Read A Town Called America for Free Online

stench of rotting food and dead flesh filled the air. Bodies lay in the street, also looted of anything of use.
    With riots and fighting in the streets, gunshots became the norm throughout the days and nights. The local governments quit long before this began; they also didn’t have any answers. Bands of gangs eventually marauded towns, killing anyone in their path. They burned buildings and shot anyone on sight.
    Around that time Brick Creek, with its few remaining residents, banned together and built the wall around the main part of town. After the defenses were in place, it was a while before anyone had come through trying to cause problems, most likely because there wasn’t much left for people to take, and the outsiders knew it. In the months after the M.M. stormed Brick Creek, almost everyone they hadn’t killed eventually starved or just left.
    After Brick Creek the M.M. tore across the country, looting and burning remaining towns and cities. The few hospitals left were either burned or bare of supplies. Children across the country were now without antibiotics. Well, a person can guess what happened to the children after that.
    In the months after the attack, a handful of people were still holed up in Brick Creek, in some of the older brick buildings they’d fortified. Eventually fewer and fewer people came around, but when they did arrive, the first thing they saw was a large sign outside town that read, PRIVATE PROPERTY : WILL KILL ON SIGHT ! WE HAVE NO FOOD , WATER , OR SUPPLIES !
    As difficult as it is to imagine, this town actually had it easy compared to the some of the cities. People living on the thirtieth floor in a high-rise, for example, had no air conditioning, elevators, or running water.
    Most of the population didn’t even know how to clean a fish or butcher a deer if they had one. People in years past had been too relianton the food at stores and everything convenient being there whenever they’d wanted it. Eventually city streets began to fill with water, collapsing them and turning them into flowing rivers of garbage and waste.
    All this was compounded by the fact that even before the US government had collapsed, the storms had hit. For two years straight, they struck like nothing anyone had seen since Hurricane Katrina. Day after day rain and wind pounded the earth, destroying everything in their path. The winds were so strong that they forced many people to take refuge underground, far away from the coasts. The damage had been in the tens of trillions of dollars.
    The roadways, unmaintained for so long, soon grew over with vegetation. Plants and weeds broke through the pavement and tore the thick roads to pieces. Because of the lack of fuel, most vehicles were abandoned and rusting. Glass had been blown out of vehicle windows, their contents spread across the land in what was a never-ending river of trash and objects that people once had thought were important. Towns and roads were a maze of vehicles and garbage and in places were almost impassable.
    One year after the destruction of Brick Creek, it was a ghost town. Its only occupants were a few diehards who refused to leave. Rick’s cabin was now unrecognizable to anyone who had seen it in its better days. The roof over the porch was now on the ground. The windows had been shattered, and anything inside of importance was long gone, ransacked by looters.
    From the outside anyone who looked at the cabin immediately could see the garbage spread throughout the front of the house, and the toolshed had collapsed after someone had burned it to the ground. Most of the trees atop the hill provided firewood, but only a few still stood at the bottom near the cabin.
    The tires on Rick’s El Camino were flat and the fuel tank long empty. It sat next to the cabin and hadn’t been moved since the attack on Brick Creek.

EIGHT
    R ick, Chris, and Shawn were sitting at the small wooden table, eating dinner. Deer was a real treat they didn’t get to enjoy