in about two weeks.

CHAPTER FOUR: LET'S GO ANYWHERE ELSE, ANOTHER ENCOUNTER

"Thinking that the road was straight,
I encountered such misfortune,
that i could not, even in madness, imagine
anything  with which I could be satified for one moment."

Garcilaso De La Vega
[unofficial translation, sonnet XVII]

"Do we have everything we need?" asked Sophia waiting beside the truck.

"Yeah, I think so..."

"Marcus," said Tom with an exaggerated exhausted tone. "You checked five times already. That was a rhetorical question."

The young man looked down for a moment, dejected; he then looked back up with a never-seen determined expression. "Hey. The thing about getting my name wrong on purpose? It wasn't funny even the first time." Turning to the woman, he added: "Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go say goodbye to my sister."

She half smiled. "Of course Marc, take your time."

As they turned around to give him some privacy, Tom mumbled under his breath: "He's getting sassy now, too". He took out of his pocket a pack of cigarettes that he had gotten from Vin's car. "It was funny. He just doesn't have a good sense of humor."

There was a time, during the first half of university, when he was quite the avid smoker; he stopped for a while, then went back to it full force, and in the end found a way to cut back. He hadn't seen a single cigarette in a while. It seemed like an appropriate time to start again.

He held one between his lips and got the box of matches in his backpack's side pocket. His hands were still shaking; Sophia took the box and lit it up for him.

"I'm driving for a while," she said.

"I'll stay in the back, then. We'll have to find a place to camp soon, it's gonna get dark."

"We can stay on the side of the road. We've got blankets, we'll manage. We've gone through worse."

Tom opened his mouth, on the verge of saying something; he instead took a long drag, before offering the rest of the cigarette to the woman.

They had never explored the South that much, especially after the beach incident.

In the north, it had taken them a while to find a couple of suitable places to spend a semi-long amount of time; that's when they'd had the idea of making a map of all the places they needed to remember. The result was rough, traced from existing maps onto pieces of paper taped together, but it was good enough for them to recognise roads they didn't know well enough yet.

For the South, they had only managed to explore the area surrounding the farm and the path to the coast, before being greeted by the unfriendly settled community.

In their experience, pretty much all the survivors left had settled, the actual number of nomads was low and decreasing over time. It was quite difficult for the average person to make it out there, it had been a miracle for the couple too, and the settled never made it any easier either, not welcoming or actively pursuing nomads, comparing them to wild animals as justification. The two had had multiple bad experiences: one time they had been held hostage and forced to execute Infected for the community. They were kept in separate places, used as leverage to push each other for a few days, before they were able to somehow escape. After at least one year, Tom and Sophia found themselves around those parts again. The twenty-something members group had been wiped out by the Infection, with few traces left for the world to remember them by.