Founders by James Wesley Rawles Page B

‘Because I have never broken my leg, my leg is unbreakable,’ or ‘Because I’ve never died, I am immortal.’ One thinks first of some great plague of insects—locusts or grasshoppers—when the species suddenly increases out of all proportion, and then just as dramatically sinks to a tiny fraction of what it has recently been. The higher animals also fluctuate. During most of the nineteenth century the African buffalo was a common creature on the veldt. It was a powerful beast with few natural enemies, and if its census could have been taken by decades, it would have proved to be increasing steadily. Then toward the century’s end it reached its climax, and was suddenly struck by a plague of rinderpest. Afterwards the buffalo was almost a curiosity, extinct in many parts of its range. In the last fifty years it has again slowly built up its numbers. As for man, there is little reason to think that he can, in the long run, escape the fate of other creatures, and if there is a biological law of flux and reflux, his situation is now a highly perilous one. During ten thousand years his numbers have been on the upgrade in spite of wars, pestilence, and famines. This increase in population has become more and more rapid. Biologically, man has for too long a time been rolling an uninterrupted run of sevens.”
    —George R. Stewart, Earth Abides (1949)
Chicago, Illinois
October, the First Year
    Ken climbed down to Terry and said, “I sure hope this works.”
    They helped each other put on their packs, which was difficult in the cramped confines of the drain. They slung their rifles across their chests, with their muzzles down and with their buttstocks positioned unusually high.
    They headed west, moving slowly, with the path ahead lit by just Terry’s LED penlight.
    The concrete storm drain had a circular cross section and had just a sixty-five-inch inside diameter. This was fairly comfortable for Terry, but it was soon agony for Ken, who was seventy-three inches tall. Walking hunched over, carrying a pack was very uncomfortable. He stopped twice in the first 300 yards, to adjust his pack. He found that repositioning the sleeping bag to the bottom of the pack and loosening the shoulder straps—lowering the entire pack—worked best.
    There was no way to avoid walking in the rainwater that had collected in the low spots in the drain system. Their feet were soon wet and cold. The air in the storm drain network was warmer than up on the street. This was an effect of the ambient ground temperature. So they soon had to strip off their field jackets and stow them in their already crammed packs.
    They continued westward, now with Ken leading the way, and holding the penlight. The sound of sirens and gunfire could be heard, via the storm drains, as they went. Most of it sounded fairly distant, but at one point, after walking for an hour, they heard shouting and shooting directly above them. The reverberations of the gunfire sounded very strange and muffled in the confines of the drains.
    Beneath one gutter drain, they could hear a man moaning and sobbing. He was lying prone in a gutter, right next to a grille. Kenpointed his light upward briefly and could see that there was a substantial trickle of blood pouring down from the grille.
    After proceeding a few blocks, Ken stopped and pulled out his Nalgene water bottle and they passed it back and forth, taking deep swallows. He asked, “Did you see all that blood?”
    “Yeah. That was the most brutal thing I’ve ever seen or heard my whole life.”
    “Well, please say a prayer for that guy. I think he was dying.”
    Terry said in a clipped voice, “I already have.”
    They trudged on and on, rarely speaking. Ken counted the storm drains so that they could estimate how many blocks they had traversed. There were numbers and letters painted on the ladder shafts, but other than one number group that continually incremented downward, they were indiscernible to the Laytons.
    At just