1.0 The Nomad Boy

In the wilds of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, no cities remain populated.

At one time over fifty thousand people called the city home, but all that stands now is crushed concrete and pale pillaring trees, like Roman columns rising towards a dark, leafy, lightless heavens. The ruins and the trees and the darkened sky are repeating motifs observed everywhere, from London to Melbourne to Yangon, Berlin, Budapest and San Diego -- different places, same trees, piercing through the hearts of cities and leaving the same scene, again and again: beds of crushed concrete, bridges twisted into corkscrews, steel I beams bent like straws. And all of this, wrapped in ivy and green.

But without argument, the area surrounding LaCrosse, Chicago, and Fort Wayne are the most unrecognizable.

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A midnight rain had just passed over the edge of the LaCrosse wilds, a few miles northeast of the West Salem ruins. Beneath the spindly trees staked into the north-basking side of McKinley Valley, squeezed into a rocky nook, a boy had taken shelter under a boulder and fallen asleep there. 

When morning came and the rains had gone, the boy stirred.

He was maybe twelve years old. His face was smeared in mud and his long hair, blond but unrecognizable, was caked in it. 

The crevice, upon closer investigation, had actually been picked very strategically for the night. While fire had been impossible in the moist Wisconsin woods, various items of clothing had been carefully laid across the rocks and hung from projecting roots in such a way that the wind failed to carry any rain to them. 

The child pulled a tattered hockey jersey over his head, wrestling with it until the garment draped from his shoulders towards his knees, fitting about as well as a tent. He slipped his feet into a pair of cracked sneakers wrapped in soggy duct tape, tucked a lock of dirtied blond hair behind his ear, and then picked up a remarkably well cared for backpack that was intact all but for the straps, which had been sewn, tied, taped, pinned, and then tied again to the main trunk of the pack. This the boy shrugged over his shoulders before tying the two mangled straps together across his chest so that, while it hung dejectedly off of his back, it did not slide down. 

After collecting his few belongings, he departed from the site.

The woods still dripped. The child descended the slope in the direction that the shadows bent, towards the southwest. He met, followed, and departed from game trails, allowing some error in his path as long as it wandered that general direction. By noontime the largest pools of water had lost their form and the leaves of the forest had mostly dried. The ground remained mucked and muddy, but the further down into the valley the boy descended, the more mosses and ferns carpeted the ground to give him traction. 

Finally he reached a cracked country road, or at least, what remained of it. While the asphalt was shattered and choppy it still was easier travel than wading through moist ferns that soaked his jeans,. He walked this road for a few hours, stopping when it intersected a creek to get a drink and replenish several water bottles he kept in his pack. From thereon the creek ran parallel to the road. As he walked the sun dried him out, and finally the road united with Highway 108. 

The highway spanned over the LaCrosse river and, had the boy so desired, he could have gone on to explore the shores of Neshonoc Lake. But that wasn't the goal of his journey today.

There was a house he knew of, not much farther he knew, where a couple -- friends of his father's -- had once lived. He knew them to be dead, but he remembered that there was a safe in that house. The key to that safe was, hopefully, still taped to the inside rim of the trash can beneath the kitchen sink. And with any luck, the gun inside was still intact.