Dead in the Water

Constrained by its belt, the fallen pilot gnashes at the two survivors as they walk closer and closer to the downed helicopter. It pulls forward with all of the effort it can muster, and the two watch as the straps of the belt begin to slowly sink into the soggy, wet meat beneath!

By the time Owen and Shayna are pulling open the janky door of the bird, the straps are two inches or so sunken into the pilots abdomen. As it twists to lunge at you, you are flecked with gore! With one final push, it pushes itself through the belt with a wet, gloopy sound and then right onto the tip of Shayna’s waiting spear! It flops down instantly, the top half of the thing coming away from the bottom. Shayna lets the walker’s body slide to the floor, while Owen looks at the abandoned legs, still sitting in their place!

The grassy space is quiet then! Owen listens intently for walkers, but hears nothing!

Looking around the crash site, Owen and Shayna see ruined and twisted metal all over! Dried blood coats the inside of the vehicle, as if something burst inside violent and suddenly. Strewn about the immediate area are a half a dozen or more smaller green crates! Some of them are blackened. One or two are destroyed completely but a great many of them seem to have weathered the crash and the seasons reasonably well.

Apart from that, Shayna and Owen notice great grooves cut into the ground. While it’s hard to say in the gloom, they don’t seem to have been made in the crash…

Owen lifts one of the boxes, and finds the thing quite heavy. He could maybe manage one by himself with some effort, but he doubted if some of the others could do the same. Not after a long day of hiking and fighting anyway…

Looking at the destroyed boxes, it seems that most of the bulk and weight was to make sure whatever was packed inside gets where it’s going in one piece. It had worked… mostly.

Squinting in the gloom, Owen tries to get an idea of what he held inside, without risking opening the thing! Who knows what could have broken open inside, waiting to leak out into the young man’s lungs…

Munitions.
Explosives.
Communications.
Medical.

Labelled in dry, military jargon, the young man gets a pretty good idea that they had stumbled upon a pretty sweet cache of military grade gear!

Wiping the gore from the tip of her spear, Shayna notices that deeper groove in the earth. Not cut from the thing crashing down, the woman sees instead what looks to be tracks. Something big… bigger than the cases Owen was handling maybe… had been dragged, or maybe pushed, from the crash site and away from the helicopter…

The doors squeal as Shayna tries to force it further open; open enough to comfortably climb inside. The sound jumps out of the gloom at you, and cuts across the clearing you stand in! Shayna manages to get the thing to budge only an inch at first. A year worth of gunk is suddenly unstucked, and then thing jerks open.

Blood paints the inside, and you can only imagine how brutal the carnage was in that final moment. Bloody bites and boxes being thrown around as the thing hurtled towards the ground.

If the door could be closed back up as it had been, it would surely provide a decent, if less than ideal place to camp out for the night.

As for the tracks: There is no indication of any vehicle having come through the space. No wheel marks! But there are deep grooves pushed into the hill, as if someone was exerting a lot of force to shunt something along!