New to the series or certain you’ve missed a chapter? You can find the introduction Here and the table of contents Here.

Cam led our group to an old apartment complex. Around the building was a fairly large open space that had probably been parking lots or maybe a bit of a lawn back before The Collapse. The top floors of this once much larger building had been shorn off, dropping most of the resulting mess on the eastern side of the building and giving that entire side of the grounds an irregular, lumpy look as snow had covered up most of the fallen rubble. The sign out front proclaiming this as the Park Estates was the only thing left that still spoke to the building’s former grandeur. Fairly recently, though, it had been heavily banged up and the text carved into the wooden sign had been sprayed over with fluorescent orange paint that spelled out the words “Headquarters of the Park Ridge Piranhas.”

When Natalie and I caught up with them, only letting our guard down once we caught sight of the sniper stationed on the exposed top floor and the guard concealed in a snow drift half a block down the street, we found the Naturalists milling around the front door. It was a set of previously glass double doors that had, at some point in their tenure, been replaced with the reinforced and insulated wooden paneling now attached to the inside of the metal frames. One of those stood open as something hidden behind the milling crowd prevented it from closing.

When I got a bit closer and started to push my way through the milling crowd, I found Cam standing in the doorway next to a pile of bodies wrapped in plastic. Past them, I saw a pair of Wayfinders descending a set of interior stairs while carrying another one of these plastic-wrapped bodies past a spattering of bloodstains.

Around me, I could hear the Naturalists whispering, some of them sending word back to where the children were being kept in the middle of the group that they shouldn’t move forward yet and the rest discussing the mess the Wayfinders had made. Rather than engage with them, I finished pushing through the crowd and stepped over to Cam.

“Seems like you really oversold how easy it was.”

“You know me, Mar.” Cam shrugged and stepped to the side, out of the way of the body detail. “I’m a bit of an understater.”

I gave them a look that said I wasn’t buying it and they shrugged again, a little more self-consciously. “It was easy. It was also just messy. We had to push through a lot of guards before we could get to their command structure.”

“By assaulting the front door?” I looked at the spatters of blood in the room past Cam and the pile of wrapped bodies holding the doors open. “That’s just asking for things to be messy, Cam.”

Cam rolled their eyes at me. “We assaulted the doorway from inside, Marshall. I left a pair of shooters outside to keep pressure on the door and then made use of the secret exits that the Naturalists told us about to get into the building. After clearing the door here, we just walked up the stairs, busted open their command center, and killed everyone inside. We had a bit of cleaning up to do, since those who didn’t flee immediately decided to fight rather than be captured.”

“Which means we’ve also got no intel.”

“Yeah, that.” Cam sighed. “I have the scouts out looking. According to the duty rosters we found, after removing the patrols we definitely took out on our way here, there’s still at least a dozen or so patrols out in the field. We should be able to capture someone from one of them. Especially if we can sneak up on them properly, set up an ambush on their patrol routes now that we know what they are, or just capture them when they try to come back here.”

“Eleven or so.” Natalie finished pushing her way through the crowd and stood halfway between Cam and I. “We took one out on the way to meet up with you.”

“Which should still be plenty.” Cam folded their arms. “Look, I know this isn’t ideal, but what were we supposed to do? Chase them off without killing them? Risk our lives to capture someone? I know we need intel, Mar, and I know cleaning up a bunch of blood and stuff sucks, but it’s not like I went on a murderous rampage. Why are you grilling me?”

“Sorry.” I shook my head. “I’ve just had something on my mind this morning. It’s not your fault. You did great and I’m sorry that I’ve let my own shit make me sound more critical than I should be.”

Cam nodded and then, after a moment, dropped their arms to their sides and jerked a thumb over their shoulder at another pair of Wayfinders coming down the interior staircase with yet another body. “Anyway, we’ve got cleanup to keep doing and I really should be patrolling the area.”

“And I need to get everyone inside.” I rubbed my gloved hands over my goggles. “Yeah. Go. I’ll take care of this.”

Cam nodded, tossed out a quick salute, and then started pushing their way back through the crowd right as I turned to the Naturalists and waved to get their attention. “Elder Brianna?” I looked through the crowd briefly. “Where’s Elder Brianna?”

“Here.” A hand popped up from the middle of the crowd near where the children were corralled. “One moment.” The hand dropped back down, but I could see the ripple in the crowd that Elder Brianna made as she squeezed through it. A moment later, the edge of the crowd parted and she stepped out. “What do you need, Captain Marshall?”

“Why are your people still milling about the entrance?”

“We’re still trying to figure out how to get the children inside without showing them whatever other grisly sights are beyond this one.” Elder Brianna pointed at the heap of bodies. “Plus, we’re not planning to stay for long and we don’t want the kids to start thinking we’re back for good.”

“Well, we need to get off the street.” I looked over my shoulder at the growing pile of bodies next to the open door and stifled a weary sigh. “Is there something I can do to help hurry this up? Do you have a plan for something like this?”

“No.” Elder Brianna shook her head. “We never considered that we’d be walking past a bloody mess of bodies to get back into our home for only a night or two.” While I could hear a note of derision in her tone, the worry I could see in her eyes told me how stressed she was. “We might need an extra day or two.” She glanced over her shoulder, back at the crowd of Naturalists and quietly sighed before adding “to get them through this, I mean.”

“We can figure that out later. I’m sure, after what the bandits probably did to it while you were gone, it won’t look like home as much as you think it will.” I saw a crestfallen look briefly spread across Elder Brianna’s face and kept talking to help distract her. “Once we get inside, we’re going to need your people’s help going through the place. We want to collect all the useful supplies we can get our hands on and make sure that we’ve got all the exits and entrances sealed up.”

“I-” Elder Brianna glanced over her shoulder at the Naturalists, most of whom had turned to face the spot where the children were at this point. “Of course. The first two floors are all blocked off. Windows and doorways sealed against the usual stuff and pretty heavily reinforced to keep them that way against anything that wouldn’t basically destroy the building. There’s still a few open rooms, though, in the middle, that we used as storage. Most of the living spaces are on the upper floors since there’s no other tall buildings near here so we didn’t need to worry about attacks from that high up, just the cold.”

“That sounds good.” I waved a hand at the two Wayfinders who had just put down another body and they came over. “I’m sure these two can tell you where you and your people can set up for a bit inside, to figure things out.”

I glanced over at the Wayfinders and saw Laura and Blake, two of the younger Wayfinders, looking back at me. “They need a place they can put their kids for a bit. Is there anywhere that’s clean enough?”

Laura nodded and Blake said “yeah, I know a spot. We’d love some help getting the place cleaned up enough to sleep, though.”

“As soon as we can get our children past all the mess, we’ll send some people to help.” Elder Brianna smiled sadly. “We can probably help speed things up a bit, too, more than just with extra pairs of hands, since we know this place so well. There’s a slide out back that goes down to the pit we dug for refuse that I’m sure we could use for disposing of these bodies.”

I clapped my gloved hands together. “Excellent. Make it so.” Blake saluted and Elder Brianna nodded. Laura walked back upstairs to warn anyone coming down that a crowd was approaching and I watched them all pass. Only when the crowd was inside did I realize that Natalie had stayed beside me as everyone passed carrying up our supplies from the last sled while helping Jaz and Hughie along.

I gave Natalie a quizzical look and she jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the sled. “Help me load up these bodies? Might as well get them around back to the trash heap or whatever. Maybe figure out what the plan was once they were all outside?” I nodded and moved to grab the shoulders of the top-most body.

It took a few hours to finish up body detail. It didn’t take long to load up the bodies, but getting the sled around the rubble was troublesome, especially since a great deal of what I’d assumed to be rubble was actually refuse spilling out of the trash heap. Laura eventually passed along the word that there was a burial ground not far from here, so we spent most of our time ferrying bodies from the Naturalists’ home to the underground burial site.

There was no one working there at the time, but a pair of Wayfinders had been sent ahead to dig out a new pit, so we were able to start dropping them off immediately. Luckily, we didn’t need to dig out the tunnels any further than they already had been since whoever had done that last had dug them out a ways beyond the last graves. Maintaining these burial grounds was a shared labor, mostly managed by the Enclave, but technically anyone in the area could make use of them.

After all, it wasn’t like any of the bodies buried on the surface were doing anything but freezing. A grave needed to be more than ten feet deep to be reasonably certain that they would actually decompose. Which is why the entrance to the burial grounds here went down twenty feet. That also helped it dodge most sewer lines, buried cables, building foundations, and basements. So, instead of digging down, most people followed the guidelines posted at the entrance to the burial grounds and dug their plots into the walls.

Once the hole had been marked and sealed up after the final bodies had been packed into it and we’d hidden the sled outside the Naturalists’ old home, I finally made my way up the stairs to the third floor where I found dinner halfway eaten. Laura, Natalie, and I removed our gear, washed up and then settled down for the dregs of dinner as I glanced around the space.

Whatever blood there’d been this morning was already gone. There were still signs of battle damage–broken furniture, cracks in walls, and even a few faint stains where something had been mostly cleaned away from the floor or wall–but they were easy enough to ignore once I stopped looking for them. Dinner was also more pleasant than I expected, consisting of the remaining perishable supplies that the bandits had left behind.

The bandits hadn’t grabbed most of their things, but it seemed like they’d at least been smart during their retreat. All of their long-term food had been taken, as had all of their medical supplies, ammunition, and any weapons that hadn’t been in the hands of one of the slain defenders, but there were plenty of clothing items, raw materials, and personal treasures still scattered around. The reports given to Natalie as we ate indicated that almost none of this was useful to us, but it was still good to know how swiftly the survivors had been forced to flee.

As we talked over the basics of our plans for the next couple days, Lucas and his scouts turned up. After we finished making a second dinner for them, Lucas collapsed into a chair beside us and sighed wearily. “I’m getting too old for all these sleepless nights.”

“And here you were, just a couple days ago, excited to go stalk some people.” Natalie smiled in an imitation of Lucas’ smirk. “What happened to that Lucas?”

“He got old.” Lucas idly scratched his nose and looked at Natalie out of the corner of his eyes. “He still had a lot of fun, but he got old and he’s spent too many all-nighters crouched in the snow, freezing his ass off.”

“Your poor ass.”

“You’re damn right, my poor ass.” Lucas picked his head up to look at his sibling as they came to sit down next to him. “You do any better finding anything than I did? It’s almost like they vanished into nothingness.”

“Some signs.” Cam smirked. “Good ones, even. Like an entire patrol bumbled into an expertly laid ambush and was so quickly eliminated that the surviving member of said patrol was too scared to do anything but surrender immediately.”

“Show off.” Lucas turned his attention back to the table and to the steaming bowl of stew we’d whipped up. “At least I got more food than you did.”

Cam pushed their bowl over to Lucas’s. “They’re filled the same amount. What are you talking about. We had a whole thing about using the one scoop to avoid this.”

“It helps having connections.” Lucas sniffed and glanced over at the cooking pot where Tiffany was ladling out a half-portion for a Wayfinder who’d gone back for seconds. “And I have more because I already ate a bunch of it and I’ve got a secret.”

Cam arched an eyebrow and watched as Lucas stuck his spoon into the middle of his bowl and unearthed one of the old, stale biscuits we’d found. When he was finished showing it off, he pressed it back into the stew and carefully heaped meat and vegetables around it again. “It’s in there to soften up.”

“Coward.” Cam shook their head and held up their cup of water, tipping it slightly to show us all the biscuit sitting at the bottom. “All real Wayfinders drink their stale biscuits.”

Lucas shuddered. “That’s maybe the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen you do, Cam, and I’ve seen you stab someone’s eye out.”

As Cam opened their mouth to retort, I held up a hand. “You said you’ve got a prisoner?”

“Oh, yeah.” Cam turned their attention back to their stew and started shoveling it down as they spoke between bites. “He’s cooling his heels in one of the storage rooms downstairs. Guards know to keep an eye on him. Figured he might be more agreeable when he’s had a night to think about the ways his life has permanently changed, you know?”

“As little torture as possible, please. The Naturalists are already struggling with everything going on.” I glanced over at one of the Naturalists, one of the younger guardians who was getting their first break all day, as they tried to avoid staring at a particularly large faint mark on the floor.

“Sure, sure. This guy was already singing, though. He’s got all kinds of crazy rumors. Said the Enclave here has some kind of thing that’s supposed to create a heat and tech shield so that people can use radios and computers and everything again.”

Natalie leaned forward. “You mean someone figured it out?”

“I dunno. This guy sure thinks that some people said the Chicago Enclave figured it out.” Cam shrugged. “Of course, he may have been under the impression that, if he didn’t say something particularly interesting or useful, I’d kill him just so I didn’t have to carry him anywhere.”

“Cam…”

“I know, I know.” Cam gesticulated with their spoon in my general direction. “I can’t trust anything they say under duress because they will just say whatever they think I want to hear. I get it. I was just laying the groundwork for tomorrow morning.”

“Well, I’m sure we’ll figure out if this rumor is true.” Natalie sighed and looked off into the distance in the general direction of the Chicago Enclave. “We’ll be there in a few days or so. Maybe a little longer if the Naturalists really need more time.”

“Sounds like bullshit to me.” Lucas was poking apart the biscuit at the center of his stew. “Capture heat and all kinds of signals? What else can it do, grow fully-formed ice cream cones? Give us summers again? Grant us immortal life? Grant any wish we can dream up, no matter how big?”

“It’s just a rumor you dour ass.” Cam nearly choked on the angry swig of water they took, forgetting about the biscuit hidden at its bottom. “Don’t act like I’m the one who started it.”

“Sure, sure.” Lucas rolled his eyes. “And maybe it can provide us all with water-soluble biscuits so no one ever needs to dig wet, pasty chunks out of a perfectly fine glass of water ever again.”

“Whatever. The point is, this asshole believed it. Or at least heard it enough to pass it along. It couldn’t hurt to at least keep it in mind.”

“We’re going to the Enclave soon, regardless.” Natalie shrugged. “I’m sure we’ll figure it out one way or another. It’s not like they’d hide something like that from us if we showed up. We’ll get the truth eventually.”

“If the rumors are true, though, we should probably get there sooner rather than later.” I rubbed my chin and felt the dull scratch of evening stubble against my fingertips. “Maybe we should rush out of here.”

“We’d have a mutiny on our hands.” Lucas tipped his bowl as he peered into it, digging through it for any chunks of biscuit he’d missed. “I’d mutiny. We need rest.”

“What do we get by going there early?” Cam downed the last of their water and shifted their focus back to their dwindling stew. “If they’re testing out some new junk or whatever, better to stay clear until we know if it works. I don’t want to settle down just to get wrecked by the next Blizzard because their whatever didn’t work as well as they thought it would.”

“Normally I’d agree, but you’re overlooking something important. You,” I pointed to Cam, “just said that the bandits must all be talking about this if this guy thought we’d be interested. That means there’s probably Cultists interested, too. What do you think is going to happen to the Enclave if this works? Or even looks like it’s working? They’d be stormed by every group at once. More than anyone could handle on their own.”

“That’s what the walls and stuff are for.” Cam waved their spoon dismissively. “They couldn’t get inside.”

“You don’t think that they’d band together? To get an Enclave that can actually use old technology again?”

“Sure, they might…” Cam trailed off. “Maybe that’s part of what’s been happening. They’ve been banding together because of the Monsters and then this rumor crops up, giving them a reason to stay together.”

I nodded vigorously. “And if we want to keep the folks at the Chicago Englance alive, maybe even join them permanently, then we should probably go help them before they’re fighting every living person outside the Enclave.”

“Shit.” Lucas sighed and downed the rest of his stew in a couple bites. “I’m going to talk to the scouts and then get eight hours of sleep. Soon as that’s done, I’m heading out. There’s no way the Enclave could survive against even half the bandit collectives and Cultist shitheads out here if they don’t know they’re coming.”

“I’ll get some maps ready.” Natalie stood up and walked away with Lucas, leaving Cam and I to stare at each other as Cam shoveled food into their mouth.

Once Cam had finished eating, they pushed themselves back from the table and sighed. “Guess I might as well get to work on the prisoner tonight. A little.” They glanced over at me as they stood up. “With absolutely no torture of any kind. I’ll be back in an hour.” Cam left to grab some food for the prisoner and disappeared down the stairs.

I took a moment longer to sit there, thinking about the rumor and everything it could mean if it was true. Actual safety from The Blizzard, never needing to worry about random Monster attacks. Actually being to use long-range communication devices even if the range on them wasn’t that long. It all seemed too good to be true, which meant it probably was. That wouldn’t stop every exile and bandit from wanting to capture the Enclave for themselves, nor would it stop any Cultist from wanting to destroy it as part of their goal to usher in the end of the world. A little hope could go a long way, after all.