Dead in the Water

Martin grasps up the pistol, and looks both amazed and overwhelmed by the piece! Then a look of determination comes over him, and he nods.
"This place will still be here when you get back!" he starts, trying to sound confident!

As Eva gingerly takes one of the grenades, she places it down gently on the table.

"We can get started on that while you’re gone! Tracy here can help us push a few of the cars around outside and free some up for the bridge!"

She tries to sound confident, though being familiar with someone she had only just met made it come off as awkward!

Vinh holds Owen’s gaze for a moment, and then his eyes fall to the young man’s machete. If they were alone, the man might remind Owen of their conversation out on the pontoon last night!

"Good news! And guns!" Emma chirps! Then she stoops down to pet the odd looking dog that had turned up outside last night!

"I guess he’s staying with us then? He’s been out there for long enough!" she says mostly to Richard, who had grown attached to the dog almost immediately.

You all finish your preparations, and get ready to say your goodbyes! You scan the surroundings one last time, before truly stepping foot outside of the ring of cars once more! It had taken so much to get in here last night, under cover of darkness. Yet here you were leaving again so soon!

You cross the bridge that would hopefully be barricaded by the time you got back! Below, and to your right, the pontoon bobs in place! The thing had served you well yesterday, and brought you to something even better… hopefully. You had certainly escaped something far worse.

You break off the road soon after crossing to the other side, trying to follow the map you had found in the death trap back there! You move into the trees, and Owen warns you that this was where he had seen the herd moving through only a short time before!

More than once the young man had pleaded for a quiet trek through the trees, to avoid pulling fifty walkers down onto your heads!

Martin Cater

"Just gonna go check up top!" Martin announces to the others, with a heaving sigh.

Emma gives him an absent minded salute, as she pokes at some of the rations she’d kept aside for breakfast! Everyone else seemed engrossed in the coming and goings of the day!

"Won’t be long!" he says again, forcing some cheerfulness into his voice! Vinh turns to him at that, and nods.

Vinh

"Shout if you see anything!" Owen’s mentor responds, though he didn’t mean literally. Martin surely knew that by now too!

Martin slips out of the building then, and looks around. Instead of turning left to head to the roof ladder, the man turns right. He clambers up and over the car barricade, and grabs up a pack he had hidden away earlier that morning.

He throws it up onto his back, checks that the coast is clear one final time before starting off with as much of a run as he could manage towards the south-western road: the road that would lead to the refugee center and, with any luck, Shayna’s sister!

He looks back at the building he had slept in last night just in time to see Selena and Eva exit the front and assess the job with the cars before them!

He ducks down to avoid being seen, and then slips off into the trees for good measure!

"I’m going to find her…" he says to himself resolutely, before turning his back on the supply store and making for the refugee center!

Following Owen’s lead, the group moves through the woods in a direction that he hopes is both away from the small horde and towards the downed helicopter!

Creeping from tree to tree and keeping low, it’s clear that there are still walkers passing through the area. The body of the thing had passed, but the stragglers still required avoiding!

It’s slow, slow work. The four of you take cover from time to time as one or two shuffle a ways ahead. You wait for them to be drawn by whatever instinct it was that caused them to bunch up, before you move on.

More than once, Owen pulls Richard back by the shoulder, just before the man walks right into the path of a small group of walkers.

An hour or more, and you haven’t covered much distance, though you were becoming accustomed to the rhythm of moving through the woods like this.

That is until Shayna puts her foot up onto a fallen trunk, preparing to clamber over it. Rather than solid wood, the woman’s foot meets a rotted log, and her foot breaks right through the bark! The crunch of wood giving way to boot, followed by a strangled cry as bark digs deep into the woman’s leg meat breaks the silence in the woods!

No sooner had the woman loosed her gasp of pain, than you hear a chorus of snarls cry out in response. And then the sound of brush being trampled under undead feet!

You see them then, ones and twos at first… but then more! Drawn to the woman with her leg caught in the stump!

Three of the four of you stay together, working on freeing Shayna from the log! Richard, becoming all the more familiar with the gun in the last two days, keeps those walkers on the flanks away from Shayna and Owen!

Billie-Faye takes the fight to them, and finds herself in the midst of a snarling, snapping horde. The fire axe sweeps about in great, reaping arcs! If the felling of the small walker last night had given the woman a moment’s pause, there was no such pause today!

Stinking, wet bodies are ruined and the woman finds herself in the middle of a great ring of carnage. Of the fifty walkers that Owen had counted on the roof, most of them had ended up here!

Mounds of dead bodies littered the forest floor, and you have a moment to gather your breath!