The Longest Drive

Chapter 5 - Hot Water

It was a relief to move into the cover of untouched vegetation. Already the smells of death and rotting decay were becoming a bit too much to handle.

I'd smelled plenty of dead creatures before, but never like this and what made it all the worse was knowing how many people I was smelling the decomposing remains of. That was especially hard to accept, but inevitable within this new era of chaos.

We walked for hours and skirted away from any sign of human habitation, but soon we would have to cross some congested urban areas. I didn't know what Orrin's plans were but I hoped that they included finding me a new pair of shoes.

The shoes I had were not cut out for this. Indeed, I wasn't sure how cut out for this I was.

The straps of the pack bit hatefully into my shoulders and my back hurt from the weight of the pack, but I didn't complain. Indeed, I felt a bit pathetic as I knew my pack must be half the weight of the one Orrin carried.

That said I couldn't help feeling the way I did. Tiredly I switched my grip on the shotgun to my other hand, for the hundredth time.

An electric ripple streaked through the air with a crackle of extreme voltage and I jumped fearfully as the loudest thunderclap I'd ever heard sounded out overhead. More streaks of potent electrical power streaked across the suddenly dark sky overhead.

The force and terrific sound of their booming echoes had me crying out fearfully and trying to cover my ears, but holding the shotgun made that impossible. My gaze took in Orrin, only to see him scanning about worriedly.

He caught sight of something and then he was seizing my free hand and yelling, "Come on! We've got to get away from these trees!"

Oh no! I hadn't thought about that.

The reassurance the trees had been for me suddenly vanished as the reality of being fried to a crisp by being beneath one of them when it got lit up by a lightning bolt galvanized me into action and gave me the adrenaline needed to keep up with Orrin as we dashed madly through the forest. All of a sudden rain pounded down upon us as if somebody was pouring buckets of it out from up above.

Instantly soaked I tried my best to keep my footing on the sudden mush of several inch deep mud that the forest understory soil had become, but it was hard. Orrin more or less was the only thing keeping me from falling flat on my face.

What he was headed for I could not guess at as I couldn't see anything in the downpour other than his form ahead of me dragging me onward and the trunks of nearby trees that we were passing by. My feet touched down on something solid and in the rain pressed darkness I saw and felt enough to recognize it as a gravel road.

Blearily I gazed about as the icy chill of the rain began to make its full impact on me. I saw nothing and then I saw something reflective looking.

Window glass! Indeed, it was to this that Orrin drug me onwards to.

The lightning and thunder had never stopped, but had sort of become a background for the rain in a crashing symphony of sound as if in replication of a World War II tank battle. The battle took new meaning though, as the ground shook and the sound of wood blowing apart echoed out behind us in a threatening way of approaching disaster that seemed unstoppable.

Not wanting to, but feeling the need, I glanced back and beheld trees on fire!

How that was possible in this heavy rain, I did not know, but as I looked a bolt of electric blue power streaked down and coalesced a tree into an electric flame the likes of which I'd never seen anywhere before. Everything in this chaos of a world gone mad had become far more savage than previously before seen.