The Freedom Roads - Part Two

With a grunt he hoisted his thirty liter backpack onto his fourteen stone frame. With his wide shoulders and slender build he could have been a swimmer or a fireman or at least a roofer but he had always told people he was a writer and this had always surprised them. This had, in turn, always surprised and annoyed David Adams, mainly because he actually wasn’t a professional writer but why the hell couldn’t I be? He just didn’t look the part and the apocalypse hadn’t done anything to improve things. His hair was ash blonde, shoulder length and specked with grey as was his beard which was full and quite long. When he kept it in good shape the first impression was always either John Lennon or Jesus, though less Jewish. Or at least he thought so himself. 

He zipped up his coat, fastened the straps and jotted down a quick note. As he slammed the door to his world behind him he turned around and stabbed the note to the door with a sharpened screwdriver. On it, in his tall, slender handwriting it said ‘Keep this house. It’s yours!’

David Adams set out with a feeling of having done something right. He even considered whistling as he walked down the familiar dirt road through the Italian countryside but he had never been able to. She hasn’t lost her beauty, which was true. The hills wasn’t as lush as they had been but purple bushes dotted the dark greens of the hillsides and the first leaves, almost fluorescent against the blackened cork branches had already sprung. The planet will have forgotten about us in no time at all. For an apocalypse this wasn’t all that bad. But he’d gotten lucky. On the phone from England his father had always joked that up there the world could end without David knowing. And so it almost did. It didn’t slip his attention but he was a spectator more than anything else. Nestled safe in the northern Italian countryside, where things had never gotten too hellish, he followed the end of the world on television, then on radio and then he didn’t bother. Shortly after the phone calls from his father stopped the fires began over the villages in the horizon, so David Adams locked himself in with his doubt and grief for a long while. His father had lived in London. Twenty years had passed and David had come to accept that his old man had either died or was living a life much like his own. He would turn 68 this year. David missed him.

Maybe I should pick up smoking again. He’d looted the supermercati in the nearby villages numerous times but, of course, all of them were out of cigarettes, alcohol and canned goods. Some of them were trashed or burned to the ground. The villas still standing were a different story but David avoided them when he could. When he was desperate he always knocked before making his way in. Nobody was ever there - none living anyway. He hated it; going through peoples things, taking what he needed. This might have been someone’s favorite tea kettle. Maybe someone wrote a love letter with this pen. He would have to get used to it. Now was the time.