The Man Who Watched the World End by Chris Dietzel Page A

to New York City, and all the way down to Texas. I zigged and zagged across the country wherever they needed the roads fortified.
    Spokane was a lot nicer than I expected. Being used to mostly flat grounds and fields, I immediately fell in love with the mountains in the distance. Each time we were due for a day off I tried to get one of the other guys to go hiking with me. But no matter who I spoke to they all said they were exhausted from paving roads for six days straight; their idea of fun wasn’t walking around in the wilderness with sore feet all day. They would rather, they said, get drunk and pass out.
    In Chicago, most of our time was spent repaving the roads leading south out of the city. We never paved roads in any other direction, only south. All of us knew this was because the city’s population would only want to head in one direction once the city was abandoned and they joined up with another community further down the road. By the time we arrived there, Wrigley Park had already been converted into a group home for Blocks. Without security guards, anyone at all could walk right in and go wherever they wanted. Of course, that was how I spent my day off. But when I got to the field, instead of seeing the pitching mound and home plate, I saw hundreds of Blocks lined up across the entire ballpark. A massive tarp was tied from the stands on one side of the stadium all the way to the other side. This was to keep rain from landing directly on the bodies. The famous homerun wall was void of its ivy and moss. In its place were hundreds of messages spray-painted by vandals. Some of the graffiti mentioned Block sisters who were supposedly slutsqpl,be,. Other obscenities explained exactly why God hated the Blocks, and still other messages said the Cubs sucked. None of the volunteers bothered trying to remove the graffiti; none of them even seemed to notice it.
    In Dayton we came across a bridge that was only half completed. Intended to cut down on commute times, it connected two different suburbs leading into the city. Construction had started right before the Great De-evolution began and then quickly stopped. Even without being told, I could guess the reason why the bridge had a basic frame in place but stopped halfway over the water: everyone started thinking, “Why build a bridge to cut down on our commutes if we aren’t going to be here much longer?” So instead of finishing the bridge for them, our road crew repaved the path heading south, and the bridge forever stood half complete and half open.
    We never bothered with side streets and auxiliary roads when we arrived at our assigned cities. Each job we started was for the major highways running in and out of the city. We saw neighborhoods similar to Camelot off in the distance, but we only ever paved roads like 95, 495, and 66, the roads that would get the most people going where they needed to go. In almost every city we went to we found people parking their cars on the exit ramps of these major highways. For these people, the people who still had to travel but no longer trusted the integrity of most roads, it was easier to park their cars on the exit ramp and walk a mile or two home than it was to get a flat tire every day. In the time it took to change a flat tire, they could already be sitting on their sofa. And anyway, the supply of spare tires would eventually run out, so why tempt fate?
    I got to see the Rocky Mountains and part of the Appalachian Trail. I got to see the Grand Canyon and the Mississippi River. But although I got as far as Spokane, the road crew I was attached to never went out to Seattle. Nor did they go south to California. I’ve heard the Pacific Ocean looks exactly like the Atlantic, that if you’ve seen one ocean, you’ve seen them all, but I would have liked to discover that for myself. I’ve seen pictures of M ount Rushmore, but never had a chance to see the faces on the mountain in person. I tell myself I saw more than most