Here is the thirteenth part of the story, and no nothing bad happens <<< PREV | FIRST | NEXT >>>


Chapter 13
Dashed was both surprised and a little confused about Carla’s question, did she want to know the full story, would she want to know about the sentient Olivia, and why did she want to know about feral Olivia. “I guess I’ll start from the time I left,” he thought
Dashed started off with, “Well after three months after the bombs fell and two months after everyone died I decided to head out, I guess it was because I had nowhere else to go and I didn’t care if I lived or died.”
“Why was that?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Dashed quickly said, “Anyways I decided to spend the first winter in a library; however I gravely miscalculated how much food I needed and nearly starved to death.”
“Why did you choose a library?”
“Think about it, you have at least four months of complete downtime except for going out to get wood for the fire, you literally have nothing to do, and so wouldn’t you want to go somewhere that had hundreds of time wasters and information guides to help you survive the wasteland?”
“Good point,” Carla admitted
“Anyways as I was saying, during winter I read up on everything from wilderness survival, to wound treatment, to firearm training. Once winter was over I came up with a plan: to reach Canada and get out of this hellhole.”
“So what were the years like after you left the library?”
“Well for the first year I just wandered, going from town to town not really caring what happened to me, trying to not think about what the future would hold or what had happened. During that time I was pretty depressed, I thought about killing myself a lot to be with the one I loved. Then the second winter came and I began to think that I could actually make it, which I was much more prepared for, and began to actually try to survive. During the winter I trained very hard, I lifted the heaviest things I could find, I did as many crunches as I could, and ran everywhere in the building. I became much stronger in winter and when I got out I had a new stance on things. You know when there you to be T.V. there was always a program on how some survival expert can survive for days in the harshest land and normal people barely surviving after a day or two?”
“Ya, what about it?”
“Well the biggest reason I knew I would survive for so long was because I was in Illinois, you know what I’m saying, the biggest predator is a coyote and the worst weather we can get is a freak snowstorm, there isn’t any droughts, or hurricanes, or even bears and because everybody was dead there weren’t any bandits! The biggest reason that I knew I would survive was because there wasn’t a lot of danger, besides the obvious broken-leg scenario, so I knew there wasn’t much to worry about if I kept my wits about me.”
“I see, well what happened in that second year of traveling?”
“Well for most of the time I took traveling pretty slowly and started to enjoy myself, if there was a river I swam in it for the day, if there was a particularly starry night I sat out and watched it, and most of all I tried to draw.”
“Why was that important?”
“Well it gave me something to do, I was pretty crappy to start with but, I gradually got better and better and it gave me something to do when I couldn’t move, you have no idea how many shops I raided to get the sheer amount of pencils, both colored and plain, to make my pictures.”
“I see, but you haven’t answered one of my questions,” Carla slyly said
“Which one is that?”
“Where did you get the fox,” Carla answered
Dashed looked over to the napping fox and decided to tell Carla the full truth for the first time, “Well I met her not two days ago, I was in the town of Englin and I was attacked by a bunch of foxes, I hid in an old auto-parts store, Olivia came in and she came in, saw me and for whatever reason led all the foxes away from me. I ran away, passed out on the side of the road, and when I woke up I saw Olivia and she has been following me ever since.”
I half expected to say she was your pet since the bombs fell,” Carla said with a smirk.
“Nah, so I do believe, I told you everything you wanted to know. So can I ask you a question, why did you decide to stay here?”