A Town Called America Read Online Free PDF Page B

had just witnessed. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly before turning the key in the ignition and driving away.
    An hour later Rick returned, exited his vehicle, and made his way toward the cabin. He stopped on the porch to gather some logs, which he took inside. He placed the logs next to the fireplace and spent the next few minutes breaking off small pieces of kindling.
    “I tried to start a fire, but it went out,” Chris said from where she sat on the stairs, only a few feet from Rick. “It went out, though,” she said again, speaking softly, knowing something was wrong but not wanting to press him.
    Rick finished up with the fire, and once it was going, the heat radiated throughout the room. As the fire burned brightly once again, Chris found herself staring into the shadows while Rick explained what he had witnessed. The only sound besides the crackling of the wood was her panicked breathing as she sat next to Rick in disbelief. Sometime the previous night or early that morning, he said, Brick Creek had come under attack, and it wasn’t clear whether anyone had survived.
    He explained that he had driven toward town but pulled off the main road so as not to reveal his presence to any M.M. soldiers who might be nearby. The last thing he wanted was for them to spot him or follow him back to the cabin. When they had stormed the town, they had destroyed everything.
    From what he could gather, they had rolled over Brick Creek as if it were nothing more than a speed bump in their path of destruction.Women, children—it didn’t matter; they’d killed them all. Bodies were everywhere: shot, stabbed, murdered. Although Rick never had dealt with the M.M. personally, from everything he’d heard about them, their modus operandi was to strip a town of all its resources and take slaves before moving on to the next town.
    Chris sat silently, listening to Rick’s soft voice. She couldn’t help ask herself whether it was good or bad that the town was gone, as most of her memories in Brick Creek were bad. Regardless she knew the people there didn’t deserve what the M.M. had done to them. She had her personal feelings about a few of the residents and wasn’t unrealistic about the state of the world. However, this was the last thing she could have imagined happening. Panic ran through her mind, as she questioned not only their safety, but the likely hood of them even being able to find food.

SEVEN
    T o understand the magnitude of what had occurred, you would’ve had to experience it personally. Words can’t describe the horror of what took place in Brick Creek. Anything mechanical instantaneously was rendered inoperable by the EMP. Radios, vehicles, watches—nothing electronic operated. Even if something was off, it didn’t make a difference; everything was useless.
    They might as well have been in the Dark Ages, and it all happened in a millisecond.
    When the M.M. struck Brick Creek, the economy was nearly nonexistent. Food was scarce, and electricity was rare for one to have. The government already had collapsed, and the M.M. had been trying for years to establish a foothold throughout the country.
    After the US government collapsed, the dam outside Brick Creek was in complete disrepair. The filtration system began to clog after employees stopped maintaining it, and eventually the water stopped flowing altogether. The water finally spilled over, causing the structure itself to erode, and very quickly the flooding began. Between the flooding from the dam and the, the sewers filling up, and the water poured into basements and substructures. The buildings and homes in neighboring towns weren’t built to sustain such tremendous water damage, so many of them also collapsed.
    When the US government fell apart, it had taken only a few days for grocery-store shelves to be stripped due to looting. After that the animals and bugs moved in, along with violent gangs from the cities that devoured any scrap left behind. The