Read Renewal 2 - Echoes of the Breakdown for Free Online Page A

lost the ability to pretend that she lived in the same world she had before.
     
    Chapter 2 – 4
    Terry looked up from his idle scanning of the horizon. He figured that if he was going to stand watch, he might as well watch. Bill was staring into the distance as he spoke, and refocused on Terry when he sensed the young man’s sharp change of position.
    Bill took a quick look, just in case, and asked, “That’s hard to understand, isn’t it?”
    “It is. What did your mother lose? Seems to me that she should have been happy that ya’ll won,” Terry said.
    “You have to understand that, before the Breakdown, good people never had to kill anyone. Mom had a lifetime of thinking that only bad people did what she had just done.”
    “I can see that, I guess... It’s just that I grew up never knowing a single adult who hadn’t killed someone, or at least tried to kill someone.”
    “That’s what I mean,” Bill said. “In a few short days, Mom went from a life where the biggest worry was getting us kids to school on time, and making sure the house was in order, to having to fight for our lives three times...” Bill pushed his gray hair back. “And that’s not counting everything that could have happened in the schoolyard.”
    “Ok. I can see where that would be a shock. I just don’t have any idea of what it was like before. I mean, I’ve read about it, but most of the books had at least some danger and killing, so I thought that was normal.”
    Bill laughed a bit and said, “No. That’s the thing. Our lives were so safe and boring that we all loved to read that kind of thing to get some excitement.” He leaned against the tree and continued, “Real life had none of that stuff. Imagine that you were safe from all the dangers we face. Imagine that if you followed the rules, the worst thing you had to think about was a car accident, or if you were really unlucky, you might get robbed once in your life. There were bad people, of course, but they always seemed to be someone else’s problem.”
    “It was really that safe?” Terry asked.
    “Sure. My dad was one of the rare people who even imagined it could ever change. I guess he spent a lot of time thinking about different situations and how to deal with them. He was always ready to claim incredible good luck, but I know for a fact that you make your own luck, and he made ours by being able to think one step ahead of most everyone else.”
    “What about Kirk? He seemed well prepared,” Terry asked.
    “Well, Kirk’s a special case. I think it’s easy for us to look back and consider him part of the good luck, because he was willing to do things that no one else would do. He could pull that trigger and just consider it part of a day’s work. Most people can’t do that. In my mom’s case, on that day, she was watching her fourteen year old son go from a good kid, the kind of kid that other parents admired, to a cold blooded executioner. It’s hard for a mother to see something like that in her babies.”
    “What about your kids?”
    Bill sighed deeply and replied, “It’s a new world. They grew up scrambling for cover like the rest of us. Aggie and I didn’t have to make the same giant leap that my mother did. Our struggle is different. We take the fact that they were born knowing that killing had to be done, and we try to temper that with a conscience that understands that there are better ways, and killing is usually the worst option.”
    “No offense, but I’ve only met one of your children, and she seems all too ready to take a head off at the shoulders.”
    “Well, if you knew how many times Aggie and I have had that conversation... We may have learned to regret all that time she spent with Uncle Kirk.” Bill grinned like a proud papa. “Of course, until this country gets back on its feet, we believe she’s better off with her mean streak.”
    “Maybe so,” Terry said.
    Bill added, “One thing I know for sure. No matter what we had to