“Alright, is everyone ready?” I looked at the squad that was coming with me, as the last day was spent making preparations for the trip. Convincing Alicia wasn’t that difficult at all; she was getting sick of being cooped up for the last month and wanted outside anyway. Convincing her father not to take him was impossible, so Victor was coming along with us as well.

Along with those two, two more also wanted to come. Lissa and Maria were also coming. Luna wanted to, until she stepped outside. Her bestial form made her more resilient to the cold, but didn’t make her like it any more than she had in the past. She changed her mind very fast when she felt how cold it was outside. Staying outside for any length of time could get someone sick, too long, and they’d most likely end up dead; it was that cold.

I had pulled my truck out in front of the mansion, but even now, it was slowly being buried in the snow. I had made many modifications since I returned in time, the least of which was removing the metal protection and replacing it with thinner, lighter, but also stronger bone. It still looked like a normal truck, but only if you got close enough would you notice something was different with it.

The inside was the size of a small apartment; the expansion it went through still allowed me to store it. It was filled with a generator and many home appliances for convenience, that was something I was glad Dale allowed me to add, but I also increased the items and replaced the generator with a newer/stronger model. I also had an expensive diesel generator that had been altered to work with vegetable oil as well.

I purchased twelve of them, and after the other generators stop working, I was planning on replacing them with these instead. Gas and diesel had an expiration date, and people managed to drag it out until about the fifth year before we had another electricity crisis, as many people lost their fuel source around the same time.

Needless to say, the trip wouldn’t suck that much inside the truck. The only metal on the outside was the original frame of the truck and the snowplow at the front. I hadn’t thought of making one beforehand, or I would have, but it would be a waste of time and necessary resources. Thankfully, we had more than one, and it would fit on a semi truck, so we didn’t need a special snowplow truck to use.

The truck was designed to take damage, but also work as transport and let several live in luxury while they travelled… It wasn’t made for me, I just was roped into being the driver for the trip because I could store it to keep it from being destroyed. Dale made it for himself; it was another one of his hairbrained ideas. In case he ever had to flee his territory, he’d have a nice home to fall back on.

I was happy with my company. Alicia was the only person necessary, but Maria and Lissa were both powerhouses on their own, and Victor would be in the near future. His power wasn’t strong by itself, but it was insanely versatile. Instead of being able to lift and control bones with his mind as I could, he could do so with everything. He might have been able to lift less and had less control, but that versatility would be far more practical than any other manipulation power.

My two girlfriends were just… More of everything compared to other non-powered individuals. Not only did they have baseline higher stats, but one could shoot energy while the other still had her regeneration on top of everything. Maria would eventually outpace Lissa, as she could no longer absorb cores or grow stronger, but until then, I’d put my money on Lissa if they fought. Mostly because she’s survived the apocalypse already, she knows how to fight like her life depends on it, but Maria was also acclimatizing to the apocalypse at a record pace.

Once she learned I killed three people at the gate, she only asked if it was necessary, and when I gave her a snarky answer, she dropped it. Most of my women were in sync with me. At least they didn’t care that I was kind of a psychopath who’d kill at the drop of a hat to avoid problems in the future. 

We loaded up into the semi as we began our trip. It wasn’t dangerous yet, just… Boring and tedious. The snow was piling up quickly, but we couldn’t feel it inside, and most of the route was on flat ground. The only thing I was wary about was accidentally going off the road or puncturing our tires with the large chunks of ice that were still there. It meant it was going to take a much longer time to make it to her than I originally thought.

Slowly, maybe fifteen or twenty miles an hour, we made our way. What I assumed was going to be a few-day trip was quickly snowballing into this, taking the entire cold snap to finish. Multiple massive car pile-ups on the road as we pushed through where we could, while backtracking where we couldn’t. Four hours in, and the snow was over a foot. It meant we were getting three to four inches an hour, and that wouldn’t slow down for the next week.

“God… I didn’t know it would be this boring. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have come.” Maria sighed in my ear again. She sat in the co-pilot seat as the other three all watched an old movie on a TV in the expanded space behind us. I heard an explosion as Optimus Prime spoke. “Cool cars don’t look at explosions… They cause them.”

I have a hard time not rolling my eyes at the Transformers movie that came out in 2030. It wasn’t very good as they really leaned into meme culture. It was as bad as the newest Shrek movie that bombed, they should have just stuck with side characters if they were going to lean that hard into memes. Almost all the jokes fell flat, but the fight scene at the end was good enough that I’d stop the truck and watch it while someone else drove.

It became nighttime, and we bunkered down for the night right there on the road. We weren’t even a quarter of the way there. Thankfully, we had weeks' worth of food and a warm place to go to sleep. We’d have to air out the generator exhaust smell in the morning, but other than the inconvenience of being cold for an hour in the morning, it was more comfortable than ninety-nine percent of other people at the moment.

Days went by with our progress slowing down as the road became harder to make out. Slowly, I made my way to her home. I had never been there when she was alive; she made her way to Pennsylvania looking for family, but didn’t find them. After she died and the base was overrun, I made my way to her old home. It was completely ransacked as scavengers looted everything of value.

Except for the picture of her family, I took for myself, which I kept in my wallet. It would be years later, after Negan captured me, that I lost the wallet and picture… Every bit of pain that fucker gave me, he’ll get back tenfold in this lifetime. I wasn’t happy with just blinding him; the shit he put me through meant that we were enemies, no matter how many times I reset. The area looked like a ghost town as the only thing we could see in all directions was snow. I had a gut feeling that this trip wasn’t going to be as easy as going there and back.