Somewhere To Run To || Lunch Club AU

waking up at the start (prologue)

There wasn't much left to do then besides drive.

Ted had lost track of the days somewhere around two weeks after it all went to hell. The road in front of him looked identical to the roads he'd left behind; he was only vaguely aware of his position on the paper map on his passenger seat. The two-way radio sitting on top of it had been silent for far too long. He knew he had enough food and water and other miscellaneous resources to last some time, and he could always pick up more once he came across a gas station or grocery store. Whenever that would be.

With everything that had happened lately, Ted often found it difficult to keep track of everything. When his thoughts started spinning in the hours when he fruitlessly tried fall asleep, ideas and hopes and speculation blurring together, he found it helped to sort through the sequence of events that had led to this happening in the first place. Here are the facts:

About three months ago, the majority of the human population had spontaneously developed strange... powers. Scientists had started looking for the source, but as far as he was aware, nobody had really figured out where they came from yet.Once people started using those powers, world governments scrambled to find ways to keep them in check. As would be expected, many were using them for destructive purposes.A few weeks after the initial "outbreak", an accident had happened. Somewhere (the details became less and less important as time went on), a person had extended some invisible limit of what their powers could do. Witnesses say they were "consumed" by them, turning into something that definitely wasn't human, going on a mindless rampage through their city. The casualties were numerous.In the ensuing weeks, more and more of these incidents were reported worldwide, increasing exponentially. Every person on the planet had gained the capacity to spontaneously become a weapon of mass destruction.Eventually, it became near-impossible to control. Casualties multiplied, infrastructure was damaged, and...Phone lines went down, then the Internet; cities emptied as people scrambled to get as far away from others as possible. The world population decreased by ten percent, then twenty-five, then fifty, until it became too difficult to hold a census.Once it had become too dangerous, Ted grabbed his car and started driving.

In this situation, solitude was safer, of course. Less of a chance of suddenly getting attacked by an elemental monster. Other people were dangerous, Ted knew, so he did his best to stay away from them. But here's the catch: it was incredibly fucking lonely.

And there was nothing to do besides keep driving.

That is, until the radio crackled to life.