I did my best to camouflage the boat in the darkness, but I couldn't help but think that my efforts were inadequate at best. I left the boat and headed in land and away from the rocky cliffsided beach.
The night was still, as I stepped onto the cliff top highway now littered with cars rusting in the sea breeze. The moonlight was enough to travel by and I started down the road. I saw and sensed others of my own kind on several occasions, as they huddled back in the bushes away from the stalled out cars.
Whether they were fellow sojourners or foes they left me alone, perhaps sensing that I was a bigger predator than they wanted to deal with in the dark of the night. Something shone white in the middle the road up ahead and I brought my sword from off my shoulder in preparation of an attack of some kind.
It was a human body now no more than a bleached skeleton, left to rot in the middle of the road like common roadkill. I stopped and looked around at the moonlit landscape. My how things had changed in my absence!
I left the road not liking what I had found there and headed across country using the stars to navigate by. As the sun came up I made my way more cautiously. I saw little game, no doubt a result of the voracious appetites of a population that no longer had supermarkets stocked to the gills with everything one could imagine.
I skirted by a small town in the late morning. It looked uninhabited and there were suspicious lumps lying around on the streets and among the broken windowed stores. I didn't want to know. It became clear to me that in many ways being on my island for the past two years had been a blessing in comparison to the harsh wake-up call that the rest of this once proud nation had experienced, when the lights had gone off.
By the next day I left all signs of settlement gratefully behind, as I headed out into the wilds of British Columbia. I found a good many traces of man, but I saw no one. Once, I narrowly avoided a nasty snare meant for bigger game. As much as I wanted to believe that the trap had been meant for a deer or wild boar or perhaps even a bear I couldn't acknowledge it. Most likely the trap had been set for both beast and man alike.
Cannibalism was one of those sins that mankind pulled out of the closet when the circumstances became dire enough. It had been around for a long time, since the colonization of North America by the supposedly enlightened non-savage Europeans. There was historical documentation that Jamestown, one of the very first settlements in the New World, had survived through the early harsh winters as a cannibalistic society.