ASCENSION: THE SYSTEMIC SERIES Read Free Page B

in which surviving to see another day was the ultimate luxury. 
    And even if you somehow managed to achieve several of those aforementioned luxuries, it was a constant battle to maintain them or keep someone else from taking them.  Gone were the laws and order of the civilized world.  Small segments of the current society had retained some semblance of its former self – certain rules, regulations, and inherent characteristics of dignity, civility, and chivalry – but there was no law enforcement to maintain order among those who chose to follow their most basic of human instincts and ignore the laws and protocol of the land once known as the United States of America.  And since the flu had created a “sink or swim” sort of mentality, many of those who had survived were the ones willing to do whatever it took to stay alive, which often meant having to do the unthinkable. 
    Our group had been lucky in that I had always been a planner and a prepper.  I had foreseen a situation not unlike the Su flu coming long before it ever arrived.  And while as a writer in my pre-flu life, maybe the idea of such a situation ever coming to fruition seemed more the basis for a book than reality, I had undertaken the preparation process nonetheless, largely to err on the side of caution than due to any real expectation of such a scenario unfolding.  I had stockpiled food, several guns, ammunition, medical supplies for my diabetic wife Claire, and other emergency items.  I had even picked out a secluded spot – land owned by a family friend – in the forests of southern Illinois where we could safely hold out until things settled down and danger had passed.  And I had even sent pre-written letters with detailed instructions to my closest loved ones before we left. 
    Most of those whom I had contacted had eventually joined us.  Some never made it.  And until we’d been forced from our safe haven by a roving gang of miscreants, we’d called the place our home. 
    That was nearly a year ago.  We’d been moving from place to place ever since.  We’d found a beautiful mansion we’d nicknamed “the castle” in the mountains of Tennessee, but we were forced to move on by local inhabitants incensed by our encroachment upon what they felt was “their” territory.  That was when we decided to continue south.  In Georgia, we had a brief stay at a small farm that had ended in disaster with the death of the farm’s owner and his wife.  This traumatic event, paired with various injuries and illnesses among our group members, had forced us onward in search for a place we could finally call our own. 
    Olsten, a small and secluded town also in Georgia had seemed the perfect spot.  But lack of water, and an area population that was apparently far less pleased with our choice of living location than we were, had forced our group, that also included my brother Will, his wife Sharron and their two children Paul and Sarah, my father Frank, Claire’s mother Emily, and our cat Cashmere – who had joined us at the castle in Tennessee – to once again move along.
    Our experiences to this point in the post-flu world had left us gun-shy and with little faith in our fellow survivors.  It had created in us an extreme distrust of others, and we were tired of having to start over again and again because sadly, in a world in which few people remained, we still couldn’t manage to find a place where we could live in relative peace and harmony with our fellow human beings. 
    The newspapers I’d read that had been printed in the last days in which mankind had such luxuries, reported that the flu’s mortality rate had run somewhere in the 95 percent range.  If that was the case, in our nation of around 320 million people, some 16 million might have been spared from the pandemic’s wide-reaching grasp.  I had few illusions though that this many people now populated what was once the United States.  It was likely that millions more had