Part 7 - May 20 - The Drive to the University Campus

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The drive from the Pine Ridge Fire Station could have been worse. The event had occurred at the end of rush hour, so traffic on the road had thinned out. The cars that were on the road had been traveling at the programmed speed limit when the occupants had frozen. Most of the cars had simply pulled to the side of the road as the industry-required safety overrides programmed into most of the auto-cars kicked in. A few of the older models, however, had ended up in the ditch or crashed into the wooded sides of the road, the older programming having not been as reliable as the newer models. There were a few pileups where cars traveling in opposite directions had crashed head-on when the WWN went down and the automated safety controls failed. Carl tried to skirt as far around these pileups as he could to prevent the children from seeing what was inside the cars.

Nancy leaned forward and quietly commented to Carl, “Some of the auto-safeties failed.”

Carl nodded. “It appears that the entire net went down all at once.”

Nancy turned to check on the baby. She repeated her praise to the girls for the excellent care they were giving the child. They checked her diaper and offered her another bottle; the formula was not warm, and the baby was unsure as to whether she liked the cooler liquid, but hunger won over and the little girl drank the formula greedily.

Nancy frequently turned to the back of the bus to check the children and do her best to assure them that everything would work out fine. As she made her way back to the front of the bus, she shook her head. Yeah, everything would work out—depending on your idea of what “work out” meant.

As they passed the exit sign for South Bend, Nancy told Carl, “We’ll need to check all the other elementary schools for survivors.”

“Do you think the children would have stayed in the school waiting all this time?” he replied. “I think it more likely that the children started to wander away hours ago. Any search we make for other surviving children will have to be a house-by-house search. These children are together because you survived and kept them together. We can only hope that at least one teacher like you survived to keep the little ones together,” Carl finished.

Nancy thought quietly for some time. “But you would not object to checking once we get these children settled?” she asked.

Carl looked at her in the overhead mirror and smiled. “As soon as I get you and this batch of children safe, I’ll do whatever I can to check the other schools.”