7/26 6:46pm

At the picket line now. The jarheads on the other side are jumpy as a cat on coke. Not good.

We left behind the tandem and Daisy for this one. The inhaler makes it dramatically easier for the old man to get by on foot, and I suggested that, no matter how quiet the ride, we would have to abandon it later on. Moaners may have decayed eyesight, but it’s a fair bet that the guys with guns don’t.

Dave agreed grudgingly. This wasn’t his idea of a picnic, and I can understand why. He has some serious attachment for the dog, and leaving behind the transport that makes us faster than the moaners takes away one of our biggest advantages.

The trip up was mercifully quiet. Leapfrogging forward, Dave’s ax and my bat took down any locals before they had a chance to raise the alarm. It was surreal, to creep through neighborhoods like a thief, and see an abandonded tricycle on the corner, or a garden in the yard, abandonded mid-planting. Like we’re ghosts, living in a world forgotten by everyone else.

That silence gets to me. Makes me feel like a stranger walking through the ruins of lives. Then a battered panama hat rises up from the ground, attached to a decaying body. Wet, rotting gardening gloves rise, and Dave slices straight through it’s neck, sending it toppling down.

When we do this, it’s like we’re trespassing on the last moments of those people’s lives, rusted into place. Rotting, dead, and hopeless, but still their’s, not ours.

That kind of place is for the goners, not us. But I guess that’s the whole city now, isn’t it? We’re the aliens and trespassers, not them.

We made it to within two blocks of the northern pass. Dave’s tried the radio, but the overgrown trees in this neighborhood are giving us a hell of a time. All we can get is intermittent signal of some useless public interest station playing opera.

We need to go into the open fields between us and the blockade if we want to get anything useful, but that means falling directly in the sights of the soldiers manning the blockade. So, we’re waiting for dark.

Dark, and danger. It’s what awaits me and the old man.