Alone, Book 3: The Journey Read Online Free PDF Page A

to either of them.
         Until the last few days, when Dave had struggled with a very difficult decision.
         Should he just leave, and risk the chance that someone might try to open his garage while he was gone?
         If they did, they’d stumble upon his Faraday cage and dried food stores. And they’d likely be curious enough to want to see what other treasures the seemingly vacant house might contain.
         Curious enough to break down the locked door leading into the house.
         And there they’d find not only his safe room and water supplies, but also the rabbits he’d worked so hard to protect.
         On the other hand, he could lock the door from the inside, run through his house, through his hidden gate and into the Castros’ yard, through the Castros’ house and back out to his running vehicle.
         And hopefully it would still be there.
         Of course, he could kill the engine and take the keys with him.
         But if he did that, and it wouldn’t start again for some reason, he’d be screwed. He wouldn’t be able to work on it in his driveway, and the driveway had just enough of an uphill slope to prevent him from being able to push it back into the garage.
         And damn it, he wanted to get on the road, and finally start his journey.
         He opted to leave it running.
         And he broke a land speed record, almost, getting through the Castros’ house and back to it.
         Winded, but glad that his garage was secured, he climbed back into the Explorer.
         He was finally on his way.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 6
     
          Dave was two blocks away before he dared pull the door closed, holding it shut with his hand to that point.
         Part of it was his paranoid nature, and part just being prudent. If anyone heard the sound of a car door being closed and recognized the sound, he certainly didn’t want it to be associated with his house.
         The automatic door locks didn’t work, of course, since he’d bypassed most of the electrical system. But the buttons, once depressed, were released by the inside door latch.
         He’d already locked the other three doors when he loaded the vehicle days before.
         Now he reached over his left shoulder and depressed the lock on the driver’s door, to prevent anyone from running up on the slow moving vehicle and pulling the door open.
         Of course, that wouldn’t prevent them from shooting Dave through the window.
         But he was relying on God’s good nature to keep that from happening.
         As for the vehicle itself, it made almost no noise at all, as long as Dave kept his foot off the gas pedal. So he let it crawl along at its own pace.
         He couldn’t go any faster than a crawl anyway. At least until he got out of the residential area.
         On each block, there were at least two, and sometimes several abandoned vehicles stalled in the middle of the street. Every one of them were in his way, causing him to mutter, “Geez. Doesn’t anyone drive on the right side of the road anymore?”
         He seemed to forget that when he retrieved his own vehicle, he’d retrieved it from the dead center of the street.
         Luckily all of the vehicles save one gave him enough clearance to get by. For that vehicle, a UPS truck, he merely used a driveway to allow his passenger side wheels to climb onto the curb, and to ride the curb to the adjacent house’s driveway.  
         After five blocks he was on a main thoroughfare, Military Drive. Seeing it for the first time abandoned and completely dark, it looked spooky. Almost like a set from a post-apocalyptic movie.
         Then he remembered he lived in a post-apocalyptic world.
         Military Drive connected with Interstate 35 a few miles away. The I-35 was Dave’s path out of San Antonio and ran in the general direction of