Journey Into The Aftermath |✔

Chapter eleven : In the Name of Science

Sweat began to journey down the side of my face as I inched closer to the Mexican border. I considered taking off my jacket but then a frosted breeze stung my face, causing me to zip the jacket back up. The sun was scorching in the sky as I headed further south, but the wind felt like it carried little shards of ice within it. I was uncomfortably sweating and freezing at the same time.

Unbelievably, the truck's GPS crapped out a few miles back and so did the weather forecast. I guess it was a good thing that it lasted this long but, now? Of all the times? I took a page out of Noah's book and wrote the directions down, but still, if I jotted anything down wrong, I was out of luck.

There was yellowed white sand for miles out on both sides the narrow road I was driving on. It was barely a two-way road, but as always, I just wedged myself in the center. You could tell this road hasn't been worked on in far more than three years because I would probably have a smoother ride on the dirt next to it. Potholes seemed to come in truckloads. The hydraulics were probably pushed further than it's ever had to go with this road, so I turned back on its inner hovercraft.

Burgundy mountains blurring in the distance sat far off while the sun swam in the blue, but cloudless sky. Random patches of dark green and yellow grass scattered amongst the sand in different sizes. There was, however, one small, lonesome tree that formed a crooked seven in the field a couple yards away. It still had the stub of a branch that has probably fallen off years ago and at the very top of the tree was a thin section of green leaves. Besides that little spectacle, there were no other leaves or branches the whole way down and the little tree was probably just less than ten feet tall.

In a way, I felt like I could relate to that tree. The way it exemplifies the only thing left in a destroyed world, the way it seems to be killed slowly by its surroundings, but despite all odds, it's still standing, not strong, but standing nonetheless. That tree and I were much the same in the sense that we are survivors when all else is lost. Our only difference?

I have a job to finish.

I lost my father and my brother to this world and I will do whatever it takes to free my father and hopefully make some sense of this ruined planet.

After I realized having a heart to heart with a tree wasn't exactly the most sane thing I could be doing for entertainment--or companionship--, I chalked it under 'having no one else to open up to, so why the hell not?'. Sane enough for me.

Watching the mountains fade further into the horizon, I noticed a toll booth approaching me when I turned back around. It was on the edge of the road. I checked to see if someone was inside and saw him sitting comfortable in the sole chair inside.

Except he was just a pile of bones.

Beyond the toll booth was a huge iron gate that was at least thirty feet high and stretched as far down as the fields would take it. There were extensive amounts of circular barbed wire coiling across the entire top of the iron gate and the gate itself was at least three fences thick.

There was a meter length of gap between the booth and the gate and as I pulled up to the booth, stopped slightly past the booth from bad brake timing. I stepped out of the still-floating truck and was about to jog up to the closed gate but got caught in a trance as I stretched my legs for almost ten minutes. I found myself moving on to working the rest of my body. I did take pit stops along the way, but very, very few because I had this sinking feeling that I didn't have time to waste.

Afterwords, I threw my jacket on the hood of the truck despite the freezing winds and simply rolled down the sleeves of my thin black and white laced sweater I picked up from a Walmart I passed by earlier. It was thin, but no wind passed through it and I figured that that was good enough because this heat was a pain in my side.