Remnants: A Record of Our Survival

Chapter Six: A Glimpse of the City

This is what happened.

If you’re still following along here then you probably saw this coming. While I’ve tried to be as faithful as possible throughout this process (by making recordings and trying to add links and all that good stuff that any real historian should be doing) you’ll just have to trust me from here on out that I’m reporting things faithfully. As Dad recently told me, history isn’t exactly objective anyway. The old Mrs. Cranston might be disappointed in me, but I doubt she’d care too much nowadays. I’m sure, if she’s still making her way through any of this, she has much bigger fish to fry, so to speak…

So I’m posting this by the thin beam of a dying flashlight in the back room of a deserted bowling alley. We’re locked in—barricaded, with a heavy metal desk in front of the only entrance. Billy and Dad are here safe, thank goodness, and there is the unmistakable musk of a hundred moldering bowling shoes wafting on the air.

Lovely.

Outside, all heck is breaking loose. It would appear that the blighted don’t share our shortage of ammunition, which is a huge bummer.

But here’s the good news: we found him. Now, all we can do is pray that he got away.

So, okay…we left the cabin four days ago, right at dusk. The truck is noisy but Dad took it slow, trying to keep it stealth. We left the lights off and slunk down those logging trails like a pack of jewel thieves, never really pushing it over 15 or 20 MPH. Outside of a sizable herd of deer grazing in a high-mountain meadow, we didn’t encounter another soul. The city loomed dark in the distance, with just a smattering of solar LEDs glowing from the exteriors of a few of the busted-up skyscrapers on the far side of the Willamette.

A dying town in a dying world, Portland is. So sad…

“I don’t expect that they’ll be rolling out the welcome mat,” Billy said. Dad chuckled, but there was no humor in it. We were all on edge. Portland is really scary, and I immediately missed the safety of the cabin. It occurred to me then that if we could just find Mom, we’d be able to make it fine there on the side of that mountain. It was an epiphany, and it felt really good to just let go of any misguided hope I had been holding onto that things would go back the way they were. So much for school. So much for soccer practice and grocery stores and piano lessons.

None of that mattered if we could all just be together again. That’s what leaving the safety of the mountain taught me. It also taught me that people can be terrible, terrible monsters, but more on that later…

So we jounced our way down those rutted logging trails in the darkness. My brother sat shotgun, our actual shotgun in his lap. The closer you get to Gresham, the more you need to stick to the paved roads, but Dad got sneaky and cut through some alfalfa fields over by the college. It turns out that Mom used to work as an adjunct over at Mt. Hood Community College. They have an arboretum on the outskirts of campus that Dad used to jog in during the summer, and we found it and stuck to its dirt paths and avoided the entry onto Glisan altogether that way.

It took a few hours but we finally made it down off the mountain and, I have to be honest—it was really disorienting. After a couple of months spent looking down on everything, losing that vantage point gives a person a strange, vulnerable feeling. We rolled slowly through abandoned neighborhoods, most of them little more than ash-blackened husks.

We didn’t speak. I think we were too scared to even risk it, as if breaking the silence would somehow coax the blighted from inside of the dilapidated homes. If there were people there, they were content to let us pass. I kept expecting roadblocks and checkpoints (the blighted posting out of Denver and Jacksonville seemed to have their cities almost completely locked down), but I guess we were still too far out from the heart of the city.