The Nation Chronicles: Book Two
Copyright 2018 Wendell Sweet all rights reserved.
Cover Art © Copyright 2018 Dell Sweet
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This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places or incidents depicted are products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual living person’s places, situations or events is purely coincidental.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
ABOUT
ONE
~1~
"So, what do you think?" Frank asked Gary.
Frank, as well as Annie, stood facing the road along with Gary and John.
The group had stopped just ten minutes before, when they had come to the turn off for Route 104 in the tiny town of Mexico, New York. The vines that they had been struggling with seemed to be growing less numerous, and as they had arrived in the small town, had all but disappeared. The vines that were in evidence here were smaller, and seemed to be just approaching from the north, while farther back the vines had been so thick in places that the Jeep vehicles bounced roughly over them no matter how slow they drove.
For nearly ten miles they had been reduced to a crawl as they crept slowly forward down the road, passing over the thick vines that in some places were better than six inches around the middle.
The vines had been brown, and the texture was more wood-like than an actual vine. Here the vines were thinner, and long green runners shot from their twisted brown surface searching over the roadway for purchase.
To the small group of people trying to negotiate the road it had sometimes felt like driving through a jungle. The vines were everywhere, not just on the road. They hung down from the trees, and climbed up and over any structure they came upon, seemingly bent on swallowing all in their path and covering it in green.
Gary was bent over a map which was spread over the hood of one of the Cherokees. The other two Jeeps were parked beside it, tailgates down as the rest of the group sat eating a lunch of cold canned-meat sandwiches they had made. Frank and the others stood talking and studying the map. They sipped at warm sodas and ate, talking between mouthfuls.
"This," Gary said, "leads straight into Rochester." He pointed with one finger down the roadway as he spoke. "Of course..." he said, pausing to swallow, "there's no real way to know what shape it's in, or how much traffic we'll run into."
They had decided farther back not to take either of the turnoffs that could have shortened their trip, because of the traffic they contained. They seemed to have been more popular, and therefor much more heavily traveled.
Both of the turnoffs had been built after the main route, and had been designed to bypass the small towns, offering a more direct route, and both had been blocked with large tractor-trailers, several of which had been involved in accidents.
They had stopped momentarily to gaze at the scene, walking quietly through the twisted and blackened steel shells. They had expected to find bodies, but none of the trucks had any passengers, dead or alive. They seemed to have been driven by no one at all, wrecked, and then abandoned to the vines that were already covering them.
As far as they could see down the road they were now at, there was no traffic at all, however.
In fact the entire small town seemed to be completely deserted. They had met no one as of yet, and had begun to wonder aloud to one another whether or not they were completely alone.
It felt that way. It seemed as though everyone had simply decided to leave at the same time. Perhaps a mass exodus of some sort had occurred.
"It can't be any worse than the alternate routes we've stopped at," Frank said, staring down the empty road.
"No," Gary said, and then continued after taking a deep drink from the warm can of soda he held. "This tastes horrible," he said, making a grimace. "Anyway, I would bet that we're going to hit some of that truck traffic again before we get to Oswego. The last alternate we passed, 104 B, comes back into 104 just before we get there, at..." he paused as one finger traced the route on the map, "...New Haven. Have you been there, John?"
"Wide place in the road is all it is," John replied, looking at the map as well. "Problem I'm concerned about is Oswego. Mighty damn close to the lake."
"True," Gary said, "but I don't think we have too much to worry about. It's a good twenty seven feet above lake level, according to the map. I guess the big worry would be damage from the quake though. Road might be all busted to hell, maybe some buildings down, no way to tell 'till we get there, for sure anyway, but I think we ought to count on a tough time getting through there..."
"...All that truck traffic will be back, and they do a lot of container shipments from the Oswego docks, mostly by train, but a good portion
