Robert Jenkins cowered in the corner of the disheveled building, sweat pouring from every pore. His grungy clothes were even dirtier than normal as he desperately tried to catch his breath. The patrol had almost caught him, and he knew what would happen. If he was lucky, a life in a Rocky Mountain States of America prison, but if the patrol had been too busy, or didn’t feel like following the “rules,” he’d be just another dead kid from the Wastelands left on the side of a street in Campo, Colorado.
The Rocky Mountain States were supposed to be so great, at least that’s what he’d heard, but what he had seen so far in Campo, abandoned buildings, dust, and high winds, reminded him a lot of Boise City in what used to be Oklahoma, but that had been long before Robert had been born. Now Boise City was just a series of ruins run by various gangs. His, the Rose Clan, had sent him to Colorado. He was supposed to make his way to Springfield, where he was supposed to steal some resources. That had been the plan, anyway. That had been when there were four of them. Jackson got fried in an electric fence while crossing the border. Evans was shot dead by some random hunter who thought he was a dear, or some shit like that. And Billings got hit by a truck just outside of Campo. They hadn’t seen any traffic since they’d entered Colorado, so Billings had thought it would be safe to walk down the middle of what had been Highway 287…maybe it was still called that in Colorado. In what used to be Oklahoma, it was just called The Road, a place where the gangs could try to take out the occasional truck going between the Rocky Mountain States and Texas, and those were few and far between.
Billings had been walking down the middle of the Highway when the truck came out of nowhere and took him out at 200 miles per hour. Now Robert was left alone to complete a mission that would probably require at least two of them, but if he returned to the Rose Clan empty handed, Jim Bob, the head of his clan would probably have him killed.
“Talk about lose-lose,” he mumbled to himself, and then quickly put his hand over his mouth as he heard a noise outside the “door.” The boarded over relic of a door had offered no resistance to his entering, and he’d hoped that he’d put everything back into place so that no one would notice that there might be someone inside.
But now the movement had stopped right outside of the door. Robert thought he could hear breathing, but maybe it was just his own.
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