Homecoming

Chapter Eight

Sweat soaks me as I sit here—my hands still tied—and study the city ruins move further away in front of me. The occasional jolts, on top of the constant shuddering, would snap me out for a split-second, but I retain my gaze nonetheless.

Alexander was right; it is a complete shame to be forced to uproot their lives from the Village, a relatively sustainable community that took them months to develop and will take another few or even longer to replicate.

Compare that to the entire planet, and the heartbreak of seeing what the Shatters have made of the civilization is a tough, if not impossible, one to recover from. The idea that it took eons of breakthroughs and progress—along with the generations of wise, hardworking men behind them—just to bring us to where we were before the apocalypse, and all that be put to waste in a matter of weeks because of the butterfly effect of our mistakes, with such gravity we refused to recognize then, is the biggest cosmic joke of all.

It just dawns on me that my aspirations of ever witnessing what the world would look like when all of this is over—in the far possibility that it will be—is just that: an aspiration. A pipe dream. A fantasy.

Maybe my kids won't even be there to see it. Maybe not even my grandkids, or my great grandkids. Maybe not even the other end of my bloodline.

Will the earth and humanity ever recover? That's a question up for debate.

Will we fight to at least try? Absolutely.

"Hey, Thomas!" Benito, the driver of the truck I'm loaded onto calls out. "Don't ever think about planning an escape."

I turn my head around to meet his weary eyes in the rearview mirror. "Nope! There's no place I'd rather be."

"Well, good." He raises his bushy brows a little, forming wrinkles in his forehead, as he has his left hand clutching the steering wheel and the other fiddling with the edge of his unkempt, greying mustache.

"Because—guess what, Ben—this is actually turning out to be my happy place," I add, flashing an overenthusiastic fake-grin, before anchoring my sight back to the dissipating view of the cityscape, swirls of dust spawned by the wheels blurring everything like a sandstorm. "Disneyland can't even compare."

In my estimate, it's been a good four hours since we left the Village. The party started moving before dawn, but the sun has already traveled far above the horizon since—providing us all with free yet unsolicited tanning privileges to at least two shades darker—and we are exiting the boundaries of Fort Wayne just now.

To be fair, most of them are on foot (the unfortunate few quite literally), while only the injured, which happens to be a lot, and the captive, which is I, are transported along with the heavier weapons and supplies via the few automobiles the mechanics were able to salvage and repair from what was left of the earth.

"Halt! Halt!" a guy with a booming voice, presumably Commander Horton, who is leading the caravan, yells from a couple vehicles away. "Let's take a rest here. Everybody can take a piss and eat their lunch now, because our next stop will be in Defiance."

Crap, we're on our way away from Stephens.

Where are we going exactly? Canada?

"You don't have to tell me twice," Benito whispers to himself, a whisper loud enough for me to hear, before stepping on the brakes, causing the pickup truck to stop and I to dive on my back, my head bumping onto the cargo bed.

Ouch.

The sound of the truck's engine fades out, and the atypical trembling at the cargo area stops, as do the rest of the vehicles.