There was a friendly, thriving fishing community on Jekyll Island and he spent a week with them before moving on. He discovered other little towns on islands just off the mainland. The ocean provided and they may not have much variety in their diet but no one went hungry. He helped where he could, worked for his rations and led them in raids to the mainland for critical supplies. Sometimes there was trouble and pointed guns but most of the time not. Somewhere near the Florida Keys someone gifted him with a dog. It was a terrier mix, a female, so he called her Bobbie.
Jessie grew tan and his hair bleached even blonder. He wore board shorts, went shirtless and the browning of his skin hid many of the scars. He let his beard grow and it came in fuller than before, actually hiding much of his disfigured face. One month slid into the next and he enjoyed the life he was living. An old saltwater fisherman showed him how to navigate by the stars, read the nautical maps and understand the flow of the currents.
He and Bobbie sailed to Cuba then over to the Bahamas. Somehow the years passed and he kept moving. Towns were thriving when he found them but there were months where he sailed the coasts of South America and didn’t see any signs of life. No smoke during the day and no fires at night.
More years passed, his boat was held together with patchwork fixes and when he put ashore in California, he knew its sailing days were over. The unforgiving sun had dried and wrinkled his skin, aged him twenty years in the decade he’d lived on the water. He found an old lodge, long abandoned and in disrepair high up on a forested mountain. He made it his home and avoided people for the most part. He was content to be alone. He got himself a mule and started trapping. He traded furs for an old ethanol converted truck and the man threw in a German Shepherd pup. He named him Bobbie three, and they survived just fine with some gardening and hunting. He was a good dog but didn’t compare to Bob. On the few occasions the stumbled across a deader, the dog just growled and barked until Jessie killed it.
He didn’t have a radio, he didn’t care about the goings on in the world. He was content with his primitive way of life. He made his way into a trading post a couple of times a year to get coffee when they had it and sell his furs. Bastilles son had found him and persuaded him to tell his version of the first crazy days of the uprising. He was writing a book, the definitive story of the hero’s or some such nonsense. The uprising had been decades ago, far enough in the past that there were whole generations who had been born after Z day.
He’d gone to visit his dad after that. He still lived in Lakota, in the house on the lake, but the place was crowded now. Suburbs spread out around the walls.
They finally buried the hatchet.
Jessie hadn’t made it home for his mom’s funeral. He hadn’t known she was sick but the old man carried a grudge, said he should have kept in touch. It broke her heart. He was at the end of his life, balding and frail and Jessie doubted he would see him again. They had a good week together before he left again.
He learned a lot about the state of the world during his stay. Most of the walled cities that had sprung up far from the population centers were holding their own, raising enough crops and livestock to feed the people but things were breaking down. They hadn’t put enough effort into restoring manufacturing, they were too busy trying to survive. They couldn’t make plastic, electronics or advanced medicine. Some trucks still ran on ethanol but when they broke replacement parts were scarce. Good bullets were getting harder to find, too. Power plants were breaking and were often cobbled together with scavenged parts. It wasn’t sustainable and there was still an occasional undead outbreak. One barely crawling zombie hidden in the weeds could wipe out a whole town if the bitten person wasn’t put down fast enough.
In other places the Tower had started constructing new units. They hired teams of retrievers for security then went into the cities. Reinforced and modified combine harvesters with wood chipper components rolled through the hordes, scooped them through the thresher and spit them out as rotten mist. They located the best building with all the prerequisites and modified it to suit their needs. They kept the undead away from the construction with moveable walls and stripped the surrounding buildings for materials. None were as advanced as the Tower but they worked and were fully self-contained when finished. The surrounding areas were burnt then razed and planted with trees and hardy grasses. Decaying cities were leveled and forgotten. After a decade only
