Chapter 1: Escape from the City

June 2026

“Sally, wake up,” Clark said in a hushed voice close to his daughter’s ear. He gently shook her shoulder and in a tone of urgency added, “We need to go now!”

Sally jumped off the leather couch with a knee jerk reaction and for a moment peered into the darkness to adjust her senses to time, space and purpose. She couldn’t see much, but enough to reach for two backpacks. She slung one in front, the other on her back, and then picked up a tote bag.

Both had packed days in advance and were prepared for this hour. She had gone to sleep the night before with a double layer of clothing and in some cases three, and a sweater tied around her waist. She didn’t want to leave anything behind.

Her father hoisted a large camper’s pack on his back, a smaller one in front. He no longer was at his absolute peak fitness and, knowing the distance they had to walk, tried to keep the load about a third of his body weight. He too was wearing a double layer of clothing, plus a hunting jacket too bulky for his already overstuffed packs. It hung loosely from his body and was too warm for June weather. But, he would need it where they were going.

It was dark outside for at least two more hours before dawn ushered in the early morning light. They had to get away from the City undetected, as quickly as possible, while everyone was still asleep, before the daily rampage of lawlessness and violence would start anew.

The City and surrounding regions and possibly beyond had been thrown into a state of chaos five months earlier on New Year’s Eve when the power failed. People were counting down the hours to welcome in the New Year. Instead, they were greeted with total darkness and deadly silence.

Many believed it was triggered by gamma rays from a massive sun storm that struck the earth’s weakening magnetosphere. The impact immediately fried electronic circuits, wiped out electric and communication grids, even caused plane crashes and train derailments. Without electricity, the world ground to a halt, went silent and plunged into anarchy. People started dying real fast.

The City was flooded with people from all over seeking food and protection. Emergency shelters were overwhelmed; food dispensaries overrun. The sick and infirmed died. Diseases spread. Government camps became war zones as desperate people fought each other to survive. Hordes of starving people roamed the streets looting and killing one another sometimes just for a stale piece of bread. Those with “illegal” guns were able to defend themselves, but not for long. The desperate population turned on itself and was devoured by violence. Gangs sprang up compounding the chaos by terrorizing, raping and murdering those who stood in their way. Under less stressful conditions, people survived by cooperating and sharing, but the collapse of society had brought out the worst in most to the point where they killed to survive. That’s what the gangs were doing, killing and taking. The ruthless survived; the humble and weak died.

Clark was devastated when his wife was ambushed and killed by a group of hungry teenage boys on her way back with food rations from the nearby government emergency relief center guarded by government security forces. She was only steps away from the downtown office building where he had set up a successful architectural firm fourteen years earlier soon after Sally was born. It now served as their refuge.

They had lived on the outskirts of the City in a spacious home with a large green backyard, swimming pool and all the creature comforts one could imagine, until the authorities confiscated it a month after the collapse to house people swarming into the City from the surrounding region. Life quickly turned into a world stacked up with trash and mired in human waste. Diseases and epidemics followed.

Clark thought it would be safer to take his family to his downtown office. Yet, despite the strict curfews and food rationing nothing was safe anymore.

Fearing for his daughter Sally, as well as his own, Clark decided it was time to get far away from the madness and seek a safe haven.

He moved the couch away from the door that was blocking the entrance to his office. Carefully, he cracked open the door and stuck out his nose. The long hallway was a dark, quiet space that ended at a fire escape window glowing with silvery white moonlight. The pale light was enough for Clark to see that it was safe to leave. Before exiting, he grabbed two canisters filled with gasoline placed by the door.

“OK, let’s move,” he whispered, motioning with his head for Sally to follow him.

Silently, they made their way down the hallway to the emergency stairway. They had counted and memorized every step between every landing and floor of the stairwell leading down to the lobby of the building. The stairwell was dark and the air clammy, smelling of wet diaper. They mentally replayed the countdown as they descended the stairs.

At the entrance of the lobby, Clark surveyed the street to make sure the night was still and safe to venture outside. The light beaming down from the moon and stars created gray silhouettes of nearby motionless shapes and brooding shadows. Otherwise, the surrounding world was an almost total void of blackness and deep silence.

They briskly walked across the street to a nearby construction site where weeks earlier Clark had camouflaged a car with a mountain of boxes and trash bags. For many weeks he had observed from his office window someone slipping in and out of the site through the plywood fence and tinkering with the engine until one day the person stopped showing up.

When Clark went to investigate, he found the keys in the ignition and the engine retrofitted to bypass electronic parts fried by the solar storm. It was an unlikely find considering that anything with four wheels was either seized by the authorities or by gangs, especially those vehicles that had been or could be retrofitted.

The battery still had enough juice to crank the engine, but the gas tank was all but empty. Clark knew where he could get gasoline. He had five gallons of the scarce fuel in the two canisters he was carrying.

While he emptied the canisters into the gas tank and removed most of the trash Sally stayed by the gate to listen for any approaching bad actors and waited for his signal to open it.

When they went to throw their backpacks and bags onto the back seats they were startled to see someone lying there partially covered under a piece of carpet padding. Clark yanked the pad to find a frightened girl who begged that they not hurt her.

“Where is your family?” Clark harshly demanded; his sense of empathy blunted by fear and the selfish hunger for survival.

“They’re dead. I’m all alone,” the girl responded trembling and starting to cry. “Please don’t hurt me.”

Her small frame shook with fear, causing Clark to regret his crude outburst against an innocent child.

Sally quickly surmised the situation and told her father to put his backpacks next to the girl and start the car. She threw her gear onto the front passenger seat and got in next to the girl.

After couple attempts, Clark was able to get the engine started and they drove out of the site and sped off down the quiet street. The amount of fuel they had in the car would take them at least 175 miles away from the City. After that, they had to walk another 125 miles to their final destination.

“So, what’s your name?” Sally asked, still shaken with anxiety over the perils and uncertainties of their getaway, but trying to project confidence and calmness.

“Katie,” the girl responded with lingering anguish.

She was pale and looked emaciated in the meager moonlight. Her lips were parched, her voice weak, her hair a tangled mess, her eyes sunken like she hadn’t slept in days. Sally grabbed the bottle of water from her father’s backpack and told Katie to drink a little before offering her a food bar, which she took with trembling hands and wolfed down.

Sally and Katie sat side by side, staring out into the darkness and over an uncertain future. “Where is your dad taking us?” Katie asked sheepishly, breaking the silence.

Sally explained that they were heading for a cabin in the mountains which her father and two other friends had built and used as a hunting lodge twice a year. It was located in a forest preserve where one of the men was a ranger who knew how to get the cabin built under the radar and regularly looked after the place.

Several days before everything went dead, the ranger friend was called to lead a big reforestation project out West to restock the region with wildlife. He was expected to be back in the spring. Now, the possibility of returning seemed highly remote. The other friend, his wife and three kids lived in the capital and if still alive were probably trapped there.

Sally kept up a running talk to calm Katie, telling her that it was highly unlikely that anyone else knew about the cabin. If they were going to survive the chaos and violence, they had to get to a bugout location. The cabin was the best place to get away where no one would find them and where their chances to survive might be better. Her father felt that the chaos and deadly violence in the City would only get worse.

As he listened to her explanation, a sad smile creased Clark’s face as he pushed on, leaving the once thriving and charming City behind. He looked back nostalgically at the plans he had made to bring his wife and Sally to the cabin for a week or more to embrace the solitude and wonders of Nature. He had the means to take them to a seaside resort or on a luxurious Caribbean cruise. However, it was among the majestic mountains, the sounds of the wild, the rugged life that made him feel whole and want to share that wholeness with his family. The decision to go there now was not to seek some momentary inner harmony, but physical safety for a long time to come.

This is what life had now become, he thought. It wasn’t an exciting adventure. It was about logistics: carrying food, finding water, adequate shelter, worrying about the weather, fretting about people they might encounter. He never worried so much before and knew very well that the addition of Katie would just make him worry more.

“So, what happened to your family?” Sally asked but quickly amended. “That’s if you want to talk about it.”

Clark felt his heart melt as the girl described how she and her family were plundered by a marauding gang of thugs soon after leaving a church soup kitchen. Her parents were killed; her older sister raped and hauled away. She was able to hide among the rubble of the construction site where the savage goons couldn’t find her, and was holed up there for days without food and very little water.

She was fourteen, the same age as Sally. Clark imagined that things would have become very dire for her, very dire indeed, very soon, alone in the midst of violent chaos, if she had not found the car and them. Girls had a hard time in this brutal world with very few choices, and often the options were not good, not friendly.

There was no chance he was going to abandon her in the middle of the road with nothing but some granola bars and a dirty blanket. Highways and open spaces were like death traps used by desperate people with bad intentions who preyed on unsuspecting travelers to steal and rape and kill.

As he drove, always wary of any sudden movements in front or from behind, he pondered why people flocked to or stayed in the City, dying, starving, and killing each other in the thousands, when there were places like the one they were heading toward which was two maybe three weeks away by foot. Did people no longer have the willpower or want to know how to survive in the wild anymore? Had they become so conditioned to depend on the faceless government to address their every waking need? Either that or they expected the government to take care of them.

He regretted not having acted sooner to leave the City. If only he had done something different, better, smarter, his wife would still be with him. He slowly shook his head side to side, knowing that the choices they made right or wrong couldn’t be undone; the past couldn’t be changed.

The silhouette of the City slowly disappeared in the rearview mirror and roadside houses became fewer and father apart. They passed scores of cars abandoned along the side of the highway, nearly all of them looted of their tires, engine parts and the contents of their trunks. Everywhere they looked, the landscape was empty, barren, devoid of life. A vast world that once bustled with the activities of people now lay dead.

THEY HAD DRIVEN NEARLY two hours as dawn slowly eased away the darkness, pushing itself higher over the horizon, crowned in crimson red, until the first fiery rays of the sun pierced the morning sky. The celestial light brought forth the shimmering dazzle of dewdrops, like glitter sprinkled over the quiet landscape.

However, all was not as bright and reassuring as it appeared when they reached a spot looking down a long, even stretch of highway and could see in the distance an odd and ominous scene. The highway was littered with cars piled up for more than half a mile at the end of which stood a roadblock. Clark had heard about such barriers, that they served to hold back the flood of people from inundating the overcrowded city.

As they came closer, the highway looked like a war zone, a graveyard of abandoned and burned out cars lined up along both shoulders of the road, some partially blocking lanes, others careened onto the embankments, many more, stuck or overturned in the ditches. All were pointing in one direction only away from the City. It seemed that this roadblock was meant to deter people from leaving the city, not to keep them away.

Confused, Clark weaved around the disabled cars, picking his way through an obstacle course, cautiously approaching the roadblock. Suddenly a man staggered out of a guard shack. It looked more like an oversized, orange-colored porta-potty. The man held up a red stop sign in one hand and a rifle in the other. Clark told Sally and Katie to hide in the well of the car between the seats and cover themselves.

Clark rolled the car to a stop about five yards away from the man, leaving the engine running. The man appeared emaciated and disheveled. He wore no uniform except for a pair of military-style boots and one of the lenses in his glasses was cracked. He didn’t look like a sentry, nor did it look like one had been sent to replace him in months.

The man dropped the sign and pointed his rifle in Clark’s direction. “Where do you think you’re going?” he shouted, slurring his words.

Clark didn’t want himself or the girls to get killed in a world that was no longer like the one they knew, the one that had been normal and predictable until six months ago. He lowered his window and responded, “I’m going to get my wife.”

“Well, you’re going to have to pay to get by,” the man snorted.

“I’m sorry, but I have no money.”

“Food! Did you bring any food?”

“Let me see,” Clark replied stalling for time while rummaging through Sally’s tote bag and contemplating an exit strategy. “All I have are a couple of energy bars. Will that do?”

“Step out of the car nice and easy and place them on the hood,” the man demanded, his voice cracking.

Clark did as he was told and exited the car, leaving the engine idling. He put the energy bars on the hood of the passenger’s side of the car and hastened back behind the wheel. The man advanced like a starving animal. Clark quickly shifted the gear into drive and switched on the bright lights, blinding the man. He jammed the accelerator to the floor and gunned the car straight at the man, swerving just in time, enough to nudge and topple him to the ground. The traffic arm was broken and Clark was able to speed off down the road, his heart beating in his chest faster than the velocity showing on the speedometer.

When they were safely away from the roadblock, Clark told the girls they could come out of hiding. Although they saw none of the action that took place, the girls had a pretty good sense of what transpired, asking Clark to fill in the details, including the emotions.

“Were you afraid, Daddy?” Sally felt compelled to ask.

“Yes,” Clark answered, a gaze of intense hatred still lingering in his eyes and the adrenaline slowly wearing off. “Remember, fear can be your best ally in a dangerous situation.”

In reality, he was surprised with himself at the ruthlessness he had shown when push came to shove, yet felt no remorse for nearly having run over the man. He knew that decisiveness was the essence of successful action. If one acted quickly and authoritatively, people wouldn’t know until it was over or too late. It wasn’t simply catching them off guard or by surprise. You had to know what you were doing and have the guts to carry it through. So, the second the man took his attention away from him and concentrated on the energy bars, he floored the gas pedal.

Sally brushed her father’s response aside and just beamed with pride. Katie was more introspective and impressed with the man she had met barely two hours before for his calculated determination and bravery. She was very grateful for those traits.

Hardened by the brush with death, Clark pushed on putting as much distance as possible between themselves and the roadblock. They drove for miles with no one in sight except for more abandoned cars, every single one looted, some with blown out windows, most scarred and peppered with bullet holes. He never slowed down and just stared straight ahead. After about an hour, the car started to sputter.

When the car finally came to a complete halt, Clark felt relieved that they had not been followed or hunted down like stray dogs. Nor did they encounter a patrol on or near the highway and adjacent roads. He also felt fortunate that they had gotten farther than he originally estimated, putting nearly 200 miles behind them. Another 100 miles still lay ahead which he hoped they could cover in five days.