After hearing Danny’s response, Hank looked at his guest with surprise on his face, not sure if he had heard it correctly.

“Sorry, what did you just say?”

“I said I will deal with it by myself.” Danny replied with a confident smile.

Upon receiving confirmation that he was, in fact, hearing correctly, Hank looked at the man in front of him with a frown stamped on his forehead. He did not know if he should admire Danny for his bravery or if he should mock him for his ignorance.

Often times, courage and stupidity were just a small step away from each other. In Hank’s perspective, to go alone against so many undead was to court death.

“Lad, are you all right in the head?” Hank asked with concern in his voice, his earlier outburst and anger completely forgotten.

To that Danny merely laughed before saying:

“Not a bad deal, right? You won’t have to risk your men’s lives and you also won’t need to waste your own supplies. All you have to do is comfortably wait in your chair for my good news. Even if I fail to return, be it because I overestimated my abilities or because I had some bad luck… either way you got nothing to lose, right?”

“That assuming you don’t simply run away with whatever I give you beforehand, right?” Hank said with skepticism. However, Danny could feel that the man was hooked.

Hank tried to pass as if he wasn’t impressed, but Danny could see the calculations going off in the man’s head through his eyes.

As the leader of the settlement stared fixedly at Danny, judging if it was worth it to invest in him and take a risk on the off chance that Danny could actually pull it off, Danny was also measuring Hank and gauging the man’s mood and inclinations.

And he knew that Hank was interested.

However, as the notion of one single person being able to clear the same factory that his men had tried to multiple times but were only met with failure was too outlandish, Hank could not help but doubt Danny’s credibility and the feasibility of the plan, even though Danny’s demeanor indicated that he was confident that he would be able to do it.

Hank was divided in what he believed. One of these three options was bound to be true: Danny was either a very capable asset he could make use of; he was a very good conman; or he was utterly and completely insane.

Seeing that Hank was on the fence, Danny decided to give one final little push.

“I’ll even sweeten the deal for you. You don’t have to pay me fully before I finish the job. For now, just grant me access to the warehouse and tell whoever is in charge there to allow me to check on all the goods and trade for whatever I need. After all, it is in your best interest that I’m as well prepared as I possibly can before dealing with the problem…”

“However, if you choose to do it this way, I’ll expect to be properly compensated later for handling the problem before being fully paid…” Danny added at the end, his index finger pointing up to the air as he clarified his intentions and expectations.

In one hand, by allowing Hank to postpone his payment, Danny was making it easy for the older man to accept his terms. On the other hand, by saying it like that, Danny transmitted confidence and showed that he was fully intent on following through with their arrangement.

After all, if he merely wanted to run away after getting some scraps from Hank, then why would he bother negotiating for more after the issue was dealt with? Even though that didn’t guarantee that he was trustworthy, it still made him more believable.

What followed that were rounds upon rounds of negotiation.

Say what you will about Hank’s short-temper and big mouth, but the man did his job with an almost fanatical fervor. He haggled, protested, insulted and even begged. Anything he could do to cut the settlement some costs, really.

After a couple of hours of back and forth, Danny and Hank came to an understanding at long last. Mostly because Danny could not be bothered to waste even more time there just for some extra benefits.

At the end, Danny would only get one weapon of his choice for completing the job. However, if he opted for a handgun which had less firepower and range, Hank would also include a silencer in the deal.

Danny had no idea why a former police officer would have such a thing with him, or where he got it, but he did not care enough to ask.

In a world populated by zombies, one could not stress the usefulness of a silencer enough. The ability to lower the amount of attention any firearm would draw upon being used was simply priceless.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Anyway, no matter what Danny chose in the end, Hank would give him some fifty rounds and would also teach him how to properly maintain and disassemble the weapon.

That was something Danny was quite pleased with.

The lessons he had received from Carl on the first days of the Apocalypse on how to handle a gun did not cover the subject, and Danny also didn’t have that kind of information stored inside the tablet he carried around.

Sadly, that was just one of the many things he had not thought of preparing during the limited time he had after Tutu’s warning.

Either way, it didn’t matter. He was just glad to have someone as experienced as Hank teach him how to find his way around a gun. The knowledge and skill he would get from the middle-aged man were not something he could scavenge for.

After reaching an agreement, Danny and Hank shook hands to cement the deal, before Danny left the building by himself.

Hank tried to hold him there for longer and even offered free lodging to try and keep Danny around in order to find out more about the mysterious young man that would be lending his assistance to them. However, Danny expertly dodged him and beat a steady retreat out of the command center.

He had a schedule to keep regarding his training with the crystals, and he could not trust that he would not be spied upon if he accepted Hank’s hospitality. Maybe he was being overtly paranoid, but better that than to trust a stranger blindly.

If everything went according to plan, there would be plenty of time to slowly get to know each other and to steadily improve the trust between them.

Ultimately, Danny chose to not ask Hank about Lara’s family as well. There were two main reasons why he chose to keep quiet about them:

First, if for any reason his relation with Hank and the camp soured – which he did not expect to happen, but you could never know -, Danny did not want the girl’s family to be caught in the crossfire because of him.

Second, all the clues that Danny managed to gather so far pointed to the fact that Lara’s relatives had come here, to this very camp. Though it was good that his quest to locate her missing family was probably coming to an end, one problematic question remained:

If they had managed to flee to a safe location and were still alive, then why they never came back for Lara?

If we considered that Lara was not abandoned on purpose – which Danny had no reason to believe to be the case –, then something was preventing them from returning.

…and that something may very well be the settlement itself or the ones in power here.

Danny could not exclude the possibility that Lara’s family relation with Hank or the camp itself was a tumultuous one. They might not be on the friendliest of terms, which would make finding and interacting with them complicated.

So, in order to get a clearer picture of the situation without muddying the waters even further, Danny decided to look for them by himself before deciding on the best course of action.

Now that he and Hank had come to an understanding, Danny had a little bit more of a wiggle room inside the settlement. Therefore, he could use his newfound small influence if he deemed necessary and if Lara’s family had for some reason landed in some kind of trouble.

Anyway, after leaving the administrative building, Danny had two stops to make.

The first one being the warehouse that Hank mentioned where he would be able to exchange some of his extra supplies for other more essential stuff.

The place was not very far from where the command center he had just left, so he got there in no time.

Danny opened the door to the wooden building and noticed a young man wearing a red jacket inside. He was wiping a wooden counter with a white cloth from behind it, seemingly bored out of his mind.

Seeing that he had a guest, the young man smiled enthusiastically and said:

“Welcome! Welcome! What can I do for you?”

“Hello there. Hank said I could come here to make some trades.” Danny succinctly stated.

“Oh, right. Are you Danny, then?”

“That’s right. How did you know?” Danny raised his eyebrow in surprise. He had come straight here after exiting Hank’s office, so he didn’t understand how word could have traveled so fast.

“Hank told me. We have a working landline here in the camp, though there only a few phones spread around the camp in strategic locations.” The man dressed in red said as he pointed to a phone that only now Danny had noticed at the far side of the counter with his thumb.

“I see!” Danny nodded his head in understanding.

Now that he thought about it, they could also be using radios around the camp, so it was not that surprising that word travelled fast.

He had been so completely used to being incommunicable out there in the ‘wild’ for the past couple of weeks, that it completely slipped his mind that it was actually possible to reestablish communications in shorter distances and smaller areas.

The further you went, the harder it got though, as there would be higher and higher requirements to do so, both technologically and economically.

Danny did not even know if there were any satellites in Earth’s orbit in working condition still. He had no idea how far and to which lengths Earth’s invaders had gone to mess up human infrastructure and development.

“So, what exactly can I do for you?” The young man asked again, interrupting Danny’s thoughts.

After hearing the warehouse keeper’s question, Danny got rid of his reverie and focused back to the matter at hand.

“What’s your name, if I may ask?” Danny asked politely.

“Oh me? You can call me Ben.” The man responded with a smile, clear excitement marking his face. The young man had been bored to death due to his posting until now.

Though being assigned as the warehouse guard and inventory manager was a safe and cushy job, it was also mind bogglingly monotonous.

Therefore, he was incredibly happy to assist Danny with his business, anything beat doing nothing and staring at the ceiling. He had already wiped the counter clean so many times that he did not even remember the exact number anymore.

“Nice to meet you, Ben. I am looking for…” Danny then started describing his needs and what he needed the most for now.

He had spent quite some time at the place going over what they had in store and picking up what suited him the best. Danny had also haggled a bit with the man, but it didn’t make that much of a difference, really.

Hank had already given a heads up to Ben that he should do his best to accommodate Danny’s requests even before he had entered the building, so the terms and prices the young clerk suggested seemed quite fair in Danny’s opinion.

All in all, Danny was very satisfied with the items he managed to find there as well as with what he had to spend to secure them.

After paying what he owed, Danny looked closely at his selection spread at the top of the wooden counter and started going over his latest purchase.