“I couldn’t take it anymore.” He said to the irritated looks everyone was giving him.
“What do you mean?” Nancy took the bait.
“Powerful people are scared out of their minds. People so powerful they can control the President. People who have no problem ordering the President to send armed men into the news studios to make sure the anchors read the scripts they’re given. That’s the reason we’re not getting the truth.” Bart replied somberly.
“Why would they lie about it?” Yue asked challengingly. She still wasn’t sold on the big government conspiracy cover-up that the rest of the family seemed to have latched onto.
“If they can’t stop the spread of this infection then the government or the puppet masters or the illuminati or whoever already know we’re going to lose. Their best course of action now is to gather their supplies together and retreat into their fortresses. They can wait there in comfort for the whole thing to die out. They’re lying so that we’ll docilely sit in our houses until the crawler things are at our doorsteps. Otherwise we may screw up their ability to escape to their private islands or to gather together all the supplies they need.” LeBron explained his thoughts on the whole deal. Even to his own ears he sounded like some kind of a conspiracy nut. Yue did not in any way look like she was convinced.
“The other piece the government is focused on is infrastructure. You notice they’ve got the power plants all lit up. I’m sure they have all kinds of critical things setup to survive. They’ll want to be able to rebuild fast once it’s over.” Bart added.
“Rebuild for who if everybody’s dead?” Yue asked.
“Who said everybody’s dead?” LeBron said thinking fast. “They could be trying to get us to all sit in our houses while they load up all the military and their families onto cruise ships or something to wait it out. They’ll know how many people they can save. They’re going to want to keep the ones who haven’t been chosen from interfering.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Nancy chimed in forcefully. Her completely unexpected interruption of the conversation instantly captured everyone’s curiosity.
“It doesn’t matter one bit.” She echoed her previous statement. “What matters is that those things are coming. We can’t depend on anyone but ourselves to get us through this. We need to figure out how we’re going to survive. I don’t think the answer is sitting in here until we run out of rice.”
They kept talking. The conversation turned to a discussion of every disaster movie they’d ever seen. Bart was the one with the real training, but it didn’t really lend itself to end of the world type scenarios. Drew and LeBron started talking zombie movies. The obvious similarity was there with the infected coming for them and the way the infection spread. The biggest difference was the waiting. None of them could remember a movie plot where the heroes knew the end of the world was coming and just sat around waiting for it. Other than the movies where a meteorite was going to hit the earth if Bruce Willis didn’t figure out how to stop it in time. It was this random series of conversations that led to Bart’s epiphany.
“We can’t stay here. I just don’t think we can leave quite yet either.” Bart stated emphatically out of the blue. LeBron looked up from where he was digging through their DVD collection searching for any relevant movies they could watch for ideas. The internet situation meant they couldn’t pull anything up on Prime or Netflix or Hulu or any of their other go to streaming services.
“What are you talking about dad?” Drew asked.
“Like your mom said earlier staying here’s a losing battle. If we leave too soon the military guarding the roads are going to sling us in a jail cell or a shelter. Same thing different name. Our best hope is to leave once everything goes completely to hell.” He said. He sat there smiling like he’d just come up with a great idea for a new game for them all to play.
Opinions differed on his plan. Everyone seemed to have an opinion on whether they should even trust their dad to come up with the plan. Bart had to remind them a few times that he was sitting right there. Still looking through the zombie flicks spread out on the floor LeBron added that another thing to consider was that the all the people waiting around right now were eating their way through pretty much all of the available food supplies. They’d all just witnessed the group of people going door to door in their own neighborhood eating every morsel of unclaimed food they could find.
Ironically enough the government was abandoning them because the infection hadn’t moved quickly enough. There was just no way to logistically support evacuating the population of the United States. Without the use of Google Maps there was a lot of fuzzy math used to come up with the mileage to the border. They were far from confident in their final estimate but were going with the infection most likely making its way to Orlando in another week. Assuming the infected ran like Forrest Gump on crank to reach them. The math got fuzzier when
