Day 18

Dawn broke and we were up and around and ready to caravan onward. Billy and John rode shotgun with me, A.J. and Nathan shared the tanker rig. Everyone else rode in the bus RV with the two brothers and their families and the few people who survived the onslaught at the trailer park.

We put the sun behind us and head west. The highway is jammed until we hit I-29 and run fast north to Council Bluffs. I hammer down and we get there in record time. The places you can and the time you can make with no Smokies around.

Navigating through Council Bluffs and Omaha is tough, very tough. For a small city everything is jammed up tight. I pick up the CB and talk to A.J. and tell him my newly discovered spidey sense is tingling and he says the same it's all red flags from there on out.

There's no way to take the fast lanes through the city, we have to go around. We backtrack to 34 and head to Plattsmouth and head to I-80 as fast as we can. No faster way through Nebraska. The plan is to eventually hit I-90 and go northwest and eventually make our way to the coast and from there north to Alaska. If the interstates are as clear as these have been so far we can make it in a few days while we camp every night.

The tanker is a huge boon to us as we just pull up beside it and refuel. Brilliant idea. I still feel like a mass murderer though for frying all of those people. Yeah I know they would have killed me and all of us but it still doesn't make it feel right. What if there's a cure in a few weeks? What if the government loads it up in crop dusters and sprays the whole country curing everyone...yeah right. The only government left is probably some low level staffer from a well known Senator that got booted out of office on the last election.

If anyone with an IQ above 110 is in charge I'd be amazed. Time to face facts, it's over. I mean it's been in the back of my mind all along that there's no going back but after traveling the hundreds of miles we have and seeing the devastation that we've seen, it really sets in now.

It's over with. At least if there had been a police state style new world order we'd be forced to farm to live and live in Utopian collectives. Up at dawn and marched to the fields, a few cracks of the whip to motivate the decaffeinated masses in all of it's Big Brotherish Orwellian left wing glory. The thought police always at our heels and over our heads but there would have been order, as warped and oppressive as it may be it would have been order.

What do we have instead? Freedom I guess. Is this what the pioneers felt as they traveled across the unknown for a better life? Is this freedom in its truest sense? No money, no credit cards, no mortgages, no more Tonight Show for that matter, nothing to tie us to the system that was in place just over two weeks ago.

We're going to be raising our own food when we arrive. What will take the place of entertainment? What will be entertaining from now on in this world gone mad? Will we ever laugh again? Will we be able to truly relax and put our brains on hold while something takes over our sleepy minds and dulls our survival senses like a plastic butter knife?

No, not now. Not even in our safest moments will we be able to truly relax and delude ourselves that our lives, such as they were are back. My only regret right now is that we can't swing down California way and snipe off some fifteen minute celebrities before heading off to our new homes, defiantly hammering the final nail into the coffin of pop culture for the last time. Perhaps for the very first time we'll all have to start living.