Crisis Event: Gray Dawn by Greg Shows, Zachary Womack Page B

said, and held up a middle finger.
    Blakely tried to make himself care about the tardiness of the convoy, and about the importance of reaching the objective in a timely manner.
    He failed.
    As far as he was concerned, the mission was bullshit.
    A pointless waste of time.
    He’d come to realize that all that remained of the U.S. government—for which he was supposedly undertaking this mission—was a bunch of civilian pukes fighting over a shitheap no longer worth having. The Constitution that he’d sworn to uphold was a dead letter.
    After the big Blow Off in Yellowstone took out a quarter of the population and nearly all of its farmland, and after D.C. was obliterated with a nuclear weapon nobody claimed credit for, no one took the claims or actions of the surviving members of government very seriously. But when the nuclear plant workers started walking away from their jobs and the nuclear waste stockpiles started boiling away their cooling ponds and releasing deadly radiation, it was fairly obvious to anyone paying attention that the U.S.A. was D.O.A.
        The elites in California and the Eastern Seaboard had sure as hell been paying attention. They had taken their slow boats to Brazil, or Argentina, or Chile—since flying was right out of the question. Even Hollywood had folded up its tents and caravanned to Caracas, Venezuela, the leftist losers.
    As for the boat-less Americans unfortunate enough to be outside the pyroclastic zone and heavy ash fall areas...their lives had gone about like you’d expect—if you’d ever seen a zombie movie or played a post-apocalyptic video game. Most Americans had suffered—were likely still suffering—a long, slow death by starvation. FEMA had been woefully unprepared to deal with the Crisis, and in the absence of any ability to restore order, things had gotten FUBAR fast. They’d managed to evacuate only two million Americans before the ability of the U.S. government to maintain order had collapsed and the country had descended into chaos.
    Two million. Out of three hundred and eighteen million. Not even one percent.
    It was a monumental miscalculation of what would be needed in a major emergency by the federal government. Or a gross dereliction of duty whose punishment should likely be the severest penalty possible.
    Blakely snorted out loud.
    No one would ever be punished. Everyone knew that.
    “Something wrong, sir?” Duck asked.
    “Nothing,” Blakely said and stared ahead. Here he was. A year after the Crisis. Chasing around the dead gray landscape. Playing soldier with an outfit of cast-off kids who’d had no one to go home to when everybody else had deserted.
    Not that he’d had anyone to go home to either. Not anymore.
    It was pretty goddamned pathetic, if you thought about it, but since Blakely didn’t like thinking about it, he didn’t.
    “Easy,” Blakely told Duck as he was about to take them down into a ditch to get around a smash-up. “The general will have our asses, we lose this Humvee.”
    “Yeah, right,” Duck said. “I don’t think the general’s going to be with us long.”
    The three men in the back grumbled in agreement.
    “Stow that,” Blakely said. “Eyes on the environment.”
    “There’s no one out there,” Duck said, and jammed a foot down on the accelerator, driving the Humvee hard up the slope of ditch beneath the highway, sending it rocketing up onto the dust-covered blacktop above. “Not anymore.”
    “Probably not,” Blakely said, “but we’ve lost enough people today, so let’s remember our training, all right?
    “Yessir,” Duck said, and gave a long, Daffy Duck quack that got swallowed up by the rumble of the Humvee engine.
    Three hours later, when the two-vehicle convoy arrived at the 7-11 on the corner of Matilda and Burke, Duck drove the lead Humvee over the curb and into the parking lot. Just for fun he slammed the front bumper into the rear end of a Prius, which went sliding into the gas pump island where it