Congratulations on Finding Your Estranged Spouse!

When the missles started flying and shit hit the fan the world over you were at a conference in Buffalo, learning about new techniques for selling insurance to people who didn’t really need it, a futility made painfully clear on that day. While you watched news stations sound off on casualty reports and fizzle out one by one the one thought dominating your mind was that you really didn’t want to die here, surrounded by people you hate so far from the people you love.

Luckily Buffalo is perceived as being slightly behind Cheyenne in terms of importance in the United States and no one thought you and your lame co-workers were worth the cost of a long range cruise missle. As such you and some other large swaths of Americana were free to roam the countryside after your local meteorologists determined that the fallout had reached safe levels.

You still had to stay away from major cities, where humanity had gone mad and turned into something terrible and monstrous under the tender ministrations of the atom, but for the most part America was just one blasted slice of suburbia, littered with decaying corpses and the worthless trappings of a bygone era. Not particularly pleasant to look at, but very safe and easy to travel through.

Before long you got into a rhythm of stealing water from the backs of suburban toilets and food wherever you could. Your once considerable girth slimed at first, then shriveled until you were a wirey collection of nerves and muscle. You watched constantly for the hint of an ambush, for raiders or bears or wild dogs. Without the promise of a better life to keep them in check people had gone wild as a race. You heard rumors of settlements, but you couldn’t stop.

You had no reason to think she was alive, but the only thing you wanted to do was find your wife in Tacoma. You knew that the city probably hadn’t done well for itself, that it had likely fared worse than most places even if it had been spared, but you couldn’t just give up on her.

So you crossed the country, step by step. You narrowly avoided death, barely made it across the Dakotas and Montana where the wilderness had almost immediately taken the land back and food was all but impossible to find. Then finally you hit the Cascades, jutting up like a series of fists from the ground, mocking your journey with their height. But the ruins of the highway were surprisingly clear and as you came closer and closer to the Pacific coast there seemed to be fewer madmen and mutants.

This morning you’ll begin your approach.

When you finally close on Tacoma you’ll find that they’ve erected a massive wall. As you step towards the gates, rifle above your head, you’ll hear a massive commotion on the gunwales. A man’s voice will shout down at you to lay on the fucking ground and not move and you’ll comply. You didn’t get this far by ignoring loud potentially armed men.

You’ll expect the boot in your back or the hand on your crotch but for several minutes nothing will come. There will be only silence. Still you’ll hold your face in the dirt. Sometimes people just want an excuse to kill someone, and sometimes if they get bored they won’t. So you’ll lay there on your belly, barely breathing, waiting for a gunshot or a rustle, but there won’t be one.

Not until a woman’s voice sounds a few meters off to your right. Not just a woman’s voice, your brain will tell you, gears slowly turning together. Your wife.

“On your feet, shitstain,” she’ll say, amused, and you’ll comply, turning to face her. You’ll be smiling when you turn around and she’ll be puzzled at first. Then her tough-girl facade will drop and she’ll stand there, dumbstruck, staring at you.

It’ll be a few seconds before she awkwardly shuffles forward and embraces you, weeping, and suddenly that entire trip will have seemed worthwhile. That feeling will hold up until you get inside the gates and find out that she has a new husband. What follows will be one of the most interesting events in post-apocalyptic marriage law we’ve ever seen, but it’s not particularly germane to your lengthy cross country journey. So we’ll close by saying Congratulations on Finding Your Estranged Spouse! We never thought you’d make it!