Page 109 of The Last Sanctuary
From here, she couldn’t make out any signs of life. All was silent, still. The ravages of the Hydra Virus invisible from this height, from this distance.
Somewhere out there was the small town of Elijay, her mother’s last known location. Was her mother still out there? Was anyone?
So much nothingness. Far beyond the bounds of the wilderness, the mountains, the small towns and the larger cities. All lightless now, and perhaps lifeless. Peaceful, finally, in death.
And beyond the towns and cities of Georgia, the other states sprawled outward—Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas, Illinois, and Ohio. The boundaries of the United States, of Canada and Mexico, and then the world beyond North America, other countries and continents, once brimming with billions.
Now empty. Now quiet and still. No one busy working or commuting to work or going to high school or college, attending classes or buying things or eating out or playing or laughing.
There were the dead, the dying, and those fighting not to die.
Was that it? Was that all? Had this virus truly taken hold of the whole world and crushed it beneath its vile, diseased jaws?
For days, she had focused solely on survival, on keeping herself and then the animals alive. No time or thought was spared for what came after.
This was the after. She felt like weeping. She felt like crumpling into a heap and never getting up again. You could know something logically in your head without feeling the truth of it in your bones, without understanding how it could break you.
The world out there was a void of emptiness so enormous, so vast, so endless, it took her breath away. It was too much. Too big to take in.
It was over. History. Civilization. The human race. All of it. The tattered remnants of the whole world left to scavengers and vultures, the worst of the worst.
Her brain throbbed dully. Her thoughts skittered over the oily black hole of a reality too bleak to comprehend in all its horrors.
She could only accept it gradually. Piece by piece. Day by day. Hour by hour.
That was the only way she knew how to make it.
You survived. With every breath, with every stumbling step, you survived. No matter what they took from you. No matter the devastation, the grief, the death, the travesties happening all around you, every second of every day.
You breathed. You walked. You kept going. You survived.
And she wasn’t completely alone. She still had Shadow.
Raven whistled for the wolf. Through the trees, he responded with a single sharp yip. He bounded through the trees and trotted to her side. She petted his huge head.
“We’re going to follow the river,” she told him. “It’ll take us where we need to go.”
While she no longer had the map, the wilderness of the Blue Ridge Mountains still seemed like a safe bet. Fewer people. The protection of the forest. Rivers and streams for fishing, cleaning, and drinking. She’d figure it out as she went.
For a few days, Raven and Shadow traveled from dawn to dusk, resting when they needed to do so, leaving the empty roads and seeking the shelter of the woods at night.
Each night, Shadow howled his sorrow and grief. Each night, Raven wept with him. She mourned everything and everyone she’d lost.
The world was broken. It felt empty, forsaken. Bleak and hopeless.
But within the suffering, their shared loss, she felt the connection—silvery, thin as a spider’s web, but strong—threaded between herself and the wolf howling his misery into the sky.
Each morning, they rose and walked again. As they traveled, she kept roughly parallel to the road, tracking north with her compass and using her LifeStraw to filter drinking water from any streams or creeks they passed. She foraged for food, gathering fallen hazelnuts, hickory nuts, and black walnuts to boil over a fire for dinner.
While there wasn’t as much food to find in the fall, when it was spring and summer, she could forage for highbush blueberries, elderberries, and sawtooth blackberries, wild sweet potato and wild ginger roots, cattails and clover, and of course, dandelions. The entire plant—flower, leaves, and roots—was edible, if a bit bitter.
Her father had taken her on numerous trips to the hunting cabin. Each visit, he’d shown her edible plants, made her memorize them, and then had her forage for them on her own.
“You can’t depend on anyone but yourself,” he’d said.
Her heart ached at the memory. In some ways, he’d been right. But in other ways, he was wrong.
Because of the things he’d taught her, she could survive.
