{"id":498,"date":"2009-11-17T08:30:43","date_gmt":"2009-11-17T13:30:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatsociety.org\/?p=498"},"modified":"2018-10-30T19:55:22","modified_gmt":"2018-10-30T23:55:22","slug":"finzel-part-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=498","title":{"rendered":"Finzel, Part seven"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week’s entry is right here<\/a>.
\n<\/p>\n

Always Coming Home<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Let the old world die.\u00a0 Die like he should\u2019ve.\u00a0 Survivor\u2019s guilt.\u00a0 Why was he walking around when everybody he knew and loved died?\u00a0 Why had he been passed over?<\/p>\n

Well, no longer.\u00a0 He was going to go back to where it began.\u00a0 Back on the couch, in front of the TV, gaping at the idiot news, watching the world come tumbling down.\u00a0\u00a0 Then watching static.\u00a0 Then sitting in darkness staring at the dead TV set.\u00a0 Frozen in place till hunger pushed him to get up, to eat what remained in his kitchen and, finally, to venture out into the newly dead world.\u00a0 Scavenge, hoard, meet McGavin, have Parker come up and whisper to them over a bottle of scotch, and ten years in passive-aggressive Amishville.<\/p>\n

Life has many paths.\u00a0 He could have been like everybody else.\u00a0 Could have stayed on that couch forever, mummified in a honeycomb suburban apartment, eaten by vermin and slowly falling apart on a moldering couch while day after day, night after night, the entire world passed by outside the clouding, cob-webbed windows.\u00a0 Forgotten forever.\u00a0 Finally free.<\/p>\n

Surviving wasn\u2019t freedom.\u00a0 It was even more responsibility.\u00a0 It was worse than 9 to 5 at the fucking office, and credit card bills jammed in with all the pleading, screaming junk mail, and wrestling dead-eyed soulless monsters at the supermarket check-out lane.\u00a0 All that nonsense, all the time desiring freedom, and, when it finally came, it was anything but freedom.\u00a0 It was the absence of control.\u00a0 Of uniformity.\u00a0 Of the vast cushion of life in the land of plenty.<\/p>\n

So he destroyed the locomotive, left his friend of ten years lying dead and tangled with the corpse of idiot fucking Walter Murray, and just started walking east.\u00a0 He followed the interstates home \u2013 68 to 70 to 270 to 495.\u00a0 Just like a thousand times before, except now on foot.\u00a0 Past towns long dead and through nature very much resurgent.\u00a0 He picked his way over the crumbling, scorched overpass spanning the blackened ruin of Cumberland, climbed the hills and gazed down at dead villages peeping from amongst the new forest.\u00a0 He climbed the long, slow rise to Sideling Hill \u2013 the ridge that had been blasted through to lay the 68 roadbed and forever make old US 40, weaving up into the mountain and down again, obsolete.\u00a0 A man-made marvel \u2013 a cut blasted in the mountain over 300 feet deep.\u00a0 But now I-68 was gone, subsumed by a decade of rockfalls and landslides.\u00a0 He scampered over the rubble, past the weathered visitor\u2019s center, and started the descent down the other side.<\/p>\n

Winter caught him at Hancock, where 68 starts as an exit off of I-70.\u00a0 An early December snow surprised him, though the nights had been increasingly dreadful.\u00a0 Just a decade without humanity\u2019s control and the weather had started to change.\u00a0 Or maybe it was all part of the old climate change stuff. Super storms and colder weather.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t matter now.\u00a0 Humanity\u2019s time was over.\u00a0 The Earth would right itself.<\/p>\n

There was no need to push on.\u00a0 He had a destination but, really, it didn\u2019t matter how long it took to get there.\u00a0 He decided to overwinter in Clear Spring, 75 miles outside of DC.\u00a0 Mid-December found him ensconced in a house, positioned behind a hill and a screen of trees to keep the worst of the wind out.\u00a0 He covered the windows in plastic sheeting and boards, and burned every scrap of wood he could find.\u00a0 The remains of two people were in the upstairs bedroom, and he unceremoniously dumped the bones and papery flesh out of the window.\u00a0 Then he broke up chairs and table and beds and, as winter moved on, even ripped up some of the old hardwood flooring.<\/p>\n

Clear Spring seemed to have avoided the worst of the looting.\u00a0 How strange that the toll of 10 years scavenging was less obvious the closer he got to the city.\u00a0 Everybody who could bugged out \u2013 got as rural as they dared. Perhaps he and McGavin were wrong to follow Parker after all.\u00a0 The city and suburbs were a fatted calf, abandoned out of fear.\u00a0 Fear of attack, fear of disease from the corpses\u2026 But, once deep in the country, there was no time for anything but simple survival.\u00a0 It certainly hadn\u2019t crossed his mind to make the long trip to the city.\u00a0 Why bother?<\/p>\n

Clear Spring was nice.\u00a0 Lots of canned goods in the stores and houses.\u00a0 Enough for a carefully rationed winter.\u00a0 The descendents of livestock roamed the forest, and deer were plentiful.\u00a0 Winter would take a toll\u2026but they\u2019d survived ten winters.\u00a0 He could make a go of it in Clear Spring.\u00a0 But that wasn\u2019t the plan.\u00a0 Let the old world die.<\/p>\n

He set out as soon as the roads were passable.\u00a0 The snow and the slush were gone, another season done.\u00a0 He marched down I-70 and, as he approached Frederick, the first storm of spring rolled in like a freight train.\u00a0 Dark clouds boiled on the horizon, and the cleansing rains chased him into the Hampton Inn right where 270 began, the corridor leading to the Washington Beltway.\u00a0 He hunkered down in the main office and devoured the last of his Clear Spring rations, trusting the upcoming suburban sprawl to provide enough for his needs.<\/p>\n

He slept fitfully on a moth-eaten fold-out cot, the last of winter\u2019s chill creeping around him.\u00a0 He dreamed of McGavin\u2019s staring eyes, he thought he heard the sounds of Jacob\u2019s flight into the woods and, as always, he saw Cumberland burning.\u00a0 Towards dawn, he dreamed of the old warehouse where he and McGavin had settled before Parker walked into their lives.\u00a0\u00a0 A nameless, graffitied building along the rail tracks in Fort Totten.\u00a0 Still standing?\u00a0 Still stuffed with the shit they left behind when they attached their wagon to Parker?\u00a0 Maybe he could go back to where that all started.\u00a0 This new life.\u00a0 Pretend the last ten years were just a dream.\u00a0 That was the original plan with McGavin.\u00a0 Build a little empire on the train tracks.\u00a0 Maybe even find one of those hand-pump platforms that go on the tracks, like in the old westerns.\u00a0 Do they still make those?\u00a0 Surely there must be something like it lying around the Union Station railyard.\u00a0 Or was everything automatic now?\u00a0 Gas powered and rusting away.<\/p>\n

Let the old world die.\u00a0 He woke up in the hours before dawn, shivering and crying.\u00a0 The impossible silence of the dead world filled his ears and every movement sounded like an echoing rockfall.\u00a0 He screamed.\u00a0 He screamed and screamed and then got up and pushed over a snack machine, the glass front long ago broken and the contents gone.\u00a0 He wrapped himself up, picked up the pack he had made in Clear Spring, and hiked out into the darkness, thinking about nothing.\u00a0 Letting his brain empty as he joined the clogged interstate and weaved amongst the rotting cars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week’s entry is right here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[126,405],"class_list":["post-498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-serials","tag-finzel","tag-serials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=498"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":770,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions\/770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}