The Apocalypse Blog
by Melanie Edmonds

We’ve been travelling by car over the last couple of days, since we came off the river. It’s slow going, as always, thanks to all the crap on the roads, but we were making good progress. We’re about a third of the way to the next dot on our map from the river – to Ben’s sister.

This morning, we looked at the map and Matt spoke up. He hasn’t done that often when we all get together to sort things out – it used to be that he would always be a voice up front, but he’s taking things much more cautiously these days. Today, he was quite firm about being heard, in a way I’ve never seen from him before. He’s graver than he used to be.

He looked at the area that we have to pass through to get to where Ben’s sister lives and said that we shouldn’t go that way. There’s a group that owns that territory – they call themselves the Pride. They’re big and they’re famous for their cruelty. People have come running out of the Pride’s zone and found the Sharks to be more welcoming. He knows of others who went into the Pride’s territory and never came out. There are lots of stories, he says, and none of them good.

So we decided to go around their territory. We’re going to go on foot from now on – it’ll take longer, but won’t attract attention the way that roaring engines will. They might be faster and more comfortable, but subtle and stealthy they are not.

We’re not turning back and we’re not giving up. But we are taking a safer route. We just have to be more careful, more vigilant, and hope we don’t attract any unnecessary attention as we crawl through the shadows of tumbledown buildings.