Enduring Armageddon Read Free Page A

nearly impossible to tell from her voice, but I guessed she couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen. “No problem, Sam. I know what you meant by the statement. We left with what we could carry and I already owned this baseball bat,” I said as I patted the big fat logo stamped across the bat’s surface. “We stayed mostly to the roads and kept hidden at night when the dangerous folks were out and about.”
    “Well, I’ll take your word for it, Chuck. I came here from Springfield and…” she stopped abruptly again. “It was a difficult trip.” She glanced quickly towards the street and squeezed her eyes shut a few times. In the gloom of the rain, I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like she was trying to get rid of tears without wiping her face with potentially contaminated hands.
    “Anyways, Virden is a pretty safe spot for us right now,” she continued. “We have everything we could need for the foreseeable future. We were far enough south from Chicago and north of St. Louis that the EMPs didn’t destroy all of our electronic stuff. There was a large grocery store here with tons of canned food and our guys are constantly going out on patrol to get more food from the surrounding area. Our town’s leader, mayor, sheriff, whatever you want to call him, was this crazy apocalypse prepper-guy so he sprang into action right away after the bombs started exploding. He convinced the high school principal to allow him to fill up the gym floor with dirt, so they brought in tractors and saved enough dirt before the acid rain came that we can grow crops inside once we get the lighting and irrigation down.”
    “Geez, that was really smart. I’d have never thought of something like that.”
    “Yeah, well, like I said, he was one of those weird prepper-guys. He even got featured on that TV show about people like him. He’s made us all watch it a few times since he’s still got power at his place, I guess to validate his abilities or whatever, but he’s alright. He’s a little eccentric, but then again, I probably would be too if I’d been made fun of my whole life for believing something and then suddenly everyone who was still alive realized that I’d been right all along.”
    “Funny way of thinking about it, but I guess you’re right,” Becca said.
    The snapping noises of the dirty black rain hitting the awning above us began to lessen. “Looks like the rain is letting up, so we’ll be able to go to the guest registration office soon.”
    “I’m sorry. Did you say that the town has a guest registration office?” I asked.
    “Oh, yeah. Allan, the mayor, likes to keep track of everyone in town and the office helps him do that. Also, if you plan on staying, you have to figure out what you’re going to do for work. They really don’t like people who don’t bring anything of value to the town. As you can see,” Sam said with a slight curtsey, “the tour guide position is already filled. They’ll tolerate you for a few days, but if you want to stay, you’ll have to bring something to the community that they don’t already have.”
    The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. “Okay, that’s our cue. Come on, the registration office is about half a mile or so down Main Street here.” Sam picked up her umbrella and started walking before we had a chance to say anything else.
    Virden was the first real, functioning town that we’d seen since we left our neighborhood in Plainfield. We pushed our bikes down the road as we followed her and took in the sights. There were hand painted signs for seamstresses, a doctor’s office, a couple of restaurants and an outdoor survivalist store. I made a mental note to visit that last one as soon as I could.
    “I don’t suppose anyone in town needs a financial advisor do they?” I asked half-jokingly to our guide.
    “Seriously? That’s what you did before the apocalypse? Geez, that must have been boring.”
    “Well, I thought it was exciting. There