“Matt, we may use a hand here,” he says with a friendly look in his eyes. “You are welcome to stay with us.”
As much as I love the comfort of a shelter, I have only one goal I am planning to pursue to the end. It is reuniting with my family.
His wife seems to read my mind.
“Why don’t you sleep on this idea? No rush… We have a guest room,” she says.
I nod, accepting their offer for staying tonight. I can’t hit the road during the dark anyway. I also need time to think through my cross-country trip on foot.
I go outside to grab my bag while Miguel waits for me at the door and scans the surroundings with his rifle—ready to shoot.
I feel happy about having a bed to sleep on tonight. I am amazed by seeing how basic needs like feeling safe, sleeping on a bed, and having warm food can quickly become a luxury after the outbreak.
They plan to take turns to stand watch starting tonight. I offer my help, and my two-hour watch will start at midnight. I don’t think I will be able to have a full night’s sleep anyway. Being on alert, especially at nights, is a new normal in my life.
Diego takes me to the guest bedroom.
“Did you bring your computer?” Diego asks me as he glances at my bag.
“Of course!” I say, showing my pride. I take the laptop out of my bag and turn it on. He sits next to me on the bed with curious eyes on the screen.
I show him one of the applications I worked on. It shows the routes, speeds, break frequency, signal usage, and several other parameters of our driverless cars on the map. We used to have this application to flag possible bad choices of our automation so we could improve the safety of vehicles.
I briefly tell him how we decide if turning or accelerating is not the best idea in certain scenarios. I flag a few actions and their color change to red on the map. Diego loves its game-like interface.
“Diego, let Matt rest a little bit. He must be exhausted,” Valeria says, entering the open door.
“Oh, it’s fine, Valeria. I miss talking about tech,” I say. I give the laptop to Diego. I watch him excitedly clicking on the map and moving the cars around.
“Please call me Val.” She sits on the chair across the bed. “I am sorry for pointing my gun at you in the gas station.” She seems embarrassed.
“You did what you have to do,” I say, smiling.
“You looked very funny hunkered down at the corner of that aisle,” she says while trying to hold her laughter. I can imagine how funny I must have looked at that moment, and I start laughing.
I ask her about what she was doing before the outbreak. She was a dental assistant in a town called Leesburg in Virginia. Since the dentist’s office was closed before the second wave, she came to North Carolina to stay with her family.
“Do you know L’amour?” I ask. It was my favorite coffee shop in that area. I used to live in Virginia as well. The city I lived in is probably about two hours away from her city.
“I love that place! You can’t believe how much I miss their Nutella plate!” Her eyeballs get bigger and her smile gets wider. It’s hard not to get excited when you think about the banana waffle with Nutella on the side to dip strawberries in. It was kind of a reward for me when I completed a challenging project at work or just to celebrate making it to Friday after a long week.
“No way! Nutella plate with hot chocolate on the side is my favorite combination there! We should check it out once this is over!” I say.
“I would love that!” she exclaims. Talking about what we used to do in the pre-apocalyptic world brings good memories back and makes both of us feel happier.
However, the sound of a plane flying above us interrupts this beautiful moment.
I quickly blow out the candle and go to the window to look outside. Moving the curtain slightly, I see only a small light on the horizon. It disappears in seconds. I don’t think it’s a passenger plane. Considering there are no big airports nearby, they shouldn’t be flying this low. It’s probably a private jet or a small military carrier.
Maybe the government is rising from its ashes and preparing to save the country. Or it could be from a foreign government that restored the social order in their country and decided to help the United States as well. Either way, I feel relieved about seeing a high technology product of civilization again.
The president will defeat the virus along with bad guys and unite the country soon. I hope.
Chapter 9
It’s my third day with the family. I decided to stay with them a little longer than I planned because I wanted to help them make their place safer.
We moved their garden to the backyard and surrounded it with bushes. It’s not visible anymore to anyone who may walk by in front of the house. We also removed the recently flourished flowers on both sides of the front door. There is no need to inform anybody that survivors might live here with a stockpile of food.
The hardest part was to hide their SUV. We had to destroy one side of the little farm cabin to move the car inside. We built a large wooden door to cover it.
It’s now difficult to tell from a distance if people are living in this house. I know that there will be people wandering around anyway. We need some sort of security.
We built a white picket fence around the house. It’s not for preventing anyone from entering the property, obviously. Anyone can easily jump over it. The plan is to
