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

The first few days of travel passed without major issue. Those of us who had recently been cleared for full duty struggled at times, as our still-recovering bodies were put through enough stress to tire out even a healthy person, but we managed to keep up the pace that Natalie had set for us. The injured Wayfinders, Lucas especially, resented being towed, but there wasn’t much they could do about it because the one time Lucas tried to walk in protest, he wound up starting to fall behind almost immediately and got back onto the sled he’d abandoned without complaint.

Most of the Naturalists had no trouble keeping up, but a lot of them were on child watching duty. Some of that burden was split up amongst the older kids, but there were only a few of those and most of them had their hands full just keeping up with the adults, much less minding children while they were at it. We had no Wayfinders to spare to help them, but that didn’t stop the children from getting in the way when an exhausted Naturalist lost track of one or two of them.

The dawn of our fifth day on the road found us all irritable and worn out. The Wayfinders did a better job of controlling their emotions, but I can see they were just as tired as the more vocal Naturalists. After having a relatively safe and warm place to rest for so long, it was difficult for everyone to be back to camping in the snow. We Wayfinders did it frequently, but usually we were leaving an Enclave, departing from one of the various Wayfinder barracks or our personal homes where we had actually rested rather than a place where we’d eaten rationed food while preparing for an arduous hike from a location where a lot of our friends had been killed.

I’d been doing my best to keep morale up even before then, so I made a point of spending some time with everyone when we made camp that night. I even had a public conversation with Natalie about how great it was that we’d been keeping the pace she’d set.  I didn’t have much on hand to make our meals more interesting since we’d long ago run out of most seasoning and the Cultists had apparently preferred their food bland. Meals were incredibly quick affairs, as a result, but I could tell that everyone was quickly growing bored of the filling but basic meals. Sure, it was enough to keep us moving and healthy, but most of it started to taste the same after only a couple days.

As we stopped for lunch the next day, Natalie took me and Cam aside, showing us the map and the mile marker on the highway we were following. As she made a show of talking about the trip ahead of us, it became clear that we’d begun to fall behind schedule. Whether it was exhaustion from the extra pulling each person had to do, loss of morale from the poor food, or just general discontent due to the events of the past few weeks, we’d begun to lose time. Only now, at lunch, were we at the place Natalie had planned for us to stop the day before. At our current pace, we wouldn’t get to where the turn-off for the depot was supposed to be until the end of our eighth day, rather than midday on the seventh. Ultimately, we decided to keep it to ourselves since Natalie had planned for us to need extra time and hauling this out would probably only make the morale issues worse.

By the end of the first week, this discontent had grown to open grumbling all on its own. The variety we’d had before being attacked by the Cultists might not have been huge, but it was enough to keep most folks satisfied as we moved. Even just being at the Cultist base had given us more options, thanks to the sizeable kitchen they had. There wasn’t much we could do while hiking, other than put what dried fruit we had in with the oats to soak overnight and try to make a soup of the various dried meats we had. Most of the time, since we didn’t have the hours required to fully cook it all, we wound up with a bunch of wet meat floating in thin vegetable broth. It didn’t taste very good, no matter who prepared it, but most people still opted for their sad soup rather than eat the things separately.

The only time things went our way at all during that first week was finding a stand of pines toward the start of the second day so we could tie some pine boughs to the back of our sleds to help cover our tracks. Sure, there was still the path we’d cut through the snow to find and follow, but the branches helped disguise how long it had been there and what, exactly, had made it. The one time someone had tried to chase us down, they’d gotten just close enough to see that we were a large group before they turned around and fled. Cam decided to let them go, since they didn’t pose a threat, but they did assign a couple scouts to monitor our rear for a few days after that in case those people came back with friends.

By the end of the eighth day, when we still hadn’t turned off the highway, tempers began to flare. We weren’t in danger of being short on food yet, but people had begun to notice that we weren’t making as much progress as when we’d started out and people began to worry about rationing and whether we’d actually make it to the depot before we ran out. No one was fighting about it, thankfully, but it was impossible to miss the tension that turned every disagreement into an argument.

Even my best attempts at distraction and entertainment did nothing to lighten the mood. I couldn’t even get a friendly conversation going since everyone, including the Wayfinders, seemed to prefer to silently eat and then sleep than to talk to each other more than they absolutely had to. Things were so dire that I called a staff meeting after the last cookfire had been put out and all the other tents had fallen silent for the night. It was overdue, since I hadn’t officially called one at all while we were in the Cultist base, but I’d been nervous about how empty the meeting was going to feel.

We met in our tent, since the senior staff group had been reduced to just Natalie, Cam, Lucas, and I. Sergeant August still hadn’t woken up and she was the last living officer after our losses at the Cultist base. I could tell that all four of us were doing our best to not stare at the place the other officers usually sat when we met, so I let us all take a couple minutes to gather our thoughts before I pressed forward.

“Our two injured Wayfinders haven’t been improving over the last few days. Between that and the growing tension in the group, I’m not sure how much longer we’re going to be able to keep this up. If we don’t manage to get to the depot in the next couple days, we’re going to start having a problem on our hands.”

“Do you think people will rebel or something>” Cam crossed their arms and frowned in the direction of the center of camp.

“I don’t expect it to get quite that bad, but some people might try leaving, raiding the supplies, or arguing. All of which would slow us down even more than we already are.”

“And the Wayfinders?” Natalie was rubbing her hands together and then holding them toward the embers from our cooking fire. The temperature had started to drop lower at night and wasn’t rising as high during the day over the past week, but we couldn’t tell what that might mean since all our surviving weather data was from before the last Blizzard and only Jonathan had known the models well enough to make decent predictions in the field. It mostly just made for colder nights and less time outside of our sleeping bags once we stopped moving for the day, but we were also burning through fuel a bit faster than we’d planned.

“They won’t rebel.” Lucas rubbed a weary hand over his face and sighed deeply enough that it caused him to flinch. “We’re just sick and tired of being a burden on everyone. It’s difficult to eat when you feel like you haven’t earned it and someone who actually did work might need it more than you in the coming days.”

“Lucas…” Natalie frowned and reached across the embers to lay a hand on Lucas’s knee. “You know you’re not a burden, right? We’re not going to force you to rip open your wounds just to make a couple days of travel easier. We don’t want to lose anyone else.”

“Yeah, we all know that. We sure talk about it enough.” Lucas placed his own hand on Natalie’s for a moment and gave her a sad smile. “It doesn’t really help how we feel though. How I feel.”

“Well, we shouldn’t be more than another two days out. Three at the most, if our pace somehow gets even worse. We’ve got enough food for that and a couple more days besides.”

“We’re running low on fuel, though.” Natalie withdrew her hand and pulled out the notebook where she kept all her records. “We’re going to run out after two days unless we double the number of people we’ve got foraging. The depot should have plenty, but we can’t afford a day without fires with a group like this. That might do more to break morale than the food situation has.”

“Too bad we can’t scare them into hustling.” Cam sighed and frowned down at the glowing embers. “I kinda hoped the exploding Cultists base would keep people focused and motivated.”

I shrugged. “I’m guessing a lot of people are trying to avoid thinking about the base since that’s where we lost so many people.”

“And those of us on the sled, keeping an eye out behind us, have little else to think about other than how useless we feel.” Lucas glared at his sibling and crossed his arms in a pose that matched theirs. “It certainly isn’t helping us, knowing that you probably drew every single eye in the area. We’re just waiting for a group to show up in force because they think we’ve got explosives.”

Cam opened their mouth to fire back, but I cut in before they could. “Feeling useless I get, but now you’re mad that you’ve got a job to do while being pulled?” I searched Lucas’ eyes but he quickly looked away. “What’s really going on? What are you actually upset about?”

Lucas took a few deep breaths, like he was working himself up to say something, but the silence continued. I looked at Cam and Natalie for a moment, gesturing for them to wait. Cam rolled their eyes, but Natalie kept a neutral look on her face. When neither of them spoke, I turned my attention back to Lucas to wait until he was ready.

A couple minutes passed before, finally, his shoulders slumped and he turned around to face me. His face and eyes were emptier than I’d ever seem then, his entire body slack like something had cut the wires holding him up. As I tried not to show the shock and fear I felt on my face, he took a deep breath and said “I don’t know if I can do this anymore, Marshall.” Thunderous silence reigned in the tent for a few heartbeats as Lucas took another deep breath. “I think that, when we get back to Chicago, I’m done.”

A few moments later, when I could get my breath under control, I searched for something to say but could only come up with “oh.”

Lucas’ head dropped, staring at the ground and where his folded hands were gently holding his wounded abdomen. The silence stretched on, my mind racing but with nothing that resembled thought, until Natalie broke through it by clearing her throat. “I think we’re all going to take a break when we get to Chicago. A long one. We all need time to rest, you especially, and we won’t need to make any decisions right away. You can take some time to make up your mind for sure before doing anything.

“And,” Natalie turned her face toward Cam and placed a hand on my arm, “we will respect whatever decision you make.” Natalie gave my arm a small squeeze as she said it, but my mind was still firing blanks at full speed, unable to figure out where to start sorting through the emotions roiling within me.

Cam, for their part, stood up. “Of course we will!” Cam frowned indignantly at Natalie and then took a small step toward Lucas. “We’re volunteers. Well, we volunteered. No one can stop you from leaving if you’re done. Plus, you asshole, we love you. We won’t even think less of you. Everyone else who started when we did has retired by now. We’re the oldest active Wayfinders by nearly a decade at this point.”

Lucas picked his head up a bit and smiled at his sibling, the expression bringing some of the life and light back to his face. Cam and Natalie moved to sit beside him, each of them enthusiastically supporting and reassuring him. I stayed where I was and watched, slowly putting my thoughts back together. The first coherent thought that finally made it through my mind was that the best scout I’d ever had was retiring. The second thought, that blew the first one to pieces as it slammed to a halt in the middle of my mind, was that my oldest friend was going to settle down. The person I’d spent the most time with, who I knew for the longest and was probably the closest with, despite our dysfunctions, was going to be separated from me. That one of the people I cared for the most in the world had gotten so worn out by the life we lived that he wanted to leave the organization we’d built together. And I hadn’t noticed it happening.

I looked down at my folded hands as they sat in my lap and expected to see them shaking or clenched. I thought I should be shuddered or curled up in a ball, but my body was just sitting there, in the same semi-formal position I took in every staff meeting I held despite the guilt and shame that were boiling inside me. I’d failed my friend by not seeing the trouble he was having. I had failed so many people already, this trip, and I’d been failing him for who knows how long.

Beneath that burning guilt, another quiet thought floated up, taking advantage of the turmoil within me to slip free of the bonds I usually kept it locked away in. Maybe I didn’t have a reason to be out here anymore, either. Everyone had been missing for so long that there was almost no chance I’d ever find anyone from my life before all this. It was nearly impossible that anyone could still be alive after all this time and not have found their way to an Enclave or Naturalist compound. There was no way they couldn’t have heard of the most famous post-Collapse organization and the person who led it all these years later, still looking for his family.

“Earth to Marshall. This is Natalie, requesting a comment on recent developments within the Wayfinder command structure. If you received this message, please return to the world around you.”

I blinked, snapped out of my reverie by Natalie’s gentle prodding. “Sorry.” I gave my head a shake to dislodge the thought now dominating my mind and looked up at Lucas. I gave him a smile as I forced my mind to focus on the friend who’d stuck with me for three decades, more than half my lifetime, as I led us all on a fruitless hunt for the people we’d lost. The friend who had never pushed me, but that I knew had given up on finding anyone else from before the Collapse well over a decade ago. I took a small breath, reached out a hand to place on his shoulder, and said “Whatever you decide to do, Luke, I’ll support you. I wouldn’t dream of doing anything less.”

Lucas’ eyes lit up and he chuckled. “Did you hear that? Mister Formal finally called me by a nickname. I’ve known this guy for over forty years and this is the first time he’s called me anything but my legal name.” Lucas reached up and grabbed my hand. “I love you, you uptight moron.”

After that, the meeting ended. We all clustered together, hugging each other as we huddled together for warmth and talked about nothing of importance for the first time since our trip had started to fall apart with the arrival of the Naturalists. Eventually, we all made our way to bed and to sleep, though it took me a while longer to get to sleep than usual as I fought to keep the thought about what I was still doing out of my head.

I was the first to wake after only a few restless hours of sleep, so I wound up pushing myself out of bed early and going to check on the camp. I spent some time in August’s tent, trying to figure out if there was anything I could do for her, but I eventually gave up when the morning crew started calling us together for breakfast. I spent most of the extra time I had throughout the day checking on her, focusing my entire mind on how I could improve her condition in an effort to distract myself, but was unable to make any progress.

That night, things took another turn for the worse. One of the sentries woke me in the middle of the night, reporting that they’d discovered that one of the Naturalist tents had been left open at some point and the four occupants, one adult caregiver and three children, had been found frozen to death. I roused myself long enough to notify Elder Brianna and work out what had happened enough that we knew no one had left the tent open intentionally, and then shambled back to bed for a few more hours of sleep.

The morning light brought awful news as well because, as I went to check on August, I found her tentmates sitting in shocked silence over her body. Apparently she had stopped breathing at some point that night. One of them had decided to check on her after returning from the last guard shift and discovered that August had passed away while she was out of the tent. I wound up delaying breakfast a bit as we prepared her for burial and dug another grave, all while I did my best to avoid thinking about how close we were to the supply depot and the supplies that might have held something I could have used to save her.

Even with that least start, we made it to the entrance of the depot by the end of our day’s walk. We even pushed a little bit past the time we’d normally stop to set up camp in order to be done with our traveling, but we ran into a problem immediately. The cave system was exactly how we’d expected to find it, full of slowly dripping water once you’d gone deep enough and hidden from sight unless you knew exactly where to dig into the snow-covered hillock, but the tiny solar panel that had been hidden in a nearby tree to charge the battery we needed for unlocking the depot had vanished. 

Cam started setting up a perimeter as Natalie got the Naturalists and remaining Wayfinders to start setting up camp in the caves. I went deep into the caves, found the security door, and pulled the panel of buttons off it. It thankfully had a small solar panel installed in it, like the kind that cheap calculators had used when I was a kid in school, but it was so small that it wouldn’t be able to charge enough to be useful in anything but full daylight. It was supposed to be a backup in case the solar panel broke or the battery got corrupted by repeated charging, but the heavy cloud cover and snow we had that evening would prevent it from gaining a charge.

As I picked through some of our electronics, trying to see if there was anything I could use to build an adapter from one of our solar panels to the panel I normally attached the rechargeable battery to, I idly looked at the instructions etched into the back of the metal box. The whole depot had once been a high tech bunker of some millionaire or another, but they had never shown up to claim it. One of the smaller scouting parties had found it a couple years after I’d formally set the Wayfinders up in the Chicago Enclave, but it had taken Natalie’s computer skills to crack it open for us.

We’d found the thing full of now-useless gadgetry, tons of shelf-stable food, and more medical supplies than anything but a hospital in an Enclave had. Everything we couldn’t use had been brought to Chicago to be bartered with the Enclave for more funding for the Wayfinders, but we’d kept everything else, including the location of the bunker, to ourselves. It was our bolt-hole for the first few years, set up to provide long-term shelter in case the worst happened, but then we wound up turning it into the supply depot it was today when the Wayfinders got big enough to need supply distribution channels.

The only reason it had stayed hidden and viable as a depot was because of the caves. We were deep enough underground and far enough away from the entrance that no signal could escape from within the hardened bunker. No signals could find their way in, either, which meant that no amount of electrical sniffing would ever uncover it. Only dumb luck. That, plus the heavy shielding on the metallic walls of the bunker meant that we could use whatever we wanted inside it. Whoever built it had been prepared for everything from plagues to nuclear war, but apparently not the kind of disaster we’d finally gotten or the ice age that followed it.

I eventually gave my project up as useless. The device was hardened against anything but the battery that was now missing or the solar panel on its face. I’m sure a more knowledgeable person could have figured something out, but I was at a loss for what I could do with the scant tech we’d brought with us on trips. There was no way we were getting inside that night and we’d have to hope that we would get enough light through the clouds sometime soon if we wanted to get inside at all. 

When I told everyone about that over dinner, there was some grumbling, but everyone seemed relieved that we were out of the wind. We had only a day or two of food left, before we went on half rations, but at least it was a bit warmer inside the caves, especially as we settled in and added cooking fires and body heat. 

A few hours later, after we had all settled in for the night, I was still looking at the small, dark grey rectangle that would hopefully let us into the depot the next day. I heard a rustling beside me and heard Lucas say “Is there any point to just leaving that outside overnight?”

I shook my head. “No. If it gets covered in snow, it’ll be useless. Plus, I don’t want to run the risk of this thing disappearing the way the battery and solar panel did.”

“Well, I guess we can do some foraging while we wait.” Lucas sighed. “I mean, if there’s too much snow tomorrow.”

“Without our best hunters.” Cam turned to look at the both of us, staring past the empty spot where Natalie normally slept since she was out on guard duty. “Our scouts will be busy enough without being sent to find stuff to eat. Plus, any heavy foraging might give away our position. Not a lot of people go past here, but we thought the same thing about where we ran into those Cultists fucks and I don’t want to be wrong again.”

“We’ll figure something out, if it comes to that.” I put the device down and dug myself deeper into my sleeping bag and blankets. “We’ve got two more days of full rations and three days of half rations before we need more food. And once we get through one day of scouting, we can probably spare a couple to do some hunting or foraging. Let’s not borrow any more trouble than we’ve got right now.”

Lucas gasped. “Wow, Natalie must finally be rubbing off on you. This is the first time I’ve heard you avoid an opportunity to be anxious about something.”

I turned my head to glare at him and got nothing but a big cheesy grin for my trouble, so I just pulled the blankets up over my head and said goodnight to both of them through several layers of fabric. I heard their voices say goodnight as well and saw the light in the tent dim through a gap in my blankets. After a couple minutes, the soft sound of Lucas’ snores began to fill the tent and I knew Cam was asleep because they didn’t throw anything at him to shut him up.

It took me a while to fall asleep. I was still struggling with thoughts of Lucas retiring and questions about why I was still out here after all these years. I couldn’t get them to stop spinning around my head, forming themselves into countless possible futures that never seemed to be the restful, pleasant retirement I’d always hoped I’d eventually have some day. I was still awake, hours later, trying to make sense of them, when Natalie came in and went to sleep. The past and the future yawned in front of me, denying me rest, as I considered them both and what my place would be in them when we finally finished this horrible trip.