Part 4 – Uncertainty Reigns

  It had been three hours since Eastport, and all four of them felt it. It was one thing to stare madness in the face and fight for your life. It was another thing entirely to watch hope die in front of you – and realize there was nothing left to replace it.

  Each of them handled the realization differently. As the tortured landscape shifted – from fractured suburbia to the slow, sprawling rise of rural fields – Maria sat sandwiched in the front seat between Rob and Lisa.

  It all felt like a dream to her. A nightmare. The world was consuming itself, and people had somehow gone mad. But in the cab of the truck, pressed close between the people she had survived with, Maria felt grounded. Her left leg rested against Rob's, her right against Lisa's. Sarah sat at the window, watching the fields roll past and deer bolt into the trees.

  Maria had worked in Human Resources at ViralStrategies, and she'd loved it – not for the corporate bullshit, but for the people. Connections. Bonds. The company had hated her for it. But that mattered little now.

  She had been devastated by the carnage of Eastport, but Ranger and Shadow, sleeping soundly in the seat behind them, didn't seem to care. And as they drove further along winding country roads with no plan whatsoever, Maria felt an abrupt shift.

  To her, hope didn't come from a place or a plan. It came from the people around you. The people you could trust.

  She looked at Rob, then at Sarah staring out the window, lost in thought. She reached across Lisa and took Sarah's hand softly in hers.

  Lisa felt their hands rest on her lap and laced her fingers into theirs. Sarah slowly lifted her head, her eyes full of sadness and worry, and locked onto Maria's. She smiled faintly and leaned her head onto Lisa's shoulder. Maria did the same. Lisa leaned her head back softly, completing the circle.

  Rob's hands gripped the wheel. The road unspooled ahead – cracked asphalt, burned-out cars, the skeletal remains of a world that had died screaming.

  An hour ago, they'd left the interstate. Now they were winding along country roads with no destination. They had a full 115-gallon tank of diesel, though, thanks to a hand-operated fuel transfer pump that came with the camper truck. Wherever they were going, they'd have fuel for the journey.

  Beside him, the women were silent. Exhausted. Shattered.

  Rob's foot pressed the gas. The engine hummed. The road blurred. He wasn't seeing asphalt anymore. He was seeing the sterile white of a hospital room, the smell of antiseptic clinging to him just like the smoke did now.

  A soft, insistent voice from a morphine haze:

  "Promise me you'll thrive."

  His wife had demanded and he'd promised. Then he'd tried to drown the promise in a bottle. The road curved back into view. He had clawed his way out of that pit. For what? To watch the world burn? At this point, he didn't know if thriving was even possible.

  His hand had moved to the gear-shifter when Maria's fingers laced into his.

  He didn't look up from the road for a long moment. He just felt her fingers splayed through his. He took a breath, rolled his hand over, and intertwined his fingers with hers.

  Then he looked up.

  Three sets of eyes were looking at him. All of them holding hands. All of them smiling gently, and Rob held on.

  Around thirty minutes later, Lisa leaned forward.

  "I think…" she whispered, pointing through the windshield. "There's a hardware store over there."

  At the southeastern corner of a lonely four-way intersection stood a sagging red sign, shot through with bullet holes: Pioneer Supply – Timber, Hardware & Feed. A long gravel lot stretched behind it toward a clump of trees, with weeds and the broken remains of a Ford dually slumped beside the loading dock.

  The building itself was a squat metal beast, part barn and part bunker, its corrugated steel walls and rusting tin roof still holding firm. Plywood covered the front windows, battered but intact—shuttered since the start of all of this.

  To the left, a chain-link pen held broken pallets, fence posts, spools of wire, and two cracked livestock troughs. To the right, half-buried in gravel, sat a 24-foot tandem-axle haul trailer and folding ramp - dusty, but untouched.

  The truck idled in the intersection and the four of them looked at one another.

  “Do you think there are any animals in there,” asked Maria, sitting up and putting her hands on the dashboard.

  “Maybe there are supplies,” suggested Lisa.

  Sarah looked at both of them, and then at Rob. “We might not see another place like this,” she said.

  Rob looked around at the intersection; they were in that transitional terrain where wheat fields existed because they’d been cut from oak forests, and the pines of higher elevations kept a watch over the low-lands. It was ranching country, farming country, and timber country, and Pioneer Supply looked like it was the life-blood of the region.

  They had no plan, no destination; hope was dead in the road behind them – all they had at this point was one another. Through the windshield, Pioneer Supply sat neat and tidy, a stark contrast to the world they now inhabited. Whatever lay inside, he wasn’t sure he could handle seeing hope creep back in just to get torn out and trampled again.

  He closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose and looked at the three of them. “Okay, let’s take a look,” he said, as the truck crept slowly through the intersection and the gravel crunched as they rolled to a stop near the front of the store.

  Rob killed the engine. The silence was absolute. "Sarah, you're with me. Lisa, Maria, watch the truck and the roads. One honk if you see anything." He took the crowbar, the Benelli slung across his back.

  Shadow and Ranger flanked him, noses twitching. The crowbar shrieked against the hasp. The door groaned inward to darkness and the smell of dust, oil, and old wood. He swept the flashlight beam. Empty. A fortress of untouched supplies. He let out a breath he didn't know he was holding. "Clear."

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Ten minutes later, Rob sat on a stool keeping an eye on the truck and the roads as the women worked their way through the darkened isle of the hardware store with his truck flashlight and a couple more from inside.

  Rob watched them move through the aisles with a kind of frantic energy he didn’t feel in his own bones. Sarah was reading the label on a chainsaw mill, her finger tracing the instructions. Lisa was crouched by a pallet of fencing wire, already calculating how much they'd need. Maria held a bag of seeds in both hands, staring at it like it was a promise.

  He didn't say anything.

  He knew what they were thinking. He could see it in their eyes – the hope creeping back in, fragile and desperate. They thought this was the answer. Tools. Supplies. The means of production.

  But Rob knew better.

  He'd spent months in the wilderness with Lance. He knew what it took to survive out there. The cold that crept into your bones. The hunger that hollowed you out. The isolation that made you question whether you were still human.

  He could do that on his own; that is exactly what’d done ever since Lance died on a motorcycle at 150 mph. But now he had three women who would look to him for guidance, and he wasn’t sure he could provide it. He had hidden away from his own crumbling life, and frankly he was terrified.

  He looked at the chainsaw mill that Sarah was working over. Then at the fencing wire Lisa was inspecting. Then at the seeds Maria was clutching like a lifeline.

  They had no idea what they were signing up for. And he didn't know if he could keep them alive.

  "Rob," Sarah said, turning to him, the manual for the chainsaw mill in her hands. "We can make lumber with this. We can build structures. We can…”

  "Build what?" Rob asked quietly, eyes down and staring at the floor.

  She blinked. "I don't know yet. But we could. If we had the tools, we could…”

  Rob asked, his voice quiet but cutting. "A cabin? With green lumber that'll warp and crack? I can fell a tree. I can run a saw. But milling? Framing a roof that won't collapse in the first snow of next winter?" He shook his head. "That's not in a manual. That's years. We have months."

  Sarah stood firm. “Then the walls warp and crack and we patch them up,” she demanded.

  Lisa stepped forward. " We have time. We have…”

  "We don’t have anything, and we have no place to go," Rob said, meeting their eyes. "I can’t promise you…."

  Silence.

  Maria stepped forward and her fingers tightened around the bag of seeds. "Sarah and Lisa are both right and I’m with them. We learn and we try our best. What else are we going to do,” she asked flatly.

  She didn't step back. She held his gaze. "We are doing this, Rob. We're not asking for a promise. We're asking you to try with us."

  Rob looked at her. At all of them. Their faces were set, determined. They'd made up their minds.

  He took a breath. Lance's face flickered through his mind - grinning, reckless, alive. Special Forces, though he'd never said which. When he died on that motorcycle about 6-months ago, his widow had given Rob the camper truck - it was an EarthRoamer XV-HD – and it wasn’t just a truck. It was a fortress. Modified. Double the solar and battery capacity. It had saved Lance's life after multiple deployments. It had saved Rob's by getting him into the woods. Now maybe it would save all four of them.

  Rob looked up at the three women and smiled gently. "Okay," he said quietly. "Then we take everything, and all the electric tools we can find - we'll probably never see a place like this again."

  Sarah nodded. "Then this is our start."

  In the yard, they’d found an oxidized and battered 24-foot dual axle trailer and Rob hitched the EarthRoamer up. Rob hauled a pallet of fencing wire onto the trailer, his muscles burning. Sarah and Lisa were inside, dragging out bags of feed. Maria was loading canning supplies into the camper, humming softly to herself.

  They were so goddamn hopeful.

  And he was terrified.

  He'd promised his wife he'd thrive. He'd barely managed to survive. And now he had three women depending on him to know what the fuck he was doing.

  He didn't.

  But he couldn't tell them that. Because if he did, they'd lose the only thing keeping them moving – newfound hope.

  So he kept loading. Kept hauling. Kept his mouth shut.

  After the trailer was hitched, they moved on to the yard. A metal gate creaked as Rob pushed through and brittle hay crunched under his boots. The place looked deserted. But behind the main structure, life waited.

  A pair of goats stood atop an overturned doghouse, watching with wary yellow eyes. One bleated softly and hopped down. Three sheep rested beneath the old shade barn, their thick coats matted but healthy. In a wire pen near the back wall, half a dozen chickens pecked quietly in the straw.

  Maria gasped. “Oh my god,” she whispered. “They’re alive.”

  Lisa blinked. “Who the hell just left livestock like this?”

  Rob’s voice was low. “Maybe someone hoped they’d make it. Or maybe… they didn’t have a choice.”

  Back inside, Sarah pried open a side room and froze. Bins of seeds lined the shelves – corn, wheat, soy, potatoes, carrots, onions, kale, tomatoes, peppers, squash, cucumbers – more varieties than she could count. Her fingers trembled as she reached for them.

  Lisa cracked open a metal cabinet in the back and let out a low whistle. Everyone turned. Inside was a sealed metal box packed with vacuum-packed heirloom seeds, each labeled by year and strain. Beneath it: fermentation lids, canning parts, books.

  Sarah picked one up: The New Organic Grower. Another read: Seed to Seed: Saving the Future.

  They spent the next hour loading the trailer – a pallet dolly to get the Wood-Mizer LT15 loaded, electric chainsaws and tools, seeds, feed, fencing, water barrels, lights, and hundreds of pounds of nails and screws and bolts; crates of fasteners. On top of it all and along the sides, they packed in corrugated steel for roofing and doors and windows. The goats resisted but followed a tin scoop of grain up the ramp. The chickens were easier, flapping and clucking as they settled into crates. The sheep walked on with slow, blinking trust.

  By the time they lashed the last bin down, the sky was beginning to shift—faded blue laced with cirrus threads. Sarah stood on the trailer edge, surveying the open road ahead and the silent, waiting world.

  As the group began to pile back into the truck, Rob spotted what he’d been searching for. At the far end of the yard was a locked shed with multiple NFPA chemical symbols on the side.

  "Over there!" he exclaimed, excitement finally creeping into his voice. He jumped out of the truck, grabbed the crowbar from the trailer, and stepped toward the shed, the women following close behind.

  “This shed should have fertilizers—ammonium nitrate, potassium nitrate,” he said, prying open the lock. “Fertilizer and gunpowder,” he added, grinning as the door swung open, releasing the sharp smell of agricultural chemicals.

  Inside, there was a cart by the door. Rob began piling it high with bags of nitrate-containing compounds, the scent of chemicals thick in the air. The women helped stabilize the cart as they wheeled it to the trailer. Rob quickly loaded it up and rushed back for another cart-load.

  After ten minutes, the engine was humming again as they headed back onto the road, the sheep and lambs bleating, and the chickens clucking in the trailer.

  Sarah and Lisa and Maria were excited in the seat next to him; they had Seed to Seed: Saving the Future open and were swapping ideas of things they could build and crops they’d plant immediately. Behind them, Shadow and Ranger sat on the bench seat and lolled their tongues out lazily in anticipation of what was to come. But as the winding country road stretched in front of them, Rob prayed to a god he’d given up on that he wouldn't get them all killed.

  He thought of the trailer. Not about the tools, but the shadow it cast – long, dark, and shapeless, like the future they were hauling into the unknown. He’d made a promise to thrive. Now he had to figure out how to keep it – for all four of them.