When I woke up I was so exhausted I felt nauseous. But I had a hard time feeling sorry for myself and got out of bed anyway. Splashed a bit of cold water on my face and drank a cup of ice water and then set to the rest of the check list.

1. Wake up at 3:45

Done.

2. Stow everything in the coded compartments and drawers in the event of raiders looking to steal the stuff you stole.

It wasn't like I'd really moved anything over the trip, but most of what I'd taken I hadn't put into the drawers with codes. The reason for that being I needed to hack into the central computer system to reset the codes. After that I was just too lazy to move everything. And I sincerely thought I would be dead.

I quickly stuffed everything into the coded cabinets that would fit everything and locked them up tight. Next I made the beds. A normal person would choose a bed and stick with it but depending on the day and where the moon was I moved around the yacht. So in summary, I needed to make all of the beds. As I was on my way out of the yacht I made sure that all of the windows and doors were shut and locked. When I passed the control room I put the thing into dormant so that the programming would make it unable to be accessed without my handprint, pass keys and the fob I'd stuck in the inside pocket of my coat. Outside, I took off the plates and traded them with the vessel three stalls down.

Finally, I stole a tarp and threw it over top so that it looked like a different vessel was new instead of the Someone Stop the Nimrod Who Named the Vessel. I still very thoroughly enjoy that name. Anyway, after the tarp was on I snuck onto the most shoddy looking ship and tore off a chunk of the falling-apart door frame. And finally I left the safety of my home-boat.

Over the past three weeks I'd gotten too comfortable on the yacht. Even the idea of leaving it made me kind of uneasy, but I did it anyway. Quiet as possible I snuck down from where I left the vessels I'd been closed from the city by. The beach front had a sickly green tinge to it and there was all sorts of algae creeping onto the shore with dead fish corpses and beached whales that were rotting away much too slowly.

The whole harbour smelled like death and blood. So naturally I hurried away from there as quick as possible, trying to get into the main part of the city so that I wouldn't need to keep thinking about the whales on the shore. As I continued to saunter down the bridge I found a few small shell craters and one part where the entire thing had collapsed for about fifteen feet and it looked like there was no way across. Jumping into the water and swimming to the shore was absolutely not an option. Not just because it looked absolutely disgusting but because I was completely certain it was so cold I wouldn't make it to the city. The cold air blowing off the water raised goosebumps on my arms and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I kept an iron tight grip on the chunk of steel in my hand, slowly turning my head to make sure I'd correctly taken in my surroundings.

The tall skyscraping buildings from Tourism.com had been partly taken down, inside of one I could see what looked like the tail end of an aircraft. Nosy, I decided I would inspect that first. So I hurried off of the bridge and into the city, which looked much, much worse on the inside. The streets were torn up and shelled so bad there was no asphalt left to walk on around the mess. The cars at the sides were crumpled, some ripped in half, parts thrown all over as if someone was feverishly looking for extra parts. On either side of the streets there were buildings that either had shell holes blasted in them or cars embedded. Mice skittered around the street, one or two over my shoes like I was standing still.

The idea that I was moving slow enough for that to happen in a place this eery sped me up. I continued to peer through the city, checking buildings that were in decent shape for signs of life. The usual, opened cans of food where the shrapnel inside hadn't started to rot yet. Coffee mugs without dust on them, rerouted and running water. Made beds in this industrial area.

Unfortunately none so far had any such things. Just flipped over office desks, broken windows, chairs under the doorknobs. A few smashed computers and dead phones. And the building I was in last was cold because the AC was broken.

And the sun was rising too fast for my liking. I'd barely made it two and a half miles from the harbour and already needed to go back to the yacht. In a city that size it would take me over a month and a half to go through everything. A Rover would have been extremely helpful, but even the sound of my shoes hitting the rubble was too loud at times. The idea of needing to make a new plan annoyed me, but if I was going to actually get through the city or even just find Callum in particular I was going to need to do that. So I trudged back through the messes of streets with the unnerving feeling of eyes on my back to the yacht.

After checking behind me and thoroughly scanning the area around me for the hundred and fifty second time I finally let myself inside. The air was nice and warm, comforting after being outside in the crisp ocean breeze. Unable to deny that I'd felt someone watching me, I checked every window and every door to be sure it was locked and plated and that there was no way for someone outside to be in. I added an eye scan into the coding as well and removed the hand print.

Not that Hollywood is necessarily a flawless point of reference but their depictions of Americans looking for food when everyone is gone... well, I thought it safe to assume that the people probably wouldn't think twice about chopping off my hand and using it to get inside. Since I didn't use the pass key or the fob I figured it was okay to leave those how they were for the time being. None of this really settled me at all, but I did my best to ignore that. Instead of thinking about all of the charmingly brutal ways I could be dismembered by hungry Bostonites, I sat on the couch with a blanket draped over my shoulders mulling over a plan.

There's just one utterly enormous problem. I'd never met an actual American in my entire life and had no point of reference for the kind of attitude or behaviour to expect. Which, inevitably made coming up with every possible solution absolutely impossible. That fact? Bothered me too much.

How much could a starving middle class primate differ from nation to nation?

My first thought was very little but the longer I thought about it, the more obvious it was that the culture affected the morals of the people. If they had a different moral code then they were very clearly nothing like the middle class I knew. Lost deep within the recesses of my mind, I could only come up with one plausible thing to do while I tried to clear my head and come up with a good plan; pull one.

With my head on straight, I returned to mulling over a plan. There had to be some way to keep myself from being diced up and made for dinner. After several hours of perfecting and fixing and changing and all of those other words that they use to describe editing. Finally, I came out with the idea I knew I could stick to.