“Just a minute,” Samuel said, closing the trapdoor and covering it with vegetation. Samuel went behind a bush and opened another trap door. I looked in. There was an engine humming.
“That’s my generator, very efficient,” he said. “It's my greatest chore to get fuel for this engine. I turn it off as often as I can. We need to conserve power. Who knows when people will stop finding gas? It's why I work hard to transfer all my work to paper, just in case. I don’t want everything I do to be based on a resource which could disappear any day.”
He went down a ladder, to the hole where the engine was stored. I looked down at him just as he shut it down. He stroked the engine like a child.
“I must find my friends,” I called down to Samuel. He looked up at me and said:
“I will take you to where they were when I dragged you away. It's not that close, I have to say. You don’t remember how long it was.”
Samuel came up the ladder and closed the trap door again. He went behind some more bushes and came out with a leg-powered vehicle with a trailer on it.
“This is my bike,” Samuel said. “You get to ride in the back.”
I looked at the crude trailer, made up of a box-like cage. It did not look very comfortable. Samuel saw the way I looked at the trailer and said, laughing, “You didn’t complain on the way down here.”
"Maybe it wasn't the explosion? Maybe it was the ride in your trailer that has my body so racked up?"
"Seriously doubt THAT!" he said, laughing.
We went out on the road, if you could call it that. It was more like a clearing along the riverbank. We bounced along this byway, heading in the direction of a rickety old bridge that crossed the river. It looked only in slightly better shape than the completely unusable bridge I had seen on the other side of the city. When we made it to the foot of the bridge, he stopped and smiled at me.
“Yes, we have to cross it. It's safer than a boat. The current is very strong.”