From the floorboards beneath me, I can hear people jerking awake, scrabbling to get to the ladder and find out what’s making me wail. Ryan’s the first to emerge out of the hole. He looks at where I sit crumpled on the floor with an alarmed expression on his face.

“He took everything!” I cry. “Craig. He stole everything.”

The others begin filing out of the underground bunker, and look around at the empty room with dismay. The food, the weapons, our backpacks, everything has gone. Then I realize, with an even greater despair, that our map has been taken as well.

Ryan comes over and drags me back up to my feet.

“We can’t stay here, Brooke. We don’t know who he will have alerted to our presence. We have to leave.”

I know he’s right but I can hardly stand. The shock of losing our possessions is too great for me to bear. All that food, gone, and the means with which to hunt stolen from us too. What are we going to do?

Finally, I manage to stand and stagger out of the shack and into the bright daylight. At the very least, our bikes remain. Craig must have left them knowing the engine noise would wake us up.

Without the map to guide us to Houston, we have no choice but to follow the Mississippi south. The roads are so destroyed here that there aren’t even any signs we can follow, and the bombs have flattened everything, meaning there aren’t even any distinguishable landmarks. It may add some more hours onto our journey but at least we’ll end up in Louisiana eventually, and then it’s just a case of heading west until we hit Houston.

We mount the bikes and go, my heart falling as I lose a bit more faith in the kindness of mankind.

*

After several hours driving, our gas gauges start to get low. It worries me to think we might have to make the last leg of the journey on foot.

We’re in a town built on the banks of the river that hasn’t been completely flattened. It’s called Baton Rouge and the road here is still intact. There’s a road sign informing us that Route 10 heads all the way west right to Houston. I can hardly believe our luck. The road sign tells us it’s 271 miles, which will take about six hours if the road holds out the whole way. As long as we don’t have to detour or run out of gas we should be there by nightfall.

It seems like everything is finally looking up. But a feeling inside of me says it won’t last for long.