A Different Alchemy Read Online Free PDF Page B

overtake him, and then kill everything ahead. It must be visible from Washington and New York. Maybe people over seas were wondering if a different type of madness, something other than the slow decline of mankind, had come over the Americans. Maybe the final astronauts were seeing it from outer space and were wondering what in the hell was happening.
    Once he was finally away from it, he slowed the tank even more. He would continue at that casual pace for the rest of his journey. There was no point going faster; he had nowhere he had to be and no schedule for when he had to be there.
    He merely focused on avoiding abandoned cars on the road. He was still too overwhelmed with fleeing the smoke, being inside a tank, traveling on a deserted highway, to think about his son. And even when he did think of Galen, he didn’t think of him at the epicenter of the flames, but, as though nothing tragic had happened, at home.
    And then, with even more black smoke rising up into the sky, he closed the hatch door, and continued north. That was all.

Chapter 3
    “Whether you like it or not, the calls are getting louder for us to leave this city.”
    Two men sat facing each other in front of studio cameras. The more fiery of the two men made a habit of wearing pinstripe suits that exaggerated just how tall and skinny he was. Along with sunken cheeks, he bore a striking resemblance to a smug Grim Reaper.
    “Why isn’t anyone stepping up to help us?” he asked into the camera. “Do they want us to just sit here until it’s too late and we’re all dead?” He had been saying the same thing for two years.
    After the disaster in Boston, the remains of an entire stubborn city frozen to death in a terrible blizzard, it was easy to see the importance of moving south where there were still enough people to keep the infrastructure functioning properly. It had been four years since New York sent a delegation up to see why no one had heard from the Boston settlement following the harsh winter. Frozen bodies were everywhere. The city’s workers had already left. Without them, the roads didn’t get plowed. People were stuck in their houses. The power generators, designed to make each house self sufficient, began killing entire families due to carbon monoxide poisoning. Worse yet, the generators at the group home in the Boston Garden failed. Most people went to sleep shivering underneath green championship banners, then never woke up again. The stories of what had been found there were enough for New York to join up with Philadelphia earlier than planned.
    It was amazing, though, how quickly the houses around Jeffrey, temporarily infused with people wearing Yankees hats, would start to empty again. A family would leave in the middle of the night to join their relatives in Florida. An elderly couple would pass away. Someone would finally succumb to cancer. Each day a few more people were gone, without new children to replace them, and after three years the city was once again reminding them how empty a metropolis could feel.
    As if to exacerbate people’s fears as they watched the gradual decline in population, protests were held each week to make people even more afraid. Half the protests were organized by groups that were frustrated with the lack of planning for how to get the entire city relocated to Washington. The other protests were to complain about having thousands of people to take along for the ride who couldn’t otherwise take care of themselves. On bad days, both protests occurred at the same time and the two masses of people combined into a scared mob looking for someone to blame.
    But there were still people who said everything would be OK. There was no need for panic. Jeffrey was one of them.
    “These are trying times,” the other man on TV said. “But we have to make sure we have the resources necessary for the trip if we’re going to pick up and move everyone a hundred miles south. You can’t just do something like that at