Remnants: A Record of Our Survival by Daniel Powell

Author:Daniel Powell [Powell, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction, Horror, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction, Adventure, Dystopian, Post-Apocalyptic
ISBN: 9780615828237
Google: -IR3nQEACAAJ
Amazon: B00D6VG5RW
Publisher: Distillations Press
Published: 2013-06-03T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six: A Glimpse of the City

So this is what happened.

If you’re still following along here then you probably saw this coming. While I’ve tried to be as faithful as possible throughout this process (by making recordings and trying to add links and all that good stuff that any real historian should be doing), you’ll just have to trust me from here on out that I’m reporting things faithfully. As Dad recently told me, history isn’t exactly objective anyway.

So I’m posting this by the thin beam of a dying flashlight in the back room of a deserted bowling alley. We’re locked in—barricaded with a heavy metal desk in front of the only entrance. Billy and Dad are here, and Billy has taken a nasty bullet wound to the shoulder. Dad says that it went clear through the skin and muscle without hitting any bone, so at least that’s a blessing. Billy says it stings like crazy, but he seems to be handling it okay and the bleeding is under control.

There is the unmistakable musk of a hundred moldering bowling shoes wafting on the air.

Lovely.

Outside, all heck is breaking loose. It would appear that the blighted don’t share our shortage of ammunition, which is just a huge bummer.

But here’s the good news: we found him, and the treatments are real.

So, okay…let me backtrack again. We left the cabin four days ago, right at dusk. The truck is pretty noisy but Dad took it slow, trying to keep it stealth. We left the lights off and slunk down those logging trails like a pack of jewel thieves, never really pushing it over 15 or 20 MPH. Outside of a sizable herd of deer grazing in a high-mountain meadow, we didn’t encounter another soul. The city loomed dark in the distance, with just a smattering of solar LEDs glowing from the exteriors of a few of the busted-up skyscrapers on the far side of the Willamette.

A dying town in a dying world, Portland is. So sad…

“I don’t expect that they’ll be rolling out the welcome mat,” Billy said. Dad chuckled, but there was no humor in it. We were all on edge. Portland is danged scary, and I immediately missed the safety of the cabin. It occurred to me then that if we could just find Mom, we’d be able to make it fine there on the side of that mountain. It was an epiphany, and it felt really good to just let go of any misguided hope I had been holding onto that things would go back again to the way they were. So much for school. So much for soccer practice and grocery stores and piano lessons.

None of that mattered if we could all just be together again. That’s what leaving the safety of the mountain taught me. It also taught me that people can be terrible, terrible monsters, but more on that later…

So we jounced our way down those rutted logging trails in the darkness. My brother sat shotgun, our actual shotgun in his lap.

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