Snareville II: Circles by David Youngquist Page B

convoy. None of it would mean dick to anyone with artillery pieces, just good targets, but it ought to give anyone else pause.
    Empty fields faded away into the horizon. We were ten miles south of town on a county blacktop. We didn’t often come this way, so we really didn’t know what to expect. Out in the fields were cattle that had gone feral. One of these days, we’d have to get out and catch some more milk cows. We’d need it soon. Beef cattle were hunted pretty regularly and the Mennonites still raised them in the pastures around Plow Ridge. I slowed the rig as a small herd of feral hogs wandered across the road.
    “World’s going back wild,” Cherry said from behind me. “It’s starting to remind me of Stephen King’s world in his Dark Tower series.”
    I grunted. I’d never read much King. Saw his movies, but he was awful wordy for me. I just didn’t have the time.
    “One of the phrases he used a lot in those books was that the world had moved on. Looks like we got to that point.”
    “Don’t know that I’d say that,” I said. “I think we’re more at a fork in the road. We give up and die out, or we do what we can to save ourselves.”
    I turned onto another county road headed west. In places, the blacktop crumbled. Three winters of freezing and heaving in the spring with no maintenance started to take its toll. We stopped in one valley and had to clear trees from the road. Winches came in handy as we dragged the deadwood out of the way. We’d have to come back and cut it up for firewood. It made a good trade commodity on the market.
    We passed through Bradford. No one was home. Two stray zeds wandered toward us, but they were down before they got within smelling distance. We rolled west on through town, picked up Illinois 40 and put our foot in throttle. Ten miles later, we hooked into another state road and turned south.
    Six miles after that, we stopped the rigs. Two miles on the horizon, buildings sprouted out of the prairies. Trees reached for the sky with heavy green leaves. I stood behind the open door of my HumVee and scanned the town with my binoculars. A cluster of industrial buildings on the edge of town caught my attention. Broken up, burned out, they reached out like burnt idols.
    “What the hell was that place?” I asked no one in particular.
    “I think it was an ethanol plant,” Wally said from the other side. “Looks like it went up pretty good.”
    “What you think, Danny?” Cindy said. “We blast through or take it slow?”
    “Road goes right through town?”
    “According to the map,” Cindy said.
    “Slow and easy, I reckon. We try to run through, we’re liable to get blocked in somehow.” I radioed we were going in. I’d be on point. Walking speed. When we hit town, everyone but the gunner and driver would get out and burn some shoe leather.
    Big River Cooperative was an ethanol plant, according to the sign in the overgrown yard. It looked like the office building was the only one not touched by flame. Everything else was burnt to skeletons. Windows in the office were busted out, shards left in the frame, crystals scattered across the gravel parking lot. We stopped to get into formation. Cherry took the wheel. Jinks climbed up behind the gun. The HumVees had a granny low gear and could move at a walk, the semis would have issues, but I wasn’t going to risk a bottleneck.
    We walked into town, past the same scene from every other town we’d been through: burnt out houses, overgrown yards, rotting vehicles. On occasion, a cat would skitter across the road in front of us. From under one pickup, a dog growled at us as we passed by. It had the leg of something clamped under a paw, what it was, I couldn’t figure. An old radio station was the only thing different from other places, but this far out, you had to listen to something. WALZ looked like it’d been off the air for twenty years, but who knew.
    We turned a corner to the north and town became less residential.