Page 1 of Homestead

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Year Nine after Impact

Grandpa wasa prepper back before Impact. One of those hard-core nutjobs always muttering about the end of days.

As a kid, I secretly believed he was fun and fascinating—and smarter than my parents would ever admit. He would show up a few times a year to our big house in Bentonville, Arkansas, with its manicured lawn and shiny appliances, and he’d tell me about his adventures in stockpiling necessities and the latest self-sustaining innovations he’d installed in his cabin.

“Chloe, doll,” he’d tell me, “the world is hanging on by a thread. It’s on its last legs. Don’t you feel the end in the air?”

I would close my eyes. Sniff the air. Try to recognize the doomsday vibes he could so clearly sense.

I never could.

He lived deep in the sparsely populated hill country in southern Missouri. Ozark born and bred. My mom always laughed and said that one day her father would disappear into the woods and never emerge again.

My parents were wealthy, intelligent, and successful. They loved my grandfather but never took him seriously. My dad was an executive for a multinational retail corporation, and my mom was a college professor. They finally had me in their late thirties after years of failed attempts and fertility treatments, and they treated me like a gift from on high.

From the cradle, it was understood that I would be as cultured, educated, and privileged as my parents. That I would care about my grandfather because he was family but would never let his eccentric, conspiracy-loving worldview infect me. I learned early that as long as I was a good girl, I would be given anything their love and money could provide.

Yes, sometimes I’d daydream about giving up our boring, vanilla life and running away to live with Grandpa, but I would always keep those imaginings secret. I never genuinely believed they could possibly materialize, and even if they could, I wouldn’t want to give up my parents or my friends or my pretty room or all my stuff.

But life likes to spin us around just for fun. When I was fourteen, my silly daydreams came true.

One random Friday, the president announced that an asteroid was on a collision course for Earth. My world and everyone else’s—the entire planet—fell into chaos.

Everything that was capable of collapsing eventually did.

My grandfather showed up the next day as stores were being ransacked and riots were erupting in the streets. He begged us to run. Escape to his survival-adapted cabin in the middle of nowhere where he’d stored up years’ worth of food and provisions.

My parents finally agreed, but they insisted on taking the time to pack all their favorite possessions while Grandpa and I waited impatiently in his old truck.

The delay was a mistake. Large groups of violent looters were already hitting the wealthy neighborhoods in town, plundering houses and killing anyone who resisted.

My mom and dad didn’t resist. Neither of them had ever thrown a punch or loaded a gun in their lives. But they were killed anyway, and Grandpa and I barely made it out of there alive.

By then the interstates and highways were impossible, clogged with cars and roadblocked by aggressive militia groups whose day had finally arrived. Grandpa took us on smaller back roads, shooting at or running over anyone who tried to stop us, until we reached his remote cabin and left the remains of civilization behind.

We stayed there—living off everything he’d stored up and using the self-sustaining energy and plumbing systems he’d installed—for more than eight years.

A couple of years ago, as our supplies were running low, we realized we’d finally have to leave the safe isolation of our home long enough to scavenge for food and provisions. This region of the Ozarks was abandoned a long time ago as the protected forests and uncultivated wildland overtook the former pockets of residents, but there are still plenty of abandoned buildings remaining.

We’ve lived on anything we can salvage from the wreckage of the former world as well as on the goodwill of the occasional passing stranger ever since.

It’s the ninth year after Impact on a cold, gray afternoon in late autumn, and Grandpa and I are on another quest for food.

He hoarded gasoline as well as food, and we still have some in reserve, but we’ve switched to taking his side-by-side ATV everywhere. His truck uses too much gas, and it’s no longer drivable through the overgrown dirt roads and trails of the wilderness surrounding his cabin.

Most of these roads weren’t paved even before the asteroid hit.

In the past two years, we’ve found and searched every abandoned hunting cabin, backwater shop, and outdoors outfitter within fifty miles of the cabin, so we’re having to go farther out now for successful scavenging trips.

Today we’ve driven east and had very little luck. Every damaged remnant of the old world that we come across has already been looted.

Grandpa has been steering us between the thick trees and through the overgrown foliage covering an old hiking trail, and I gasp when the familiar deep woods suddenly break into a clearing.

Not a clearing.

An old parking lot.

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