The Retreat

MASTER PRESIDENT-3 EXT. THE US FROM SPACE - DAY We travel by red line from the White House. A cute little bus-icon with PRaptor hanging onto the back, tail trailing, leads the way. I-66 W from 17th St NW and E St Expy I-270 N, I-70 W, I-68 W, I-79 N, ... and I-44 to MO-32 E/MO-5 S/MO-64 E/S Jefferson Ave in Lebanon. Take exit 129 from I-44 Follow MO-5 S to Ledge Rock Rd in Grovespring. CAPTION: Grovespring, MO -- Center of Governance of the United States. EXT. HIGH OVER GROVESPRING, MO Fade from the unincorporated bedroom community of the late 201Xs to the modern, sleek, sprawling body of governance. From gentle green hills and trees to modern neo-brutalist architecture and an endless suburbia without a fixed center, rather a series of campuses. Businesses grow in the niches between government buildings like lichen. Coffeehouses, restaurants, massage parlo...

WOLVES-1 EXT. OVERGROWN SUBURBAN STREET - DAY Suburbia plus about six-hundred years of "where'd everyone go?" What was once a pretty little cul-de-sac is overrun by some hardy, broad-leaved vine which covers almost every surface with plant matter that gently blows in the breeze. It's on the fallen power line poles. It climbs up downfallen wires. It clambers up the side of every building, making the strange, rare patches where it doesn't -- due to too-hard a surface, or too much wind, or some other damned thing -- to be anomolous eyes or mouths, spread wide in horror or rictus screams. The street itself isn't much better. It's cracked, there's no doubt, and in places barely detectable as a road. Pieces crumble both on the edges and along the middle, lines long scoured away save in patchy shadows. More than a few places show water erosion from the hard rains that pour through, no longer well drained away. It's not quiet, though. The wi...