Etching 39
The expeditions were Evelyn’s idea. The industrial park was between our origin and our imagined destination. The City was clearly unsustainable, so we were stranded between it and the Town we had left.
We could have gone back, of course, me to my empty house, Haley to her parents’ mansion, Jeremy and Fred to their backyard where I imagine them tossing a ball back and forth, Evelyn to her mid-century bungalow, Walter’s people to wherever Walter’s people came from.
Titans on the Titan side of town and Eagles on the Eagle side of town.
That would have been a reasonable, logical response to the realization that the City was functionally submerged and therefore not particularly useful. It had been a grand idea, and adventure with the potential to provide some level of hope among hopelessness. It hadn’t worked. We should have gone home.
I think we would have if it weren't for one commonality among us. We had all watched people we loved die in our houses.
So we settled on the in-between, a shelter whose intended purpose was now obsolete. A big building not quite to our destination, but at least not where we started.