The three men had been driving for nearly three days straight to cover the roughly 1,800 kilometers to Montgomery wasteland. In the old world, that distance might have taken a dozen hours on smooth highways. Now, with the landscape ravaged and unrecognizable, the journey was a grueling test of endurance.
Once outside the special districts, Sebastian found himself staring at endless stretches of Gobi-like desert in the no-man's-land, and the dry, empty gorge that had once been the mighty Mississippi River—a lifeline that had sustained countless lives.
North America's current survival environment could be roughly divided into three tiers.
The third tier was the no-man's-land—areas hit hardest by the catastrophe. Some were cracked, parched earth with no water for hundreds of miles; others
