The Survivor Journals Omnibus by Sean Patrick Little

Author:Sean Patrick Little
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Post-Apocalyptic | Pandemic
Publisher: Spilled Inc. Press
Published: 2019-10-29T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Long Empty Roads

We left Washington and went south toward Richmond, Virginia. The sun fell low in the sky near Fredericksburg. I pulled off the highway and found a gas station near some woods where we could set up a decent campsite well away from the gas pumps. I started to erect camp, and it quickly became apparent that Renata’s camp skills were almost nil. She’d been purely scavenging, living day to day since the Flu. She knew how to light a fire off of newspaper, and only had wood because she’d used an axe to hack up furniture. I had to show her how to hunt down firewood and simple comfort items like camp chairs, which were always available from someone’s front porch nearby. I had to show her how to unload the necessary gear from the RV. She was a quick learner, though. She watched me with fascination as I moved around setting up wood in a pyramid shape and starting the fire with dry pine needles as tinder. Instead of a match, I used a magnifying lens that I found in the gas station. It only took a few seconds of concentrating the sun through the lens and angling it to the needles before a few embers sparked and quickly caught flame. I was showing off, I admit.

“That’s some real Boy Scout stuff right there,” she said. “Amazing.”

“How’d you survive the past year if you didn’t know how to do this?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I made it somehow. Sheer force of will. You look like you really know what you’re doing, though.”

“I’m no outdoorsman by nature. I learned over the past year. A real trial by fire. It’s not too difficult once you get the hang of it, but to maintain, it’s really time consuming. I don’t know how people used to do it. Like the pioneers, the pilgrims—how did they survive? We might have been thrown for a bit of a loop here, but at least we still have a lot of modern advancements.” The fire bit into the wood and climbed to a nice little flame in moments. White smoke streamed upward.

Ren inhaled the wood smoke deeply. “This is like real camping.” She sat back in the lawn chair I unfolded for her and put her feet toward the fire. After a few seconds, she kicked off her shoes and peeled her socks. She wriggled her toes gleefully in the heat of the flames. “I could get used to this.”

“I don’t think you have much of a choice in the matter,” I told her. “This is how it is now whether we like it or not.”

I showed Ren how to pump gas for the RV. She watched me pump for ten minutes, and then I gave her a chance to help out. After five minutes, she was looking at me like I was insane. “And this is how you have to do it every time? My shoulders already hurt.”

“Every single time. Takes about a half hour of solid pumping to fill the tank.

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