The fire hadn't taken them long to get ready, but the woodsman wouldn't let them use any of the remaining petrol the he had with him to make it burn easier, which had been annoying.

As he left to go scrounge up some food the rest of them had been left trying to light the wood with sparks from the flint and steel he'd carried with him.

"Why can't we use the petrol?" She'd asked.

He'd smiled at her, a slight twinkle of genuine mirth in his eyes, tempered by lingering fear.

"Call it a gut instinct. I reckon we'll be needing it soon enough."

And that had been that. Their camp was ready and the woodman returned an hour later with a few handfuls of berries and a fish. They cooked the fish over the fire and took about two mouthfuls of the small thing each, with some of the berries being handed out to each of them. They supplemented the woodsman's foraging with some of the dry bread he had left for their rations, but it was still a small meal.

Not that she was complaining. She'd not done anything to catch the fish or find the berries, and there was no need for him to share his rations with them.

He did anyway, of course.

"I know it isn't the best meal you'll have had, but it's all we've got till we reach the village. Enjoy it as best you can, then get some rest. We've a long way to go yet."

They'd all muttered some small thanks to him before digging in. The berries were bitter, the fish tasteless and the bread hard, but it filled the stomach and that was what mattered at the moment.

The woodsman stood after a little while, moving his rifle from his shoulder to his hands. The old cobbler started and reached for his shotgun, thinking a shadow was coming.

"No, don't worry, no shadows." The woodsman said. "I'm just getting ready for you all to catch some rest. I'll take the first watch."

She knew exactly how this would go. They'd rest here for eight hours with two watches. He always took first, then someone else would take the second.

He always overran on his. He claimed they all needed the extra sleep, and he didn't. Couldn't.

She didn't think she'd ever seen someone so tired who couldn't sleep before.

Well, it wasn't like she had enough energy to dwell on that. Night was falling, and far in the distance there was the distinct cry of a shadow embracing the thrill of the hunt.

Poor bastard, she thought to herself. Anyone left out there would be little more than sport for the shadows when the last dregs of sunlight fell below the horizon.

The young woodsman fiddled with the bolt of the rifle in his hands, looking out into the distance where the cry had come from.

"It's gonna be a long night, tonight."

He nodded at the old cobbler.

"I'll wake you in four hours. I won't be going to sleep tonight, I don't think. Something's coming."

He was silent as he stared back down the way they'd came, back west.

"Get what rest you can. I don't wanna be out here one more second than I need to be."

She turned in her sleeping bag to face the fire and closed her eyes.

If a shadow was going to take her tonight, she'd rather not see it coming.

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"Psst. Come on, wake up."

There was a whispered urgency in his voice as her eyelids fluttered open.

"Wha-"

He cut her off immediately with a finger to his lips, and she followed his instructions without question. He'd kept them alive this long, after all.

She nodded at him, to show she understood.

"Okay. Don't say anything. Try and move around the camp to wake the others as quietly as you can, and stay close-"

"Could you be quiet? I'm trying to sleep."

The voice of the student cut through the quiet of the night like a knife. There was a whispered curse from the young man as he raised his rifle, barrel pointed in the direction of the student.

At first she thought he was preparing himself to shoot the interrupting student, but then she saw what he had woken her for.

There was a rustle in the leaves behind the student, a gentle gust of wind moving towards them.

The student blanched at the rifle.

"Whoa, hey man, let's not be-"

BANG, BANG, BANG.

The rifle rang out three times, each one broken by the metallic sound of the woodsman working the bolt faster than she could track his hands.

The gunshots woke the rest of their camp as a figure stumbled from the darkness into their camp. Skidding towards them as its legs folded under its broken form was a shadow, pained malice emanating from its features. The woodmen picked up the spent bullet casings and pocketed them.

"I thought we were too lucky not to encounter one yesterday. Everyone up!"

The camp moved sluggishly at first. Some didn't like taking orders from the young man, but seeing as he'd lived in these woods his whole life and was the only sleepless in their group, they didn't have much of a choice.

Sleepless. Such a weird term. She got why they had that name, it was because they hadn't fallen to sleep like everyone else had when the world collapsed around them, but they weren't actually sleepless. They still needed rest, still needed sleep.

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Fuck, given the shit they'd lived through they needed it more than anyone else.

The woodsman might have struggled to sleep, but when he hit his limit he still needed some time to rest.

The voice of the university student broke her out of her thoughts, hit tone shaken but still as nasally as ever.

"Are we seriously moving out at night?"

The woodsman snorted.

"You can if you wanna die. No, I want that fire rekindled right now, as bright and as hot as we can. That should keep the shadows back till daybreak. Then we move eastwards along the old road. It's forty more miles to the village, but we'll need to cover that in one day. It'll be a long walk, so we're setting out as soon as dawn breaks and we won't be stopping until we're there. We're running too low on fuel as is to risk being out in the open on this road another night."

That was another thing. There was no question as to which road "the road" was. It might have been minor before everything collapsed, but now it was one of the only routes out of the west and towards safety.

The road was safety. The road was life.

"That's gonna be a hell of a trek to make in one day."

"Aye, it will be, but we don't have much of a choice."

The old cobbler heaved as much stick on the fire as possible, then the woodsman poured out cup of petrol and poured it over the top of the reconstituted fire.

He held out his hands and she handed him the flint and steel.

A few strikes later and a spark flew at the petrol-soaked wood, and it caught in a most spectacular fashion. She turned to look at the young woodsman, his gaze lingering on the fire a moment longer before he turned to the shadow he'd killed.

He kicked its corpse with his hiking boots, and his foot went through it like smoke, spreading it out into the air as it dissipated into nothing.

Most of the sleepless that remained behind in the west, she'd found, were doomsday preppers or off-grid survivalists. People who had prepared for the complete collapse of society most of their lives.

According to the woodsman, he was an anomaly.

He had good wilderness survival skills, yes, but those had come about naturally as a result of his life and job. He hadn't set camouflaged supply caches in the woods or built himself a bunker to hide in like some of the ones back in the village had. He'd just lived a life that had naturally prepared him well for life after the end, so he'd adjusted about as well as anyone could be expected too, and he hadn't needed to truly prepare for a single day.

Most sleepless were alive because they'd been ready for the apocalypse, but the woodsman?

He'd been a part of the group who survived because they simply refused to die.

That, she thought to herself, is admirable.

He'd had a motorbike once, he'd said, but none of the sleepless could afford the luxury of motor vehicles any more. The fuel was needed to run the generators back in the village and could be traded for a lot of food with wakers further east.

And of course, if you were caught in the wilderness with only wet wood and damp kindling all around, that petrol was the only thing between a fire to burn away the dark and a cold, dark, forgotten end.

No one wanted a fate like that, and so what petrol or diesel there was left was kept far from the engines of motor vehicles.

To waste such things, to waste anything nowadays, was almost a death sentence by itself.

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Perhaps ten minutes later they heard a panicked cry from the west.

"HELP US! SOMEONE! WE HEARD GUNSHOTS, ARE YOU STILL THERE? HELP!"

Immediately the woodsman was on his feet, snapping the bolt shut on his rifle and running to the end of the camp. The rifle was slung across his front as he cupped his hands around his mouth to make his voice as loud as possible.

"CAN YOU HEAR ME! ARE YOU BEING CHASED?"

"YES! YES!"

The woodsman grimaced and shouted again.

"ALRIGHT! WE'RE OVER HERE, FOLLOW THE ROAD EAST! FOLLOW MY VOICE! WE'VE GOT A FIRE, WE'VE GOT A FEW WEAPONS! YOU'LL BE SAFE HERE!"

A few seconds past, and a different voice shouted back, this one sounding more like a terrified teenager than an adult.

"I CAN'T- WE CAN'T SEE THE ROAD!"

The young woodsman swore under his breath and hastily put on his headtorch. He turned to the old cobbler, an authoritative and yet panicked edge to his voice.

"The shotgun's still loaded, grab it and watch the perimeter. I know these woods better than anyone, I'll get whoever's out there to this camp. Make sure the fire don't go out."

The old cobbler nodded, clearly at unease with the thought of the woodsman, who must have been less than a third of his age, go into the darkness alone. But he recognised what was at stake, and did as he was told.

"Good luck."

She snorted, and the young woodsman did likewise. Luck. What a fickle thing. Luck was gone. They'd used up all their luck quite some time ago, the collapse was evidence of that.

Nonetheless he gave a quick nod to the four of them around the fire as he took off running down the way they'd came the night before, rifle gripped firmly in his hands and headtorch swaying as he ran. It wouldn't keep the shadows away, but at the very least it would give whoever was running a chance to see him.

The camp was silent for about five minutes. No one wanted to speculate what was going on out there, not in the slightest. They'd all gone through something that felt far too similar to this less than a week ago.

The clerk spoke, more to themselves than anyone else.

"He'll be fine. He got us this far, he'll get whoever's out there here as well."

There were two gunshots from the west, and the old cobbler stood, readying the shotgun.

Just in case.

Another gunshot. The sound of pounding footsteps, terrified wakers running as fast as they could, shadows hot on their tails. It was a sound they all knew too well; it had been them a week ago.

The first to break out of the darkness and into the camp was a young teenage boy, definitely the second voice she'd heard earlier. He all but threw himself into the camp before scrabbling as close to the fire as possible. Next came a woman in her early-forties, damn near dragging a screaming, terrified child who could have been no older than six years old behind her. She collapsed as they entered the safety of the small camp, crying in relief.

The penultimate arrival was a man about the same age as the woman, who moved to his family and embraced them as tightly as he could. The four of them were safe around the fire, but where was...

She watched as the group's young woodsman burst back onto the road, stumbling and clattering towards them. She gasped in fear as he fell and the old cobbler took a step forwards, raising the shotgun, but the woodsman was able to right himself without losing speed.

He reached their camp, turned and knelt in a swift motion, and fired the last round in his magazine into the darkness. She doubted he'd hit anything, the headtorch had broken in his fall so he was firing blind, but whatever shadows were chasing them all seemed to have moved on in search of easier game.

"Well," the young woodsman turned and smiled at the eight of them around the fire, specifically the four newcomers. "I guess you'll be wanting to find safety?"

The young teenager nodded at him, seeming slightly awe-struck by the young woodsman.

"Y- Yeah. But how?"

The woodsman moved to ruffle his hair. It was probably the most affection she'd seen him give anyone since they'd met.

"Follow the road, boy. The road is safety. The road is life."