"Did you find anything?" Harry's voice entered Alice's mind as the four came down the stairs.
"Yes, and no. All we found out was that our target was here for a while, but they won't come back anymore. Here, take a look," Alice answered, pushing the note into the old soldier's hands.
"Anyway, let's get out of here. Debby, Max, leave our mark on the street outside before we go. We should be... in Area C2, right?"
Immediately, Debby and Max took spray cans and laminated templates out of their backpacks, sorting through them before keeping only four out.
"Ready," both of them confirmed.
Quickly, the group moved out of the building and to the middle of the street. While Debby and Max went on their knees to start working, the rest of the group made a loose circle around them, keeping an eye on the monster population in the area.
"Remember, the sign isn't worth our lives. As soon as something looks like it wants to attack, we leave."
Debby's spray paint was a bright red, which she used to paint a cross of four lines, like an eight-pointed star. Then, at roughly half the radius, she made a circle around the middle. A sun, a simplified version of Golden Glades logo. Instead of the name, however, the woman wrote the words 'safe haven' around the edge of the sign.
In the meantime, Max layed the templates for area C2 before going over them with his own paint. They had split the entire city into nine areas, from A1 to C3, and for each area, they had a different set of templates. Each of those templates would allow them to quickly paint different sets of instructions for each area on basically any surface. Of course, what those instructions contained was information on how to reach the base.
It was their best hope to collect all of the remaining survivors. Not that there was much hope that there would be a lot of them. Trenton had only a bit over eighty-four thousand inhabitants, after all. If truly only one in a thousand survived, there might not even be ten more people alive in the entire city.
Of course, Alice was aware that those numbers might not be true, but it matched their current experience.
Just a bit over a minute later, the group was once again on their way, staying on the move as much as they could to prevent different groups of monsters from seeing them as a threat. In a way, they had realized, most of the monsters showed behavior similar to animals. Highly aggressive and territorial carnivores, to be sure, but animals nonetheless.
Taking advantage of that fact was what allowed them to continue moving mostly uninterrupted with only the occasional scrap.
Thanks to that, they reached the second location only about fifteen minutes later, however, "Yeah, nope, not gonna go in there."
"Why?" the question came immediately from Debby.
"Right, this is your place, isn't it? I think you guys have some kind of monster roach infestation. I can feel at least a hundred creatures in there."
"Daniel, you don't happen to have some kind of chain lightning, do you?" Ava interjected.
"I actually do," his answer came back immediately, "But it only jumps twice and doubles every time, so every shot would only hit seven targets at most."
"Okay, Max, Debby, put down our mark, and maybe an extra message for your son? This is just over the border to C1, right?"
"Should be. Give us a minute."
Without Alice having to say a word, the group jumped into action, five of them securing the perimeter while their two utilities got to work.
"This is... Say, can anyone of you hear anything from that direction?" Daniel asked after a while, pointing further into area C1, where their next target was located.
"Now that you say it, no. At least nothing beside the wind. That's... concerning," Ava answered after listening for a while.
"You think it's because whatever is inside their house?" Alice nodded towards Debby and Carl.
"Wouldn't surprise me," Ava answered.
"Let's check if it's really the case. If it is, we should probably mark the area as a no-entry zone," Alice made the decision.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
"Ha, what's a bunch of roaches gonna do to us?" Carl couldn't stop himself from commenting.
"First," Alice started into an explanation, "we don't know if they actually are roaches or something else entirely, just that there are a fuck ton of them. Secondly, have you ever seen The Mummy?"
"The movie? Sure."
"Do you remember the scarab scene?" Alice looked at the big man pointedly, not missing the shudder that went through his body.
She couldn't suppress one either as she thought back at it. It had been one of the first horror movies she had ever seen. It was also one of the last she had ever seen. She had never quite understood what was so much fun about it.
"We're done."
Looking back, Alice found Max and Debby standing back up, packing their spay cans back into their packs.
They didn't move a hundred meters before Alice turned the group back around. Not just in the buildings, but under bushes, in the gutters, and even in holes in the ground. Basically, everywhere that light didn't touch, she could feel hundreds of souls.
Alice could very much do without getting swarmed by thousands of critters. Especially with a group like theirs that was more or less specialized in heavy hitters.
Only when they left the zones and created some distance between it and them did Alice speak up, this time out loud. Not being able to talk was suffocating after such a long time.
"Ava, you have the map, right? Mark the entire area of C1 as a danger zone. Since the bike shop is in the upper right corner of B1, mark only the lower-left half of the area as unconfirmed.
Hmmm... Since the third target was in the middle of C1, we will have to skip that. The next one should then be in B3," Alice looked up at the sky. It wasn't too late, but she was getting tired from all the running, fighting, and general stress. Also, she was getting hungry, and she doubted she was the only one.
"Since the Shopping center is going to be close to our path, let's find a place to rest up and make sure we are at full capacity."
"Finally!" Ava immediately exclaimed.
"Come on, pull yourself together for just a while longer. Not even Debby is complaining."
"Well, someone has to do it, so why not me?" her girlfriend retorted.
----------------------------------------
Noon had come and gone, and once again, the group of seven was back on the road. They had found a nice little isolated house at the lower edge of the B2 area, where they had taken a while to calm their nerves as they stood guard in rotation.
What helped even more to calm them down than not having to pay attention to every single detail that may or may not cost your life, however, were the pizza and ice cream. While choosing their temporary rest spot, they had gotten exceptionally lucky in choosing a building with an integrated, solar-powered battery, which meant the freezer and oven had continued to work.
Despite how little time had passed objectively, it made Alice feel almost nostalgic. And not just because she hadn't had pizza in a while, but also because she knew this might very well be the last time in years she got to taste either of the treats that had been all too common before the monsters came.
Well, maybe they could make pizza sooner or later. But ice cream? Never mind making it, just getting the milk would be pretty much impossible.
Marking the building on their map as a potential future outpost, the team got going once more. With their stamina fully regenerated and their spirits at a high, they made a good time moving across the city while evading the most dangerous situations and ending the few fights they did get into quickly. Only once did Ava get injured, for the first time actually, as Alice noticed. However, even that was not a wound that would have been dangerous, and even less so with their resident Combat Nurse patching her up in mere moments.
Actually, rather than being a problem, that incident could be considered a good thing.
For Ava, it was a bit of a wake-up call. Since the beginning, her combination of stealth and speed had caused her to finish her fights quickly without getting injured a single time, something that Alice noticed had made the girl become a little careless despite the danger. However, after that incident, Alice could clearly see that the redhead was getting more careful.
Max, on the other hand, had gotten a little more sure of himself, now that he didn't feel quite as useless anymore. At the same time, thanks to Pack mentality, Alice could tell that the man was a little conflicted. After all, it did mean that someone had gotten injured, something that his mindset and job forbade him from being happy about.
In that way, reaching area B3 took them just about half an hour and another fifteen minutes to reach their target location. The one that Alice personally had been looking forward to the most but also been dreading.
Despite never having seen it before in person, the small house was something Alice was very familiar with, and as such, she was pretty happy to see that it was left mostly untouched.
It took them only moments to deal with the group of three Monkeys guarding the house's backyard, but with that obstacle out of the way, they made their way back to the front of the building to face the second obstacle. Getting inside.
With all the memories she had of the building, Alice was reluctant to break open a window or the door. Before the apocalypse came, Simon McBell had been a careful man, most definitely not someone who would just 'hide' a key under the doormat. Rather, he had made very sure that only those who knew would ever be able to find the key. As such, it was a good thing Alice was someone in the know.
Starting from the front door, Alice began walking right, meanwhile counting the lowest bricks of the wall. Only when she reached the twenty-seventh brick did she stop, right in front of the flowerbed. The flowerbed was about a meter deep, while the border between the bed and the lawn was secured with a row of stones. Roughly gauging two-thirds of the distance from the brick to the stone border, Allice began to dig into the earth, bringing up a small ziplock a few moments later.
"Got the key!" Alice walked back to the others that had been waiting by the door, triumphantly holding up the plastic bag containing the small piece of metal.
She quickly opened the door and led them inside. Going through a small hallway, Alice opened the second door on the right, revealing the stairs down into the basement.
"I don't see a bunker in this room," Max remarked as he pointed his flashlight here and there.
The room didn't have a lot of space in it. The entire left wall was covered behind neatly stacked cardboard boxes, while the right wall held shelves. One was filled with tools, both for crafting and gardening, while the other held the kind of clutter that any person collected over the course of their life but couldn't bring themselves to throw away.
"He, I always wanted to do this."
"What are you talking about? Are you still yourself in there?" her girlfriend asked half-jokingly.
"I am, don't worry. Now, watch this," Alice walked over to the left side of the room and put her hand into the handle-hole of one of the bottom-most boxes.
Hidden inside it, she found what she was looking for and pulled the small lever. Then, she pulled back the box, opening up the hidden doorway, the front of which held only the front few centimeters of cardboard boxes.
"What!? Okay, that's awesome!" Daniel exclaimed.
"Hmm... Clever, since they are cardboard boxes, no one would ever think that they are a permanent fixture. It wouldn't hold up against a dedicated house search, but I doubt any unlawful intruder would find this place," even Harry couldn't help but give some praise.
And behind it was what they had been looking for. The Vault door to the bunker. Stepping up to it, Alice spun around the little wheel, unlocking the door and allowing her to swing it open.
Just the fact that she could open it, however, meant that it wasn't locked. Then again, she knew that no one was inside it from the beginning.
Alice stepped into the small safe room, finding the light switch and flipping it on. Immediately, she could tell that the room had been lived in. The small number of opened cans and emptied bottles of water was enough of a hint.
But, before any of that, she already found the small note attached to the wall right in front of the door.
It said, "A group of survivors found us and offered to take us in. Their base is at the university. Meet us there.
Love, Angelica & Sarah"