This Rotten World (Book 2): We All Fall Down by The Vocabulariast

Already a crowd had gathered around them. The soldiers
dragged the man in charge after them. "You ok?" one of the men asked
him.
    "Yeah. Yeah, I'm alright.
Just stings a little."
    They climbed up into the back of
the truck, a large two-ton beast that guzzled diesel and looked like a
mechanical ancestor of the covered wagons that so many had used to emigrate and
make their lives in Oregon over a hundred and fifty years ago.
    They sat on the metal benches that
lined the sides of the truck. The man in charge leaned his head back against the
tight green tarp of the truck. "Send Silva up here," he bellowed. A
man with sickly, yellow brown skin stood up and rushed to the man in charge. He
began washing and cleaning the wounds, water mixing with blood and falling to
the floor of the gurgling truck.
    "Can I have my gun back
now?" Chloe asked.
    The man looked at her, smiled,
and said once again, "You're not going to need it." Sweat gathered on
his brow, and Chloe heard his stomach grumble as they bound his wounds.
"Don't worry. You'll be safe," he said, before coughing weakly.
"Hurry, up with that bandage, Silva. I don't have all day."
    Rudy and Amanda watched as the
man in charge paled. Their hands were interlocked. Rudy turned to Amanda and
asked, "Can I have one of those beers?"

Chapter 10: Safe
     
    Katie had driven towards the
river and into one of the more industrial parts of town. She saw few people. If
they were there, they were hiding. The only signs of life she had seen had been
other cars passing on side roads, there for an instant and then gone. Large
warehouses, some seemingly as old as the city itself, rose into the sky, most
of them thirty or forty feet high. The views were terrible, but due to the lack
of housing in the area, she could almost forget that they were in the middle of
a potential apocalypse event. Her Dodge Durango purred along while the voice on
the radio droned on.
    A shelter, she thought. Would
it be enough to keep them out? Would it be safe enough? She thought of the
time she had spent in the old man's house, Fred Walker. She thought of the
relentless banging, the untiring assault her dead husband and child had put on
the door of Fred Walker's bedroom. That was only two of them. What would happen
if there were a thousand of those things? What would happen if there were twenty-thousand?
What place would be safe from that sort of attack?
    A helicopter buzzed overhead, firing
a rocket into the day. The explosion rattled her windows. She couldn't see what
had been blown up, but she hoped the explosion had taken plenty of those things
with it. She halted the vehicle at a stop sign, more out of habit than anything
else. Other than the noise of the helicopters in the sky and the haze that
crept through the city, it seemed like nothing more than an ordinary day in
Portland. What would she be doing now if this were just a typical day in June?
She'd probably be making lunch for Kevin while her husband bashed away on his
laptop, trying to craft some sort of young adult fiction novel that would sell
in the millions, so he could quit his job. He said he knew the formula. He said
he had cracked the code. She believed him, though there was no proof that he
held within his head the code to capture the hearts of millions of teenage
girls.
    She would probably be putting
together some sort of sandwich assortment, ratcheting up the air conditioning,
and fighting the temptation to open a bottle of wine. Kevin would be in his
room playing video games or down the street playing street hockey with one of
his many friends, dirty little things whose noses always seem to be runny.
There she would be, fighting the urge to get drunk by slathering mayo on
generic, grocery store bread. The new world wasn't all bad, she guessed, as she
grabbed the open bottle of wine off the seat next to her and took a long slug from
it. It was one of those single-serving bottles. Just enough for a good pug in
the car. There was a pile of them in a