospect, Andy figured that they would have to leave sooner or later because there was nothing else to salvage. It was either leave or become savages, stealing and killing others for smaller and smaller amounts of food.
She peeked into Richie's area to see that he had finished packing. He was writing or drawing in a journal. Seeing that he did not need her help Andy went to see about JC.
"Knock, knock." Andy said loudly outside the green cloth partition that JC had up designating his room. Receiving an acknowledging response, she slid through the entrance. "So I guess you were never a scout," Andy teased watching as he smashed and threw a shirt into the backpack before him.
"Actually, I was forced to take it for four whole years, until I could convince Ma that I really hated it. I just wanted to make video games." Another crumpled shirt was tossed into the bag with a self-deprecating smile, "Of course that was before, I knew the world was gonna end and that I'd need to know the stuff."
"Well, I don't think anyone really thought we'd need stuff like that." Andy pulled out all of the the clothes and started folding them into tight rolls which she packed tightly into the bottom of the lower compartment. JC looked like he was contemplating whether to tell her to stop messing up his packing, but after a moment, he followed her example.
They stayed that way for a while, just enjoying the companionable silence before JC broke in with a question. "So is Miranda your girlfriend?"
"What?" Andy stopped and looked over to JC in surprise. He returned her look with a mischievous grin. "No," Andy said, shaking her head definitely. Seeing the disbelieving look that JC threw at her she elaborated, "No. She's just a... a friend." She picked up a pair of socks.
"Sounds like she's more than a friend to me," JC muttered aloud. At Andy's look of askance, he cried out in falsetto, "Oh Miranda, Miranda!"
Andy blushing red in horrified embarrassment grabbed a convenient pillow and smacked the younger man with it several times. "Ouch! Stop it! Okay!" He managed to pull the offending item away from Andy and she reached over to grab another plush weapon. "Okay, I'll stop! I'm sorry, okay." When she slowly put down the pillow he said teasingly, "Man, some people can't take a joke." He quieted at the gentle shove she gave him in reply.
When it didn't look like Andy was going to say anything more, he asked gently, all teasing gone from his voice, "It's okay you know, if you like her like that." JC trailed off at her headshake.
"It's not that." Andy looked down at the shirt that she had started on, "There's just so much between us. I have so much that I need to say to her."
"Like what?" JC asked quietly, not being able to hold in his curiosity. He watched her put the shirt in a neat roll into the pack. He followed with one of his own. She had picked up a pair of socks to fold.
"Like 'I'm sorry'," Andy eventually replied, putting the socks in the pack and picking up another shirt. She looked at the small tear underneath the sleeve. "Remind me to fix this later okay?"
He nodded but was not sure she was paying him any attention. Her long brown hair had been pulled back into a ponytail without the normal bangs he could see how much darker her eyes seemed in the low lighting. Her eyes got darker and he could almost see tears edge their dark depths, "What are you sorry for?"
JC waited for such a long time that he did not believe she was going to respond. He assumed that she had forgotten the question. He caught her arm before she left his room. "Andy, what are you sorry for?"
"I'm sorry for leaving."
---
How long did it take to reach the city limits? Looking around at the broken, flooded ruins around her, Andy once again acknowledged that there were more obstacles to their speedy exodus from the city than she had originally considered. Mainly, that it was not speedy.
When Andy had introduced the idea of leaving the city to Juan Carlos, she had not taken into account how slow the group would be. Andy was a runner. She ran cross-country track in high school and had even participated once a year in the annual 5K 'Run for a Cure' race during college. The cardio training had helped her when she went to work for Miranda.
But even at her fittest, even with her running around all of New York City for Miranda that year, she could probably only walk about 20 miles a day assuming that the day was 8 hours long. She could push 30 if she did not take any breaks or stop for lunch. However, if she did that, she would not be walking at all the next couple of days because she would be too sore to move.
None of the others even came close to Andy's level of fitness. Richie was an avid soccer player but he was just a kid and before J-Day JC admitted, he would be more likely to be on a computer than playing a sport. Juan Carlo's physical fitness was almost a non-factor with his injuries. His injuries made him a hindrance since Andy and JC would have to take turns helping him along.
A cold, hard rain that caught the small group as it made its way through the city, a black rain. It was a byproduct of the ash still hovering in the lower layers of the stratosphere. Andy tried not to think about what the ash used to be.
Juan Carlos had a difficult time with the travel. Not being able to walk properly, put strain on everybody in the group. The slick muck that covered everything did not help. Andy and JC had made an improvised travois to pull their supplies. Juan Carlos occasionally used it when he could not walk any further on the crutches that Andy had fashioned for him and the ground was dry enough to pull his added weight.
They had been travelling for almost a week now. They were far from their old haunts and hunting grounds. They had hurried that first day, rushing through cluttered streets and moving steadily away from the bookstore. Andy and JC had both taken turns as human crutches in order to put as much distance between them and the danger behind until they were far enough away that they did not feel the overwhelming need to run.
Another limiting factor, Andy had discovered, was the lack of daylight hours available. They had found out the first day, that 'daytime' was the only time that it was 'safe' to travel. Since J-Day, vibrant blue stratosphere had given way to a seemingly eternal overcast sky. The tumultuous blending of muted colors splashed sickeningly across the injured atmosphere until the day existed as a bruised twilight.
Night was even darker. Without ambient light from the moon or the stars, it was too dark to see. Every night since leaving the bookstore, the small group had managed to find a room with a lock in one of the evacuated buildings in which to set up camp. Last night, their luck had run out and they had to camp outside:
It rained the night before but was dry now, which was a blessing. The rain caused the ash to compact together so that it crunched underfoot as if it were fresh snow after a hard freeze. Andy was too tired to tell if it was harder or easier to walk on than the soft sandy ash that they had crossed the days before. It was nearing full dark and they had not come across suitable shelter yet. Most of the buildings in the area had damage to the point that Andy and Juan Carlos worried that any stayed in would collapse on top of them.
Finally, Andy called a halt when they came upon semi-fenced parking lot nestled between two squat and crumbling buildings. The lot was rather large and held a few older cars, trucks and SUVs. There did not seem to be any signs or ads on either the buildings or the lot, but Andy thought it might have been an abandoned used car lot.
They searched through the lot and came across a SUV that someone had crashed so that it formed a "v" shape with another vehicle. The collision created a windbreak parallel to the mostly intact wall of one of the buildings. A torn chain-linked fence made up a third wall and created an enclosed area. The arrangement created an ideal place to rest for the night.
At Andy's suggestion, they settled Juan Carlos and began clearing away the ash from the depression the two cars made. There was less ash between the collision and the wall than the surrounding area so it only took about twenty minutes to scrap away the compacted ash down to the underlying cement. They had discovered a few nights ago, when a gust of wind blew a cloud of superfine ash through a broken window, that ash could be extremely flammable under the right conditions so they cleared away as much ash around camp as possible. Andy did not intend to wake up to find their camp catching fire again.
Soon, there was an area about ten feet by seven to camp and JC resettled his father in the cleared space while Andy used a couple of rags to tie the chain-linked fence closed. Richie moved to grab several handfuls of refuse and torn car upholstery from the vehicles for his father to start a fire. He had done this often enough that it was almost that it was routine by now and he knew what would burn without a lot of smoke or a bad smell. Someone or several people had already torn up the cars: they smashed in the windows, slashed the rubber off the tires, and ripped away at the interior and engine for usable parts.
It did not take long to gather a sizable pile of kindling. Andy and JC paired up and began searching the area for more useful things to keep and burn. Less than half an hour later, they returned with a few broken billboard pieces and settled down for the deepening of the night.
Andy did not know what woke her. She sat up and tried to see around the SUV where the windbreak ended. There was a slight scuffling sound above the distinctive crackle of fire. It sounded like the crunch of feet pushing through hard packed snow. She could not see past the orange glow the flames made; the night was a wall of darkness beyond the camp. Another crunch of hardened ash brought Andy to her feet in a crouch. She crept over to where JC slept nearest to her and shook him awake.
Her movements brought Juan Carlos out of slumber and seeing the harried, worried look on Andy's face, he quickly woke Richie, shushing him to silence when he started to ask questions. They all listened and startled when they heard the steps pause before getting closer. Andy was sure that there was more than one person out there.
She gestured for them to move away from the open space between the SUV and the wall and towards the fence. JC untied the rags and Andy ushered the group through, helping JC with Juan Carlos before following them through the separation in the fence. She would feel silly leaving the safety of their camp if it was nothing but a couple of stray dogs, but better safe than sorry.
Andy drew them to a halt much later by what she thought might have been a playground. The plastic structures, covered in at least six inches of ash, created a hard coat of reinforcement over the hard plastic play equipment. Seeing what looked like a kiddie fort, Andy led the frightened and exhausted group over to it. She tucked the others inside and then backtracked over their path, kicking up sand, all the way to the street trying to obscure their tracks. In the end, all she was really able to do was get filthy dirty and tired.
Eventually, Andy trudged back to the kiddie fort and crawled inside with the others. Richie had cried himself to sleep in Juan Carlos’s arms while JC huddled by himself in a corner. Andy crawled over to him and huddled in the dark next to him, waiting for the deep darkness to rise.
TBC... Chapter Six
The raids were surprisingly swift and tactically systematic in nature. They started in the center and worked in a slow spreading radius. The lucky ones managed to escape before the tide came down upon them. Slowly, the True Men took control of their Promised Land one street at a time.
-The Years Without Summer: A History by Unknown
Six months after J-Day:
Finished packing her bag, Andy got up to pack Juan's things. Afterward, she wondered over to see how the boys were doing with their packing. It had been months since Andy convinced Juan that it was safer to leave rather than to stay at Novel Escapes. Then main hold up with their leaving was that they did not have enough supplies to make the journey assuming delays. Several weeks of heavy foraging netted them a slightly larger supply. In retrospect, Andy figured that they would have to leave sooner or later because there was nothing else to salvage. It was either leave or become savages, stealing and killing others for smaller and smaller amounts of food.
She peeked into Richie's area to see that he had finished packing. He was writing or drawing in a journal. Seeing that he did not need her help Andy went to see about JC.
"Knock, knock." Andy said loudly outside the green cloth partition that JC had up designating his room. Receiving an acknowledging response, she slid through the entrance. "So I guess you were never a scout," Andy teased watching as he smashed and threw a shirt into the backpack before him.
"Actually, I was forced to take it for four whole years, until I could convince Ma that I really hated it. I just wanted to make video games." Another crumpled shirt was tossed into the bag with a self-deprecating smile, "Of course that was before, I knew the world was gonna end and that I'd need to know the stuff."
"Well, I don't think anyone really thought we'd need stuff like that." Andy pulled out all of the the clothes and started folding them into tight rolls which she packed tightly into the bottom of the lower compartment. JC looked like he was contemplating whether to tell her to stop messing up his packing, but after a moment, he followed her example.
They stayed that way for a while, just enjoying the companionable silence before JC broke in with a question. "So is Miranda your girlfriend?"
"What?" Andy stopped and looked over to JC in surprise. He returned her look with a mischievous grin. "No," Andy said, shaking her head definitely. Seeing the disbelieving look that JC threw at her she elaborated, "No. She's just a... a friend." She picked up a pair of socks.
"Sounds like she's more than a friend to me," JC muttered aloud. At Andy's look of askance, he cried out in falsetto, "Oh Miranda, Miranda!"
Andy blushing red in horrified embarrassment grabbed a convenient pillow and smacked the younger man with it several times. "Ouch! Stop it! Okay!" He managed to pull the offending item away from Andy and she reached over to grab another plush weapon. "Okay, I'll stop! I'm sorry, okay." When she slowly put down the pillow he said teasingly, "Man, some people can't take a joke." He quieted at the gentle shove she gave him in reply.
When it didn't look like Andy was going to say anything more, he asked gently, all teasing gone from his voice, "It's okay you know, if you like her like that." JC trailed off at her headshake.
"It's not that." Andy looked down at the shirt that she had started on, "There's just so much between us. I have so much that I need to say to her."
"Like what?" JC asked quietly, not being able to hold in his curiosity. He watched her put the shirt in a neat roll into the pack. He followed with one of his own. She had picked up a pair of socks to fold.
"Like 'I'm sorry'," Andy eventually replied, putting the socks in the pack and picking up another shirt. She looked at the small tear underneath the sleeve. "Remind me to fix this later okay?"
He nodded but was not sure she was paying him any attention. Her long brown hair had been pulled back into a ponytail without the normal bangs he could see how much darker her eyes seemed in the low lighting. Her eyes got darker and he could almost see tears edge their dark depths, "What are you sorry for?"
JC waited for such a long time that he did not believe she was going to respond. He assumed that she had forgotten the question. He caught her arm before she left his room. "Andy, what are you sorry for?"
"I'm sorry for leaving."
---
How long did it take to reach the city limits? Looking around at the broken, flooded ruins around her, Andy once again acknowledged that there were more obstacles to their speedy exodus from the city than she had originally considered. Mainly, that it was not speedy.
When Andy had introduced the idea of leaving the city to Juan Carlos, she had not taken into account how slow the group would be. Andy was a runner. She ran cross-country track in high school and had even participated once a year in the annual 5K 'Run for a Cure' race during college. The cardio training had helped her when she went to work for Miranda.
But even at her fittest, even with her running around all of New York City for Miranda that year, she could probably only walk about 20 miles a day assuming that the day was 8 hours long. She could push 30 if she did not take any breaks or stop for lunch. However, if she did that, she would not be walking at all the next couple of days because she would be too sore to move.
None of the others even came close to Andy's level of fitness. Richie was an avid soccer player but he was just a kid and before J-Day JC admitted, he would be more likely to be on a computer than playing a sport. Juan Carlo's physical fitness was almost a non-factor with his injuries. His injuries made him a hindrance since Andy and JC would have to take turns helping him along.
A cold, hard rain that caught the small group as it made its way through the city, a black rain. It was a byproduct of the ash still hovering in the lower layers of the stratosphere. Andy tried not to think about what the ash used to be.
Juan Carlos had a difficult time with the travel. Not being able to walk properly, put strain on everybody in the group. The slick muck that covered everything did not help. Andy and JC had made an improvised travois to pull their supplies. Juan Carlos occasionally used it when he could not walk any further on the crutches that Andy had fashioned for him and the ground was dry enough to pull his added weight.
They had been travelling for almost a week now. They were far from their old haunts and hunting grounds. They had hurried that first day, rushing through cluttered streets and moving steadily away from the bookstore. Andy and JC had both taken turns as human crutches in order to put as much distance between them and the danger behind until they were far enough away that they did not feel the overwhelming need to run.
Another limiting factor, Andy had discovered, was the lack of daylight hours available. They had found out the first day, that 'daytime' was the only time that it was 'safe' to travel. Since J-Day, vibrant blue stratosphere had given way to a seemingly eternal overcast sky. The tumultuous blending of muted colors splashed sickeningly across the injured atmosphere until the day existed as a bruised twilight.
Night was even darker. Without ambient light from the moon or the stars, it was too dark to see. Every night since leaving the bookstore, the small group had managed to find a room with a lock in one of the evacuated buildings in which to set up camp. Last night, their luck had run out and they had to camp outside:
It rained the night before but was dry now, which was a blessing. The rain caused the ash to compact together so that it crunched underfoot as if it were fresh snow after a hard freeze. Andy was too tired to tell if it was harder or easier to walk on than the soft sandy ash that they had crossed the days before. It was nearing full dark and they had not come across suitable shelter yet. Most of the buildings in the area had damage to the point that Andy and Juan Carlos worried that any stayed in would collapse on top of them.
Finally, Andy called a halt when they came upon semi-fenced parking lot nestled between two squat and crumbling buildings. The lot was rather large and held a few older cars, trucks and SUVs. There did not seem to be any signs or ads on either the buildings or the lot, but Andy thought it might have been an abandoned used car lot.
They searched through the lot and came across a SUV that someone had crashed so that it formed a "v" shape with another vehicle. The collision created a windbreak parallel to the mostly intact wall of one of the buildings. A torn chain-linked fence made up a third wall and created an enclosed area. The arrangement created an ideal place to rest for the night.
At Andy's suggestion, they settled Juan Carlos and began clearing away the ash from the depression the two cars made. There was less ash between the collision and the wall than the surrounding area so it only took about twenty minutes to scrap away the compacted ash down to the underlying cement. They had discovered a few nights ago, when a gust of wind blew a cloud of superfine ash through a broken window, that ash could be extremely flammable under the right conditions so they cleared away as much ash around camp as possible. Andy did not intend to wake up to find their camp catching fire again.
Soon, there was an area about ten feet by seven to camp and JC resettled his father in the cleared space while Andy used a couple of rags to tie the chain-linked fence closed. Richie moved to grab several handfuls of refuse and torn car upholstery from the vehicles for his father to start a fire. He had done this often enough that it was almost that it was routine by now and he knew what would burn without a lot of smoke or a bad smell. Someone or several people had already torn up the cars: they smashed in the windows, slashed the rubber off the tires, and ripped away at the interior and engine for usable parts.
It did not take long to gather a sizable pile of kindling. Andy and JC paired up and began searching the area for more useful things to keep and burn. Less than half an hour later, they returned with a few broken billboard pieces and settled down for the deepening of the night.
Andy did not know what woke her. She sat up and tried to see around the SUV where the windbreak ended. There was a slight scuffling sound above the distinctive crackle of fire. It sounded like the crunch of feet pushing through hard packed snow. She could not see past the orange glow the flames made; the night was a wall of darkness beyond the camp. Another crunch of hardened ash brought Andy to her feet in a crouch. She crept over to where JC slept nearest to her and shook him awake.
Her movements brought Juan Carlos out of slumber and seeing the harried, worried look on Andy's face, he quickly woke Richie, shushing him to silence when he started to ask questions. They all listened and startled when they heard the steps pause before getting closer. Andy was sure that there was more than one person out there.
She gestured for them to move away from the open space between the SUV and the wall and towards the fence. JC untied the rags and Andy ushered the group through, helping JC with Juan Carlos before following them through the separation in the fence. She would feel silly leaving the safety of their camp if it was nothing but a couple of stray dogs, but better safe than sorry.
Andy drew them to a halt much later by what she thought might have been a playground. The plastic structures, covered in at least six inches of ash, created a hard coat of reinforcement over the hard plastic play equipment. Seeing what looked like a kiddie fort, Andy led the frightened and exhausted group over to it. She tucked the others inside and then backtracked over their path, kicking up sand, all the way to the street trying to obscure their tracks. In the end, all she was really able to do was get filthy dirty and tired.
Eventually, Andy trudged back to the kiddie fort and crawled inside with the others. Richie had cried himself to sleep in Juan Carlos’s arms while JC huddled by himself in a corner. Andy crawled over to him and huddled in the dark next to him, waiting for the deep darkness to rise.
TBC... Chapter Six