ASCENSION: THE SYSTEMIC SERIES Read Free Page A

family away from the pressures of school and work.  Now such travel was dreaded – even feared.  It was difficult, dangerous, and could even prove deadly.  We’d thought – or maybe just hoped – that such journeys could be set aside for a while when we’d finally found Olsten.  We’d settled in and had our lives set up quite nicely there, but we’d again been forced from our home, which seemed to be becoming a recurring theme in our post-flu lives. 
    And thus, here we were, scavenging, suffering, and living hand to mouth once again. 
    We’d left Olsten several days ago.  Mysterious Molotov cocktail-wielding attackers had arrived in the middle of the night and evicted us from the general store we’d converted into our home.  Thankfully, we’d salvaged a fair amount of supplies from the building before we’d been forced to stand nearby and watch it burn to the ground. 
    However, even with our supplies, Florida in the summertime was proving to be a tough foe.  We were finding that clean drinking water and gasoline were the hardest items to come by.  And with the heat and humidity that the “Sunshine State” was throwing at us, we were going through more water than we’d expected in an effort to stay hydrated.  We were trying to limit ourselves to half a gallon of drinking water a piece each day, but with eleven in our group, we were still quickly consuming a fair amount of our supply.  The only good thing was that the oppressive heat seemed to be keeping our activity – and in turn, our appetites – in check.
    We were hoping to make it to the coast in the next day or two, but it was slow going.  We’d drive for a few miles before finding a spot with some abandoned cars or an empty home to search in hopes of finding fuel, food, water, or other useable supplies.  The old farm pickup with attached trailer that we were using as our transportation was running with its tank perilously close to empty.  And constantly having to stop and look for more gas to continue our trek had kept our progress to a snail’s pace.  Yet our efforts had only yielded us a paltry few gallons of gas in the process.  It seemed like it was always just enough to get us to the next spot at which a few precious ounces awaited.  I dreamed of the day that we’d come across a huge tanker truck in which we could fill our vehicle’s tank and then some.  But I was afraid that in this day and age, such a dream was just that, a dream.  With no oil wells or refineries running to create and process more fuel, and with other survivors of the flu having consumed or hoarded much of the excess supply over the past year, it was becoming increasingly difficult to scavenge gasoline.
    My old college buddy, Ray – an FBI agent in the pre-flu world – who had joined our group back in the forests of southern Illinois with his now pregnant wife Pam, had said we might try grain alcohol in place of gasoline, but alcohol was probably even harder to find these days than gasoline.  It was one of the few luxuries still available to people to help take their minds off of lost friends, lives, and loved ones, and the cruel realities of the post-flu world.  There was no cable television, no sporting events, no movies – unless you had a generator and fuel to power a DVD player and television, which even if you did, you weren’t likely to waste such valuable resources on movie watching.  There was no running water for soothing baths or hot showers, no electricity or natural gas for cooking romantic dinners, no doctors to diagnose and prescribe something for that achy back or those debilitating migraines, and no pharmacies to fill the prescription even if you had it.  There were no date-matching services to pair you with your ultimate love interest, no mindless online videos featuring piano-playing cats or screaming goats to take your mind off things for a minute or two, and no cell phones, tablets, or instant messaging.  It had become a world