Zelda

The battered Jeep, the roof gone with only the driver’s door remaining, the green paint long worn away by the elements, shook vehemently as it finally pulled onto the well-hidden dirt path leading up into the mountains. The driver, head obscured by a black motorcycle helmet with a cracked visor, stopped the vehicle and poked their head out the non-existent window and looked back. The crumbling gravel road was empty of any other living thing and vehicle, completely overshadowed by the overgrown trees and bushes of the forest. The driver looked away and restarted the Jeep, and off it went up the mountain road, bouncing off the uneven terrain.

The path was a difficult one, to be sure, with Mother Nature running rampant everywhere since the Last Day. Ah, yes, the Last Day, the driver recalled bitterly, when electricity Died and no one could do anything anymore… All the chaos, the bloodshed… and for what? Over what? Cell phones and toasters? Insanity. Just…insanity.

Finally, the tree canopy above parted, revealing the bleak overcast sky, and the Jeep pulled up in front of the two-level cabin that the driver currently called home. The place had seen better days, it had been ransacked continuously throughout the past five years, the driver being the most recent ‘visitor’ to the isolated shelter. The varnish was peeling, the windows cracked and broken, and the deck of the upper level had collapsed partially, but the roof was in good shape thankfully. At least I can sleep knowing I won’t get rained on, the driver thought, walking in through the doorless entryway, carrying a large cardboard box effortlessly. If I can sleep, that is.

Since it was such a large house, the driver made living quarters in one of the downstairs bedrooms, the perfect vantage point – there was a set of glass doors that looked over the ruins of the upper deck as well as the dirt path leading down into the valley, and it possessed the only usable mattress left in the house. The driver set the box of non-perishable goods recovered from the ruins of the nearest grocery store down upon the floor next to their duffel bag of clothes and pulled off the motorcycle helmet and tossed it onto the mattress, revealing long auburn hair and a pale, weary face lined with exhaustion.

Hang on, Zelda, you’re so close, she thought as she sat down cross-legged upon the mattress, her whole body sagging in relief as she found herself relaxing for the first time in days. Just a little while longer and you’ll be okay… Just make it through the drive to Camden, and you’ll be okay, you won’t be alone, there’ll be other people…

She could barely remember the last time she had been in the presence of another human being, the last five years having been so blurry and anarchic. It had been back home, in Cincinnati, at Union Terminal, when her parents had dropped her off for her big trip to Chicago. Mom, Dad… She shut her eyes tightly, her fingers reaching up to finger the delicate heart-shaped locket that she always wore – their last present to her, before the Last Day… I’ll make it to Camden, I promise. I’ll stay safe…for you…

Camden, Maine was supposed to be one of the last towns in what was left of the United States of America to retain some semblance of normalcy in the new Dark Age – at least, that was what she had heard on the old radio in the ancient Jeep she’d commandeered three years prior in Nashville. She had made it back to her hometown, after a long and arduous trek following the train tracks – she had found no trace of her family, and so had decided to travel south, to Gatlinburg, to their vacation home. She’d found the old cabin burned to the ground, and turned her attentions back north, finding her way to Nashville.

Camden, Maine – the last sane place in America, the last hope of America. Her last hope. And it was only a three days’ drive away…

…

The next day, Zelda relinquished her post in the mountain cabin, moving all her supplies into her Jeep, and set off on what had once been State Route 302 through White Mountain National Forest, New Hampshire, and crossed state lines into Maine at noon. She silently thanked God that she had managed to find that working gas pump back in that little hamlet of Huntsville, or else she would have had to walk the entire way to Camden, Maine. Hopefully she had enough to last the trip, or that there would be another gas station still miraculously standing after years of continuous looting and rioting.

As she masterfully drove the Jeep over cracked asphalt and around fallen tree limbs, Zelda caught glimpses of more ghost towns and charred ruins scattered across the countryside. Vehicles, whether they were burnt-out, abandoned, or still occupied by their last owners, were everywhere, like some child’s long-forgotten toys, neglected and abandoned. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them crashed because they were panicking over why their phones weren’t working, Zelda thought. ‘Fuss’ doesn’t even begin to describe just how obsessed we were with technology, does it? Ironically, most of her thoughts these days were about technology, even though it had been years since anything once thought irreplaceable had worked.

We were too dependent, that was the problem, Zelda thought, and everyone knew it. Well, they knew but they didn’t really know, did they? If they had, they would have prepared… We would have prepared for this, prepared a lot. But we didn’t, and now…

A hand reached up to the locket and fingered it for a minute, before grabbing the steering wheel and turning it sharply to the right as she drove through the scorched remains of Portland, Maine, making headway for the Northeast, towards Camden. She hoped that the roads up there would be in as relatively good a shape as they were in Portland. However, over the past five years, Zelda had learned how not to get her hopes up. Thankfully, she had her hiking boots, found in the aftermath of a riot at a L.L. Bean store in Ohio last year. They would help if she had to walk most of the way.

The skies above her had darkened considerably with all the ominous threats of a coming thunderstorm, she could feel the winds picking up through the broken driver’s seat window. Damn, I’ll have to find shelter for the night, she muttered, squinting her eyes as she scoured the terrain in front of her for any sign of a still habitable building that she could take shelter in. She found it, eventually, in the crumbling Greek Revival remains of the Freeport, Maine location of McDonalds, noted for the departure from the franchise’s usual architecture.

“Huh,” she said aloud as she pulled into the empty parking lot, “maybe there’ll be some lobster rolls in the freezer.”

Five years, and your first joke is about lobster rolls? Zelda, honey, you need people. Lots and lots of people.

…

It rained continuously for a day and a half, with thunder rolling boisterously throughout the most of it. Only when the wind finally died down and the sun finally peeked out from behind a straggling ribbon of gray cloud did Zelda restart her Jeep and drove out of the forlorn remnants of Freeport, Maine, and turned her attentions to Camden, only an hour’s drive away.

An hour away…you’re only an hour away… Come on, baby, come on, Zelda thought, patting the steering wheel affectionately as she navigated through the twisting, turning coastal roads, coming ever so closer to Camden. Almost there, almost there, almost there…

The first thing that she noticed when the sputtering Jeep finally approached the center of town was how foggy the Megunticook River was. It looked like the entire landscape was covered in a fluffy, comfortable blanket of a cool gray shade. Zelda sat back against her seat, taking in the sights, as she noticed a few figures poke their heads out of the doorway of a nearby house, eyeing her with a mixture of surprise and elation.

She smiled as she fingered the heart-shaped locket, rubbing the gold for luck as she opened the door. We did it.