Feeling utterly defeated, I gather up my stuff and head back to the highway to resume my journey. With a heavy heart, I trudge down the road, navigating around and over debris and broken sections of highway. The trail from the convoy sometimes going off road to avoid unpassable sections of destroyed roads and bridges. A trail of saplings and fresh vegetation follows in the wake of the convoy, growing in the place of felled trees where they had cut their way through. In a year or two it will be impossible to tell that anyone had passed through here.

For several hours I continued to follow the trail south. Occasionally finding spent casings and the dead bodies of monsters and mutated beasts that tried their luck with stopping high caliber rounds. What corpses are left are picked over by scavengers, reduced to torn apart carcasses rotting on the side of the road.

Thankfully, I’ve yet to find any signs of people dying, most of the confrontations ending quickly with lots of lead being thrown at anything that so much as dared to threaten the convoy.

Interestingly, the number of spent casings that I find does not measure up to the amount of violence that seems to be getting dispensed. The soldiers are probably picking up their spent rounds so they can reuse them to make fresh ammo.

I wonder if the army is starting to run low on bullets. It’s bound to happen eventually I guess; I just hope it doesn’t happen too soon.

Soon night begins to approach, what meager bits of the sun’s light that can make it through the clouds slowly beginning to disappear beyond the horizon. The clouds are looking especially heavy and grey today. There's going to be a lot of rain tonight.

Deciding not to risk looking for a building to camp in, I settle for a semitruck that apparently wrecked into the side of a bridge crossing over my section of the highway, its trailer having flipped and slid on its side, off the bank and into a hill. Atop the toppled trailer is a layer of green as moss and grasses had somehow managed to claim its surface as their new domain. Sitting proud and tall atop this green perch is a young arching oak that had managed to run its roots through the gaps in the trailer’s surface and around its body before finally planting itself in the ground next to the highway.

“These trees are freaking crazy. I swear these things can grow anywhere. They just don’t give a shit…” I say to myself, shaking my head side to side.

Deciding to ignore the tree that seems to be just radiating with smugness, I climb up the driver side of the semi and open the door. Thankfully it’s not locked, and there are no corpses inside. The driver probably survived the crash and left, caring more about surviving the apocalypse than properly locking his vehicle.

Shrugging off my backpack into the passenger seat, I dig out my empty water bottles and set them up outside to fill up overnight. I’ll treat them with iodine drops in the morning.

A quick search through the cab doesn’t turn up anything interesting, well except for a porn mag, all guy-on-guy stuff, it’s not my cup of tea so I put it back where I found it and pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s the least I can do as I would hope others would do if they found my personal stuff. All of which is currently buried under the burnt remains of my family home.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

May you rest in peace Homework Folder, gone but not forgotten.

With my stupid dirty thoughts out of the way, I dig out some food and get comfortable. I have another long night ahead of me as I still don’t appear to be growing sleepy despite having not slept for about four days now.

“Haahh…” With a sigh, I sit back and eat some of my food, “Today sucked….”

Not wanting to spend all night dwelling on stressful things, I just sit back and munch on my travel rations as I watch the last bit of sunlight vanish beyond the horizon. Darkness quickly consumes the world as twilight becomes night.

Almost like clockwork, as if waiting for the sun to avert its attention, the clouds soon let loose their loads. Fat raindrops begin to fall and come to a tragic end as they splash against the hard ground, followed in an ever-quickening succession by their brothers and sisters pinging against concrete, plastic, and metal in a song of their short lives.

Leaning my chair back, I close my eyes and take in the sounds of the rain. The pitter patter as it collides against the roof of the semi’s cab. The sound of ever-growing puddles filling and flowing down the road through cracks, only to end up in places unknown.

Letting out a long breath I try to release my stress and anxiety. Letting the sound of falling rain flow into my mind and drown out the angry and sad bits of my mind that want to lash out at the world for putting me through so much trouble.

Things will get better; I just need to hold out until then. I tell myself.

Letting out another long breath, I open up my eyes and relax as I watch the rain fall. I had never been one for long sessions of meditation, usually opting to just focus on my breathing and clear my head. The rain helps.

I’ve always found rainstorms to be quite relaxing. Often getting some of my best sleep as a storm would be rampaging outside. Not counting the couple months of earthquakes that made doing anything difficult and annoying, the end of the world hadn’t done much to stop me from enjoying a relaxing storm.

Even if I am unable to sleep now, I can still at least sit here and enjoy the show.

Sometime later, bolts of lightning begin to play and dance their way across the clouds surface. Putting on a performance of light and motion never intended to be comprehended by their mortal audience. Occasionally a bolt would fall from the stage and strike the earth, a thunderous roar would follow in crescendo, sounding out over the song of rain as the orchestra of the heavens would signal the tragic end of one of their actors.

My eyes narrow and my breathing become soft and relaxed, my heartbeat entering a slow rhythm as my conscious mind takes a step away from behind the wheel. The world around me becomes little more than a window from which the shadow of my conscience peaks through.

The performance goes on, rain continues to fall in an incomprehensible sonata and lightning bolts continue to fall from the stage; their part of the performance complete and marked with a bang.

For the rest of the night, I sit as the sole member of the audience, bearing witness to a performance that was never intended for me. Hours pass as I sit in a fugue state of half sleep and awareness, hours flying by as the heavens song plays on in its own madness.

As time passes, the rain slows, reduced to a slow drizzle as the surviving actors wrap up their performance, slowly retreating back into the depths of shrinking clouds like falling curtains. The sun’s light peaking over the horizon, a herald calling out the end of the heaven’s performance.

With mornings sunlight shining though the cracked windows the semi cab, my mind is slowly drawn back out to full awareness. Time resumes its normal pace and I blink my eyes as I finish ‘waking up’ from my half sleep.

Looking around and peeking outside, I see that it is now morning. Night had come and gone in mere moments, only really perceived by my half aware mind.

“That was weird… How did I do that? Can I just do that whenever I want to pass time or what? Is that how I sleep now?” With too many questions running though my head about my weird biology, I decide that the best thing to do is to put it aside for now.

Let scientist figure this stuff out or something, I don’t know.