I was quite convinced my life had reached its dénouement. I had achieved the height of civic duty – I had guided my country through its greatest health crisis – and could rightfully spend the rest of my days in idle pursuits at New Beach Haven, writing my biography, hunting along the new coastline. I’d had my fill of sick people.

But I am one condemned to an active and restless life. My first career had been a private investigator, and I had achieved several positions of authority in our previous government, to which the quiet contemplation of retired life was an ill-suited substitute. I was thus in an anxious state when Bob “Bullocks” Clancey contacted me.

I first met old Bullocks on an investigation job. A trade union at one of his companies had hired me to investigate alleged corporate embezzlements from the employee health program, but instead I uncovered a series of fraudulent claims from the employees, including several high-ranking union officials. I turned over this information to the company officers, as was my duty, and they were able to liquidate the program and dissolve the union. It seemed a poor decision for me since my client ceased to exist, but I had to do the moral thing. And Bob, who had been CFO and was also moving up the ranks in the federal government, rewarded my loyalty several years later with an appointment as a federal health policy advisor. The country was in crisis with the recent outbreak of the Highway Virus. Very early I was able to recognize the greatest threat in this new condition, the danger of overdiagnosis. Any investigator will tell you, in a time of public panic, every sniffle, every high temperature, every unexplained death is immediately attributed to this new disease. The world turns into a quivering hypochondriac. The health system bends and then breaks with this new burden, and the people who really need help die in waiting rooms.

Within a month of my appointment, we cut the number of registered cases from nearly one million to a few thousand and had discounted nearly half of the deaths attributed to the Highway Virus. I was investigating the phenomenon of intentional infection, perhaps one of the biggest insurance scams in our history, when the roads closed and the federal government, the First Government, dissolved.

I retired following the dissolution, but Bob stayed in the eastern swamps and helped found the New Order of Incorporated Elders. His continued service did not surprise anyone who knows old Bullocks. If the world exploded, Bullocks would be in charge of distributing brooms. One of his projects, several years in the planning, was the construction of a new route, the Pioneer Pass, through the wide swath of wasteland where roving militias and trogg dogs claimed anyone who tried to cross. It was a grand plan – the Pass would reconnect the two American coasts and re-civilize the New Wilds – but to start the project, they needed an expedition to plot its course. As the Elders’ viceroy, Bullocks was charged with commissioning the caravan, and he was looking for someone with the unique combination of science and action to be his man in the group. Naturally he thought of me.

The Elders arranged my transport to Old Cincy, the project’s launching point. Presuming complete protection, I had discharged my bodyguards. That was my first mistake. The Elders had recruited about thirty people for the expedition, mostly unskilled convicts released under the new amnesty labor laws. The chroners would have been ideal for this project. Members of their collective had been mapping the New Wilds for years, and they knew the shifting landscape, how to deal with threats, how to survive. But they were boycotting the expedition for fear the Pioneer Pass would put them out of business. The profession was less than a decade in existence, and already they were unionizing. I had thought the spirit of serving humanity would inspire them, but to a man the chroners were unable to look past their immediate needs. The caravan’s professionals, beyond me, consisted of one doctor, one soldier, and two surveyors, all probably bribed with free water. They certainly made poor companions. The doctor was aloof, but at least he was quiet. The soldier was a middle-aged warrior with a slight limp. The surveyors were in their early twenties but did not posses the pensive introspection typical of their Virus Generation. They were a husband and wife team – or maybe they were brother and sister. Whatever their relationship, it should have been dissolved, except they never stopped arguing to consider the possibility.

“That box won’t fit in the trunk,” she would say.

“Yes it will,” he would reply.

“You’re going to break it.”

“It’ll fit.” And he would shove the box into the trunk of their vehicle.

They both possessed an unrelenting need to contradict the other, which they carried far beyond the logical conclusion of any single topic, and so their querulous bickering sullied the historic launch of our expedition. A team of convicts walked in front to remove any obstacles. The surveyors were in a mechanized open-air carriage with a retractable roof. I rode with the doctor in the backseat of a customized Chevy Vigour, with reinforced windows and doors to repel attacks. The soldier marched between our vehicles, and another team of convicts followed in the back. The doctor and I had a convict as chauffeur, so there was little to do except listen to the nattering of the cartographers, debating data points and the angle of the earth’s rotation. I would have kept the doors and windows shut, except the doctor, an older practitioner originally from India (although he had successfully hidden his accent), started voicing his displeasure for my past political actions. His tiresome comments are not worthy to recount, but suffice it to say I often kept windows down despite the threat of projectiles.

All these factors made tedious the first few days of travel. As we moved south and west, the heat increased until the car was unbearable, but random attacks, mainly arrows or rocks launched from concealed overgrowth areas, kept us in the vehicles. A few convicts died repelling our attackers, but the feral humans in the first stage of our trek were only a minor threat. They attacked in groups of two or three and were often just children, fifteen years old at the most and easy targets for the soldier.

As we moved into the Midwest, where mounds of mutilated cattle dotted the landscape, the open spaces were less accommodating to sneak attacks, so I was able to walk outside the car. It was a relief despite the bickering of our surveying team. One particularly virulent argument concerned the antennae for a GPS unit.

“I told you this wasn’t working,” the man said, twisting the antennae head with one hand while driving with the other.

“I just need to get out and walk with it,” the woman said. “To get a signal.” She dismounted with the unit half-strapped to her back as he let loose a series of profanities. Once she was on the ground, the unit started beeping. “See,” the woman said, dripping satisfaction.

“The satellites are no longer accurate,” he said. “They aren’t being maintained, so we can’t rely on those readings.”

“They’ll maintain their orbit for at least ten more years,” she said, her eyes now on the handheld unit.

“Did the New Elders send you an instruction manual?”

They were arguing as such when the Vigour exploded.

It was a small explosion, from a device lobbed almost gingerly onto the car’s roof. It came from a rotten haystack, almost liquid black, where two particularly dedicated attackers had been waiting. The blast collapsed the cab, tilting both ends up so the car took the shape of a fat capital V. The doctor and driver were killed, mostly likely crushed by the constricted cab because the explosion had been little more than a puff of air, a firm but gentle push that laid me on the ground. Our assailants emerged, dressed in brown robes with red trim and dripping with black rot, and tried to run, but the soldier had time to set, take aim, and remove both their heads.

Silence followed the two shots, so complete that for an anxious second I feared for my hearing. But it seems there was something in this world with the power to strike dumb our surveyors. They stared at the mangled car like dogs trying desperately to understand this giant consonant. They were silent for nearly a mile as the soldier pushed our caravan on, “double time” as he called it, and away from the scene of the attack. He wanted to go further, but as acting doctor for the group, I insisted we stop before the combination of shock and exhaustion undermined our fragile cadre. Fortunately the attack had occurred at dusk, and the soldier had to admit, traveling at night would be too perilous.

We camped in a clearing, with rocky terrain on all sides, what the soldier felt was a defensible spot. The remaining convicts started a rotation guarding the perimeter, while the rest of us gathered in the center to eat and unload necessities. These mundane activities revitalized the surveyors’ feuding.

“Don’t put that box there,” the man said. “The stone could drain the batteries.”

“Not while they’re packaged,” the woman said, putting down the box in defiance.

“Did you see that?” the man said, pointing just below the horizon. “Those were eyes. Red eyes.”

“You’re seeing things.”

“No, that was an animal. It went behind that hill.”

“Why don’t you go find it then?”

“I would just trade one animal for another.”

With this talk of red eyes, the convicts started swapping stories about trogg dogs. The tales varied from simple exaggerations to outright lies. One man missing his left eye claimed to have seen a trogg dog swim out to kill two men in a fishing boat. Another had seen a trogg dog run into the woods with a baby, still crying, in its teeth. Another said that anyone who survived a bite from a trogg dog, a miniscule number to begin with, was immediately infected with the Highway Virus. One particularly brusque convict believed the troggs were once wolves that had mutated from the virus.

Trogg dogs had appeared around the same time as the Highway Virus, so of course the lay mind linked the two. During my tenure as national health advisor, we did some research on these animals, enough for me to have heard all the trogg legends, and I had the knowledge but not the desire to correct the convicts’ false beliefs. I admit, troggs are complicated animals. They exhibit some habits similar to scavengers, happily eating carcass meat and even dead bodies infected with the Highway Virus, yet they also hunt live humans just as a natural predator would, canine terrorists taking advantage of an already burdened human race. They always hunt in packs, are incredibly difficult to kill or tranquilize, and will turn on their wounded, making live capture rare. Given these factors, the uneducated tend to view these animals as something fantastic or mystical, ripe circumstances for the promulgation of trogg tall tales. In truth, the president’s scientific advisors were uncertain about the trogg dogs’ biological origins, only that they have some genetic kinship to the family Canidae. As such, they have a keen sense of smell, acute enough to discern the bleeding flesh of our fallen companions encased in the crumpled Chevy Vigour. And from the explosion site, a pack of trogg dogs was able to track us to our camp.

We first heard the breathing, heavy panting through those pugnacious noses, then the cracking of their claws as they navigated the rocky terrain with impossible ease. Multiple sets of ruby-clear eyes appeared in the surrounding darkness, lingering for a pregnant second, and then they disappeared. I moved closer to the fire. One more fact from my previous research – trogg dogs shut their eyes as they bite into their prey. The screaming started, and those animals not occupied at the perimeter stampeded into the camp. They were up to six feet long, some of them, with mangy fur that smelled hot and rotten. They toppled men thick as tree trunks, their teeth flashing black in the firelight before disappearing into their victims.

I was spinning in the center of camp, hoping to find a clear path away from the onslaught. The soldier was backing out of the campsite on the other side, his rifle steady in front of him. He stood between the attacking animals and the surveyors, who were running toward the carriage. Fear gripped me but not enough to hold me in place. I ran toward the soldier, unsure how I would bypass the two trogg dogs in my path. Fortunately they were in a tug-of-war with the one-eyed convict and separated him just as I ran past. The one that got the legs turned to follow me, but I was already on the safe side of the soldier, running toward the rumbling carriage.

The surveyors were screaming. They were both inclined to wait for the soldier, but habit and stress insisted they argue about it. I glanced back and saw the soldier fall beneath two trogg dogs. The camp was in ruins. Trogg dogs were running around the fire like hoary moths. The only means to preserve the mission was to flee. I pushed my way into the carriage and drove until I couldn’t hear the snarling.

Of course neither surveyor had grabbed a weapon. I had moved the doctor’s supplies, those that had survived the tiny blast, into the carriage before we had camped, so between the three of us, we had a roll of white medical tape, a few syringes, some penicillin, and a stethoscope. I put the stethoscope around my neck.

“Which way is east?” I asked them as I piloted the carriage through a fallow cornfield. I had failed to consider the controversy the question would incite.

“We should go back,” said one surveyor, the female. “There might be survivors.”

“There are never survivors,” said the other. “We need to call Old Cincy, so they can send more soldiers.”

I implored them for a gesture, a nod, anything to indicate an eastward direction and the way back to civilization, but panic had trapped them in an unending debate. I drove through empty fields and over cracked highways until I found an old interstate that looked to have a latitudinal aspect. I turned right, only on a hunch, and followed the dilapidated road.

We traveled all night, seeing nothing but a few deer, the median breed, still living in the center strip. Their eyes glowed pale green as they stared at the carriage’s running lights. For a few miles, I could hear them running behind the carriage, following a latent instinct for self-preservation even though the hunters who had driven them out were long gone. They had little left to fear, of course, because the trogg dogs had not developed a taste for deer meat. There were even past instances, unconfirmed, of trogg dogs lingering near these deer sites, waiting for humans to appear. One of the surveyors was aware of this supposed symbiosis.

“We should get off the interstate,” she said. “These deers will attract trogg dogs.”

“No, they will serve as early warning against attack,” he said. “And there’s no such word as ‘deers.’”

The sunrise confirmed we were traveling east but also revealed a local militia had surrounded us in the night. They had formed a circle to move in tandem with the carriage and stopped in unison when I crushed the brakes. They totaled about fifteen men, all clad in crushed brown leather with insignias painted on their arms, two intersecting red and white rectangles with a dark blue border. Each held a shotgun, with a pistol in a side holster, standard issue from the Southern Corporate Alliance.

“Are they going to escort us home?” the female surveyor asked.

“Run them down!” the man said.

“Maybe they want food,” she said.

I was sure they would start shooting, if only to silence my companions, but they stood and stared, marking the time. Once the requisite two minutes had passed, the nearest native jumped into the carriage and pushed his narrow body into the driver’s seat, claiming the vehicle and all its contents under their adapted conversion beliefs. The Southerners were at least systematic. Northerners would have cooked and eaten us on the spot.

Our new driver was a trim male, clean with only a day’s stubble on his chin, probably from the night he had spent following us, and he had the sunken eyes of a Walking Carrier. He piloted the carriage with silent efficiency, and after a few miles, I ventured, “We were hoping someone would help us back home.”

He did not reply.

“We have been traveling for days, on a very important mission.”

No response. All three of us were dead at that moment. Their bylaws are quite clear about invaders, leaving me with few options to save the expedition. I leaned into the driver. “I have to get these carriers to the coast,” I whispered, with a slight gesture to the surveyors trembling behind the seat. “They are the cure.”

The promise of a cure, however slight, still stirs sediments of human hope, and God willing, we will find it one day. And it was the only thing I could offer that these creatures might value.

The driver did not respond. He piloted our carriage without comment for another two miles and then veered to the right, traveling another few miles across more difficult terrain until we reached a clearing with several tin shacks. The road ended in a large corrugated shed, the doors open, and he drove the vehicle into the gaping building. The vast interior held several other vehicles, mostly chroner cruisers, with several chroner weapons – net guns, electroshock spears – hung on the walls like trophies. The driver took the GPS units from the surveyors and departed, leaving us in the cab. As he walked away, I could hear several sets of feet echo against the thin walls, then the loud scraping of the front bay doors closing, and then nothing.

After a few lingering moments of silence, the male surveyor asked, “What should we do?”

“They would have killed us already, if they were going to,” the female said, although her voice wavered.

“They’re probably waiting for the water to boil,” he said.

I jumped down from the cab. My landing echoed in the lifeless building. I advised the surveyors to grab a few weapons off the walls, and I walked toward a side door. I cradled the knob and opened the door a slit, only to meet a hundred expectant eyes crowded near the entrance. I did not see our driver – these were younger eyes, mostly teens, and they stepped back with an immense crackle of leather as I opened the door. The male in front, his hair and skin showing the dirt and strain of life in the New Wilds, carried his youth in his eyes, which were wide and eager. “Is it true?” he asked, in better English than I expected.

“What do you think?” I said. I started to move into the crowd, and they gave me space. A few of them stepped into the shed behind me.

“Are they the cure?” said another, less patient youth.

“Maybe,” I said. “I have to get back to my lab to determine that. Of course we would all benefit if it were true.”

There was murmuring as word came back of who was in the shed, along with doubt that there was anything unique about my companions. There were a few voices, imploring everyone to wait for the leaders, but they were muffled as the crowd shifted again – and this time I felt the space constrict around me.

“They’re Carriers, but you’ll notice they aren’t sick,” I said quickly. I started fingering the stethoscope around my neck.

“But how…” said the first youth.

“They have a special resistance,” I said. “We have to extract the oil from their DNA. It holds the cure.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s our only hope.”

More of them were talking now, some shouting, then pushing. I felt a relief of space behind me, as more of the natives moved into the shed. Voices echoed in the building, but I kept pushing ahead as the crowd moved around me, drawn to the open door. Gunshots sounded from the building, intensifying the surge toward the tin building, and I was able to make it into the nearest tree line.

It never occurred to me that my level of peril would increase once in the New Wilds. Besides the Southern Alliances, I had to worry about trogg dogs and nonaffiliated tribes, which were graver threats than what I had escaped. One could argue that I would have been safer in the shed, but it is not in my nature to wait for my tormentors to come to me. Of course I don’t know the fate of the surveyors. They could have found another exit – and with all those weapons at their disposal, they could have defended their position against the incoming Southerners indefinitely. There were infinite possibilities for escape and preservation for people willing to take responsibility for their own destiny.

I wandered for two days, sleeping in the trees, moving east on the westbound side of the interstate. I smelled pure feral when I finally encountered a chroner named Blane, a young first-timer who was mapping on the old interstate. He was a good kid, taking me back to Old Cincy and arranging for my transport to the Elders headquarters. I heard a week later, just one day before my final report to the Elders, that a Southern faction had captured and killed him, first crippling him and then boiling him alive to make some kind of medicine broth. I used this incident to preface my presentation, which recommended immediate construction of the Pioneer Pass to civilize the area and counter such brutality. The Elders in their wisdom had already prioritized this project, but my impassioned plea, along with some persuasive comments from Bullocks, convinced them to proceed even though the expedition had provided no usable coordinates to plot the path.

Bullocks, who was supplying the concrete, organized the groundbreaking ceremony one month after my return. I declined to speak at the event but did attend, and while sitting in that small crowd of supporters and construction workers, listening to Bullocks expound on his vision of the future, I recalled the same feelings of pride from my early days in public service. I had been a part of something far greater than myself. The Pioneer Pass is a turning point in history, with our efforts combining to move the world in a different, better direction. In Bullocks’ own words, the Pioneer Pass will serve as a civilizing influence on the New Wilds, just as the trains and interstates did so many years ago.

And, in line with Bullocks’ predictions, the Elders received a communiqué from the Southern Corporate Alliance once construction had started: “Send more DNA oil.” It was a short request but was the first official contact between these two governing organizations. The expedition, the Pioneer Pass project, and now these new lines of communication – we are forging the early connections with the indigent tribes in the New Wilds. And I know, these efforts will be the first steps leading to a better world for all of us.