of things. No one liked the stink, but the vehicle was spacious and all in one piece, so they spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning it up and packing it full of supplies. By the end of the night, the van was stocked with enough food and water for a month, and still had space left over for a makeshift medical bay.
The next day, they added two more cars to their collection. The first was a minivan for the family of survivors, retrofitted with a few good layers of grating over its vents. It had all the amenities, including a plush interior and an audio deck loaded full of Chinese pop.
The second vehicle was a beaten up and rusty old jeep that’d seen better days. Nikitin was adamant about having an off-road vehicle for scouting purposes, and the jeep was the best he could find. Or so he said. Jack suspected Nikitin had a soft spot for beaten up and rusty old jeeps, which he refused to admit to.
On the third day, they mounted up and hit the road as the winds began once again to rise. Jack and Nikitin rode ahead in the jeep where they both took a serious sandblasting in the open air. It was worse than they’d expected, and at every stop, they layered on more spare clothing until they both looked like mummies. The extra layers made the ride survivable, if not particularly comfortable.
The jeep scouted ahead by a paltry fifty meters most of the time, while the others trundled along behind them with their headlights on. It was slow going at first, but roads proved to be in excellent condition and they picked up speed. They traveled two hundred kilometers in that first week, and Jack suspected they could cover more ground if they wanted to.
They stopped to check for supplies and survivors at every settlement and the search was well worth the effort. They found plenty of both, and their small group sprouted into a motorcade. Survivors started coming out to meet them, drawn out of hiding by the sounds of car engines and human voices shouting over the roar. The motorcade swelled into a mass migration in time, their population numbering in the thousands, in a puttering line of cars that stretched across a kilometer of road.
Every influx brought another handful of orange jumpsuits, stocked up and ready for duty. Many spoke multiple languages including English, and they found constant work translating. The local guides were also plentiful, although each one delivered the same morbid warning: don’t bother with the cities. There was nothing to find there but death.
They traveled for more than two straight months past the ruins of towns whose names Jack would never know, at the foot of the great mountains to the North which they only saw in silhouette. Always headed westward, they passed from China to Myanmar, then along the northern border between India and Nepal, and finally through Pakistan where they met up several more groups like their own.
As they neared the end of Pakistan, they finally caught sight of a city. Where Peshawar had been, there was a black and still smoking petrified forest, with a thick layer of shattered concrete lining the ground and the twisted steel skeletons of buildings standing in for trees. A power capable of such total destruction was unthinkable. They skirted the edge of the ash heap faster than common sense might have suggested, and as they headed for the mountains, no one bothered to look back.
In single file, they entered the Khyber Pass, which Jack had once heard described as a knife-wound in the mountains. The words hadn’t meant much to him, but they were all too appropriate once he saw the steep gash as if the earth had simply been sliced away. The pass had been used by armies since the beginning of time, and he wondered how it would be remembered from then on, having carried so many survivors away from that terrible destruction.
As they emerged on the other side of the mountains, the travelers saw the most wonderful thing they’d ever seen. After more than two months in dust-choked twilight, they could finally see the bright blue sky again. They were back on Earth.
At the other end of the pass was a village built of sand-colored stone which rose up out of the landscape like a natural formation. It was part of the land, and Jack wondered if that was what had spared it from the onslaught. The village was whole, intact and full of people, and along the road stood a handful of soldiers in desert camouflage with assault rifles slung over their shoulders. For the first time Jack could remember, he was glad to see soldiers. Overjoyed, in fact.
With the fish van behind him, Jack pulled the jeep over and killed the engine, then he peeled off his gas-mask. He took one giant lung full of clean air. Fresh, reasonably dust free air. He held it as long as he could, and the feeling was amazing. As he took the second deep breath, he heard Nikitin doing the same beside him.
In another moment, he pulled off all his extra layers and tossed them in the back seat, until he was down to just the jumpsuit. He felt naked, and he was quickly struck by how bad he smelled.
“I was starting to worry the whole world was choked up with that cloud of shit,” Nikitin said. “Would you look at this, though. It didn’t even make it over the Hindu Kush.”
“Unbelievable,” Jack said as he stretched. He felt the overwhelming urge to curl up on the nearest rock and take a long nap. To sun himself like a lizard.
A soldier marched up to the jeep. He was a young man, a couple years younger than Jack, but moved like a seasoned veteran. The markings on his uniform were Mashriq Coalition, a union of middle-eastern nations that was had helped found the United Earth Organization. The Mashriq Coalition was always fighting separatists somewhere in its territory, and one could always any given soldier had seen his share of action.
“More orange jumpsuits?” The soldier said in disbelief. His English carried the slightest trace of an accent. “Every time we think we’ve seen the last of you, more come through that pass with another pack of refugees. They’ve all been Chinese and Indian, though. Where are you from, my friends?”
Jack was glad to hear they weren’t the first group, and he guessed they wouldn’t be the last either. “Pacific States Alliance,” he said, “San Jose. Our tranzat went down over Szechuan province, and we’ve been hoofing it ever since.”
“You’re quite a way from home. Tell me, can anything kill you oranges?”
“Nothing yet,” Nikitin said with a smile and they laughed. Jack could always count on Nikitin for bravado, if nothing else.
“So, where do we go next?” Jack asked. He was trying to recall the local organization from his last trip to Afghanistan. “Is there a refugee camp in Jalalabad, or do we truck all the way to Kabul?”
The soldier laughed again. That couldn’t be a good sign. “You’re a rare one, to be so optimistic after a march through hell. There is no Jalalabad or Kabul. The entire Mashriq is in ruins. The whole world, if what I hear is true.”
Jack hoped he’d somehow misunderstood the soldier. “Come on… The UEO must be coordinating something.”
“Perhaps I was not clear. The UEO is gone, friend. Everything’s been burnt to ash, and there’s no one left to run anything. There are only refugees like you and me.”
Jack felt like he was on the receiving end of a cruel joke. “Everything? Europe? North America?”
“Everything. A pair of Blade Valkyries just returned from North America, and they say its the same there as everywhere.”
“Son of a bitch,” Nikitin said.
“Where do we go?” Jack asked again, but it was hardly a question. He closed his eyes and saw the ghosts of his life back home, a life that was already dead and gone. His beautiful Jessica was there in the pale light of an approaching storm, waiting for him to come home. Waiting for him to ask a question to which she’d already said yes. She told him that she would always be there waiting for him, and he refused to let the promise go. He had survived against all odds, and she must have survived too. Somehow.
When he opened his eyes, the ghosts were gone.
“You have two choices,” the soldier said. “The first is to head for the North, as many others have. There are rumors of enclaves sprouting up in Russia around their Ark. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear the same about the other two, but who knows.”
The Ark Project had been started a couple decades before, but never totally finished; it turned into such a massive boondoggle that folks wondered if the GAF was running the show. The Arks themselves were huge underground shelters to be used in the event of a planet killer asteroid, each designed to hold a few million people indefinitely. They were located far off the equator to maximize their distance from potential impact zones, or that was the official story, at least. Jack always thought their locations suspect, likely influenced by politics and money. There were three, one each in Russia, Canada and Australia.
It made a lot of sense to try and reorganize there.
