FSE

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Despite the horrors and dangers that plague the world today, one thing that hasn't changed for children is snow. When the snow comes, many cubs, Rabid or not, see it for the first time and go crazy in it. Rain, even rarer than snow, is held in mystical wonder, as most simply can't comprehend water from the sky.

The next morning I woke with a chill and a shake. The cold had completely disregarded the fact that the house was Pre-War and still in good repair and come in anyway. Despite hand warmers, two poncho liners, a lead blanket and Eirren next to me, the cold had still managed to fight it's way through and settle inside my bone marrow. The house and the vicinity were both quiet, only the sounds of the wind coming through the thin walls and there was a distinct blue hue around the frosty window panes. Zack was asleep on his side next to Nat, who was lying on her stomach, head on her arms, AR in front of her, watching the door with an unblinking stare. Her suit was piled in the corner with the rest of her gear and in the dark, the Corium inside her cheeks and ears was glowing vividly.

"You're not nude under those covers are ya?", I asked digging into my pack for my sweatpants and grey hoddie.

Nat shook her head, "Nah. Not quite sure I'm ready to get that close to Zack just yet. By the way, I don't know of you can tell, but snowed last night."

"Did it?", I asked dressing. I laced my boots and went to the window, brushing away the fog on the inside to have my jaw drop in awestruck silence as I stared at the easy 8 inches of snow on the ground. I'd never seen that much snow on the ground in...ever really.

"Holy shit!", I exclaimed.

"What!?", Eirren asked jumping awake and reaching for her shotgun.

"There's eight inches of snow on the ground", I grinned.

"Right", she grinned wrapping herself in the blanket and standing up, "you're from Texas, you don't have snow."

"We had it in Maine, but never this much at one time", I said, "most snow I've seen in...well ever really."

"Do you wanna build a snowman?", Eirren mocked with literally the worst movie line ever.

"If I wasn't your mate, I'd flatten you", I said returning to my bag and digging some more winter clothes out, "and even if I did, I've got a job to do. Zack and I have gotta find a way to get a big fire going to heat up water so we can get Mya clean, she isn't gonna last very long covered in tar and with big open gashes."

"Fair enough", Eirren said, "I'll try and get as much off her as I can while you guys do that."

I put on my long underwear underneath my jeans and my grey hoddie inside my Alaskan Hardgear jacket, strapping my vest on over all of it and picking up my M4. Zack was still asleep, despite Nat having gotten out of bed already, so I decided to give him a little nudge. On the nose...with my boot.

"Zack!", I said thumping him.

"Gahhh!", Zack growled snapping at my boot, recoiling at the taste of leather and going for his handgun, stopping when he realized it was me.

"Get up man", I grinned, "work to be done."

"Reason you kicked me in the face please?", Zack hissed rubbing his sniffer.

"Well you didn't wake up when I crawled outta bed", Nat said, "had to be woken up somehow."

I don't think I'd ever seen someone go from tired and pissed off to alert and curious so quickly.

"Wait...what?", Zack asked perplexed, "you..slept with me?"

Nat grinned, "that would imply I let you inside. And that's not happening."

Zack sat back, sighed and then looked to me, "you know I didn't think it was possible for an ego to be built and crushed so quickly. And by ego, I mean..."

"We all know what you mean Zack", Eirren said throwing a small rock at his head, which smacked him under his ear, "don't say it in front of my son. Got me?"

"Eirren, we all swear like marines and make dirty jokes in front of Nero on a regular basis", Zack said, "he's seen both his parents die and who knows who else. I think it's safe to say that the garbage that comes out of my mouth is irrelevant."

"Still though", Eirren said, "silence."

"Where the hell did you get a rock by the way?", Zack asked picking up his vest and putting it on.

"I carry a few around in case I need a quick distraction", she shrugged.

"Eirren...I don't know if you knew this, but rocks are, literally everywhere", Nat said, "you can't take a step without stepping on one."

"Why all of the harassment?", Eirren asked sarcastically, curling into the fetal position and rocking back and fourth as if she were someone at Trump's inauguration, "I need my safe space."

"You won't find it in my presence", Zack said, "as I am the cure for Hipsterism, being the hipsterest hipster who ever hipstered myself."

"I don't understand why you would admit to that", Nat shrugged, "liberalism isn't something I wanted to be associated with before the bombs fell."

"Once I got red pilled neither did I", Zack said lacing up his boots, "may others learn from my mistake."

Zack picked up his AK and racked a round into the chamber.

"Back whenever", I said, "We'll check in every 35 minutes.

"See you whenever", Eirren said, "stay safe boys."

"We will", I said as we stepped out the door. The air instantly took down my defenses, feeling like someone was scraping cheese graters against my sides and face, "oh man, that's brisk."

The Wastelands in the winter were a very different animal than in the summer. During the winter months, threatening grey clouds replaced the bleach like sun. Snow with the consistency of house dust and melts on contact, leaving clothes, scales and skin soaked and uncomfortably cold replaced the razor like sand. The wind, normally feeling like you just opened an oven that had been preheated to 350 degrees, became sharp like the edges of freshly broken glass, or glass that had been sitting in the dirt and ash of a burn pile for some years and then you step on it with a bare paw and worry if you just contracted a flesh eating disease. Threats of sunburn, dehydration and heat stroke were replaced by one much more sinister condition, Hypothermia, which leads to Frostbite, the plague of the winter months. I'd seen a few animals in Maine contract it, doctor had to get me and my Dad to help him hold the poor souls still while he amputated, fingers and toes usually, but a grey squirrel had lost his tail, half a leg and both ears, all in the course of two weeks. Rabids were much more active in the winter as well, but you already knew that.

"377 3rd Avenue", Zack said jotting down the house number on his bare arm with a permanent marker, "keep an eye out for obvious landmarks we can use to navigate back."

"How the fuck are you not cold?", I asked, "it's like 17 degrees out here, at the most."

"Gets colder down in the depths of the deep blue", Zack smiled, "I grew up in the ocean with a native tribe, spending so much time so deep in the water left me in a pretty good spot even when there's snow on the ground. Probably don't even need my vest."

"What brought you topside?", I asked.

"Fishing", Zack said, "other animals fished all of the Lesser fish outta our area. Southerns just migrated to land, some of my Feral friends moved on."

"Sounds like a rough trip", I commented.

Zack shrugged, "Moved a few times in my life. Wasn't any different than just buying a new house, migrating from water to land was hell, getting used to my lungs working much harder than they usually had too, but we all managed okay, though I can't say meeting our new neighbors was a fun time."

"I don't understand why the first thing that comes into my head when animals tell me they were tribal is picturing everyone as just running around with spears and no pants on."

Zack snorted, "that's not far from the truth, and it's more common than you think. I'm not sure how it is in other Shivers, but in mine, only the adults dressed, it was considered a privilege to cover up. One most never earned."

"Jeans can be found at Goodwill for thirty cents man", I said, trying to keep from just bursting out laughing.

"Yeah", Zack shrugged in agreement, "it was, but in my tribe, Alpha's were boss, what they said went, none of us cared either. I mean it wasn't like covering up really served an advantage at the bottom of the sea, about the only thing it did was drag on the water and make it hard to swim."

"You know what, fair enough", I agreed, "you don't happen to know your way around Albany do you?"

Zack shook his head, "only certain parts, this doesn't happen to be one of them. I don't have a map either, so we have to figure this out on our own. Our best bet is to climb up on one of these houses and see what we can see, or atop some other high structure, though with all of the snow and ice around that may be easier said than done."

"Is it worth returning to the hotel and climbing to the roof? As burned out as the inside is, the structure and frame seem intact, so we could theoretically go up the fire escape."

"I think we're gonna run into a similar problem", Zack said, "even if the escape is usable, what if it all just comes crashing down around us?"

I sighed, "so if we can't climb a house, we can't climb the hotel...where does that leave us?"

"I know there are a few parks in Albany, if my memory serves me correctly, we're close to one right now. Schuyler Flats I believe. If we can find it, we have a straight path through to the Hudson River, pay attention for signs and such. Also keep an extra close eye on where you're putting your feet, we don't need to be stepping on landmines or tripping one of the many traps we encountered last night."

"Rodger", I said keeping my eyes fixed on the road. And, surprisingly, less than 2000 feet from where we'd camped last night was the entrance to the park, along with a small, yellow building that had been boarded all the way up and left to fall into despair. It looked like it hadn't seen activity since before the bombs fell and it's yellow paint was filthy, peeling and unkempt. Zack seemed rather crestfallen at seeing the building in such dis-repair.

"Aw man", he sighed, "the one place in the world I would rather not have seen ruined."

"What exactly is it?", I asked.

"Submaker", Zack said, "I visited the place a lot while I was stationed in New York back in '15. The cheeseburger sub was to die for, the rolls they made it on were fantastic, everything about this place was perfect."

Zack tugged on one of the broads blocking the entrance, sighing when it didn't budge, "I could cry right now dude. One of the wonders of the world lost. Fucking bombs, ruined everything."

"Must have been incredible food to cry over", I shrugged.

"You had to have eaten here to understand", Zack said, "one guy in my unit maxed out two credit cards because he couldn't stop munching here, though in hindsight, all the blunts he hit may have had a hand in that."

I shook my head, a smile creeping up my lips as we moved from the parking lot of the sandwich joint into the large open field of Schuyler Cultural Park. A blanket of perfectly smooth, powder like snow rested atop the dead grass underneath it, and every step we took put a hole in it that allowed the shit brown vegetation to contrast out and ruin the scenery. Still though. The way the snow and ice was settled in the tops of the dead trees and various gazebos and markers throughout the park was like some kind of Disney winter wonderland. I didn't wanna trudge through it and ruin what was probably the last nice looking thing on the planet.

"Never seen so much white in my life", I commented as I followed Zack through the park, the sound of the Hudson slowly coming into ear shot, "looks like some kind of winter wonderland I tell ya."

"How much snow ya'll get in Texas?", Zack asked, "I know it isn't a lot."

"Last time I saw snow was the week before the bombs fell, winter of 2017, last time before that was 2004 when I was, I don't know eight?"

"Thirteen years apart is a hell of a gap", Zack said, "now I'd be willing to bet it snows there every year."

"Would surprise me if it did", I mentioned, "it takes some extreme conditions to get it to snow in Brazoria, it doesn't happen often."

Zack didn't respond. The more land we took down across the field and then through a somewhat dense wooded area, the louder the rushing of the Hudson River began to get. Another couple thousand feet had us at the river banks. The water was moving through some thick ice at white water speeds, falling in would be a death sentence. Not only that, but it left me wondering how in the hell we were supposed to recover enough of the stuff to get Mya clean, and do it fast enough that we could leave the city by sundown, we couldn't spend another night.

"Aw man...this is not what I was hoping to see", Zack sighed, "ice is bad enough...how in the hell are we supposed to get water outta this river?"

"We don't need water come to think of it. What we need is a container to melt snow in. If we find an old barrel we can fill that up, or an old gas can and some WD-40 or brake parts cleaner, we can scrub it and carry that back by hand."

"What we need is a big 55 gallon drum and a truck that runs", Zack noted.

"Fat chance of that happening", I said, "even if we find something that could start right up with no trouble, gas goes bad after 3 years."

"We could find a diesel and run it off spent vegetable oil", Zack suggested, "that stuff just isn't looted from restaurants or stores, should be easily obtainable and I know how to make Bio-Diesel. My Dad always ran it in his farm truck."

"Doesn't mean shit if we can't find the ingredients", I said, "how likely are we to find pure lye any more?"

Zack sighed, "we gotta do something Arien, we can't keep going. Not like this. We can't carry enough water, food will probably get harder and harder to find, and now we have to deal with snow and increasing Rabid activity on top of it."

"And you wanna add a truck and having to make all our own fuel to the mix too?", I asked, "you even hear yourself right now? Can you even use three year old oil to make diesel fuel? More over, would the tires even survive the trip out of Albany? You've seen how much shit is in the road."

"Yes", Zack said, "in the military I picked up a trick that you can use to recover 75% of a gallon of out of date oil and return it it nearly new quality."

"How the hell do you do that?", I asked.

"Chemistry that sounds incredibly complicated, but once you perform the steps once our twice it becomes second nature. Even if we can't find the parts and supplies to refine it into Bio per say, just cleaning the oil and mixing it with diesel or kerosene that isn't bad will work, and if we were really desperate, just cleaning it and putting it straight in the tank would work, though those last two options are hell on the fuel system and engine."

"And for the tires?", I asked, "those aren't easy to come by."

"The more common a vehicle we can get a hold of, the easier tires will be to find", Zack said as though he had repeated the same thing to me about a hundred times.

I sighed as I pulled out the radio, "you aren't gonna make this easy are you?"

"Nope", Zack said flatly.

I shook my head, "Eirren, how are things at the house?"

"Quiet", Eirren said over the radio, "working on cleaning my AK and Nat's keeping an eye on the kids for now. You find something?"

"Not yet", I told her, "Zack and I are gonna go down stream and see if we can find something to hold a manageable amount of water in. Zack's adamant with me about finding a oil burner and making our own Bio-Diesel as we head south and I don't think I can talk him out of it, so be ready for an entire new set of problems should his wish be granted. In the mean time...move camp upstairs, I have a feeling we'll need to get dug in here."

"Think we'll be spending a few days here then?", Eirren asked, in the back ground, I could hear the kids stop talking and Nat hold her breath. It was no secret that longer we stayed in the city, the bigger a target we became. I knew it wouldn't be long before the Rabids stormed our camp, I just didn't know when it was coming.

"I don't know", I said thinking long and hard about my answer.

Eirren took a few moments to reply, "alright. I'll get my AK clean and then move came upstairs. Anything you want done downstairs?"

"Not at the moment", I said, "wait till I get home, we'll plan our next moves around weather or not Zack get's his way."

"Rodger", Eirren said.

The radio clicked off from the other end. I stuffed mine back into my vest and Zack and I started down the Hudson river bank, keeping an eye out for anything of interest. The further we got from the house, the more I got the feeling we were being stalked. The smell of Rabids was very strong throughout the city, so if they were stalking us, there wasn't anyway I'd have an advance warning via scent, since the fuckers all smelled the same. It was quiet enough I might hear them before they got too close, but who knew? I mentioned my concerns to Zack, who confessed that he felt like he was being ghosted too, but didn't think it was Rabids, not dumb ones anyway. After that, well I wasn't sure how to feel. I decided that the best thing I could do was just stay alert and focus on the task ahead. Get water for Mya and try to keep Zack from adding to the mess of problems we had already with a vehicle. Some hour or so after we left the house, we arrived at a boat launch with it's sign lost to time. The launch itself wasn't in very good keep. Broken glass and trash was everywhere, a parking lot crammed full of cars in various states of rust and decay sat under an old over pass. The railings that guarded the parking lot and walkways from the lethal river waters weren't in all that great a shape either. The were covered in ice, sagging under the weight due to weakness and the rust that was surly there. The spray from the river, though not very strong all things considered, was freezing on contact with everything, forming fantastic ice walls on the side of the Marina structures and railings, the two trucks that were submerged on the launch ramp itself were covered in it. They'd probably been killed by one of the EMP blasts from anyone of the bombs that were dropped on the area, even more evidence that the chances of a working truck were absolute zero.

The biggest feature of the boat launch, though, was the large hanger that stood very near some larger docks, appearing to be for ferries, larger commercial vessels, yachts, things of that nature. It looked a little worse for wear and signs of activity had been preserved by the bombs in the form of a nuclear shadow burned into the sand blasted metal some 50 or 60 feet up the facility's 70 foot height with the window washer's platform hanging by a large chain and thick nylon straps just underneath it, swaying in the wind and struggling to support the weight of the snow and ice daggers hanging from it. The Hudson's Ice Wall was creeping around the side of the building and it made me wonder what the back end of the place must look like. A sight worthy of paid admission in another place and time.

"Let's split up here", Zack suggested, "you try and find something to hold water in, I'll see if I can locate a good vehicle to do some work for us."

"Don't get your hopes up", I shrugged, "those two trucks on the ramp were killed by EMP blasts. The odds of finding anything that works in that scrap heap are quite simply nothing."

"Imma try anyway", Zack said slinging his AK. He started to walk away, but then turned back to me with a grin, "actually, let's make a bet?"

"Oh no", I sighed.

"I will put money on the idea that I can find a working truck in this mess of cars, if I can, we take it, if I can't, I pay up."

I thought for a moment, "Money ain't any good anymore bro. I don't know if you can see around you or anything, but the world ended about three years ago."

"I've got something you might like though", Zack said.

"What would that be?", I asked.

Zack reached into a drop pouch on his leg and removed a hundred round drum for an AR-15, "my Ak's 5.45, so I can't use this, you might want it though."

I grinned, "I could see myself getting some use out of a 100 round drum. Alright, you got a bet."

Zack smiled and put the drum back in his pouch, disappearing into the mass of cars, pickups and crossovers, meanwhile, I turned my attention back towards the hanger. I trudged through the snow across the parking lot and upon reaching the hanger's large door, I found it was chained, and from the other side no less.

"Chained from the other side?", I thought to myself aloud, "must be another way in."

I then tried the secondary, smaller door, which I found was unlocked. It was easy to open on it's own, though the snow complicated some things. Directly inside was an empty hallway with several doors on the right hand side that by my guess lead directly into the main storage area, and sure enough they did. The main hanger, large and spacious, was empty. Just completely empty. Bare concrete floor that looked like it once held an amount of cars due to all of the oil stains on the floor. Might have been national guard space that they cleared out shortly before the bombs fell, or after words by scavengers. One thing I found interesting was a flat piece of steel that was up on cinder blocks with a large ash pile underneath it. Recently burned, but cold to the touch, maybe a few days old with some burned black mass on it. Looked like meat that someone tried to grill but had just ended up burning to charcoal. Regardless, I didn't expect to find anything of real value in building, but I'd been hoping for just a water container. In the back of the hanger were two buildings, one on ground level, looked like a storage area, and another suspended above it that appeared to be offices.

"Maybe I can find what I need there", I thought to myself, crossing the open floor. I peered inside the window. Shelves lined with garage components, buckets and plastic milk crates of electronic scrap, a wall of wrenches, someone's bike and work bench along with 2 55 gallon drums of an unknown substance. Everything someone like me could use to be in heaven for a few hours, or cause a lot of problems very quickly. I walked around to the door, it was unlocked. Opening the door and stepping inside, realizing two things. The first was that everything was organized, or at least it seemed that way and two, everything smelled like a fucking homeless New York Rat. Even if the source of the smell was just that, it was way too strong to be someone who wasn't willing to go nude into the Hudson river to clean up every night, had to be something else. I stepped further inside the workshop, poking around to see if I could locate the source of the foul stench, eventually realizing that it was coming from whatever was in the drums.

I sighed, "you know you shouldn't yet you will."

I took a wrench off the wall and muscled off the caps of one of the barrels, the smell just about knocked me on my tail, whatever the hell that stuff was, it REEKED.

"Holy...", I gagged reaching to my vest for my gas mask, which I strapped on almost uncomfortably tight, thinking that whatever was in the barrels might be radioactive, but a scan of the Geiger revealed it wasn't. I screwed the cap back on the can and left the warehouse, shutting the door behind me. At this point, I began to feel a rough scratch that felt like it was coming from inside of my lungs when I took a breath. Very little after that, the inside of my ribs felt like they were starting to burn. I pulled off my gas mask and took a breath, though that really only made things about ten times worse. I started coughing and choking, ending up on my knees and fighting to breathe against the weight of my vest, so I took it off. It made a little difference, but I still felt like someone who weighed approximately a shit ton was sitting on my rib cage. The coughing became so bad that my eyes began to water and I knew if it continued much longer that I was going to throw up, which eventually I did. Straight bile erupted out of the back of my throat beyond my control and made short work of the concrete floor, eating a good six inches out of it before it stopped. I coughed for a few more seconds before the feeling of pressure left my ribs and I could breathe easily again. I sat back on my tail, wiping my mouth. The situation had left me feeling extremely cold and weak, not to mention the bad taste that was in my mouth now. I couldn't fathom what had just caused that, couldn't have been bad smell alone, it wouldn't have just about set my insides on fire. It left me thinking that whatever was in those barrels was some kind of fuel that had gone very bad and I'd just breathed in too much of the fumes. I cleared my throat, put my vest back on and continued my search of the hanger.

At the left hand front end of the hanger by the huge doors, there was another wall that split the smaller hallway off from the main area, beside the old rusted door, there was an equally rusted stair case that led up to a spider web of catwalks that granted ceiling access and also lead to the hanging office space that was above the storage room. The catwalk squeaked and squawked as I climbed it and the steel wire which anchored it to the ceiling appeared as though it were reminding me that I was, in fact, on it's time. Getting close to the office space, I noticed two things. The first being that the glass panes themselves were clean and well kept, the second, being that there were hanging curtains that looked like they'd been cleaned at some point rather recently. Getting up to the door, the smell of New York Rat was present again, though upon knocking on the door to the office space, I heard no reply.

With my AR at the ready, I opened the door, finding a simple room that looked like it was only used for sleeping, as there was just a mattress with a pillow and a few blankets. Whoever it was that was campin' up here was a bit of a neat freak, as the bed was made army style. The blankets so tight and perfectly matched that I'd be willing to bet they could stop a bullet. Though to be fair, it looked like it hadn't been touched in a long while. My guess is whoever used to own it went out scavenging looking forward to coming home to their nice clean bed, but then, never came back to it. I stepped back outside of the room and quietly shut the door behind me, when I turned around to start to go back down stairs, my radio chirped.

"Arien", it was Zack, "bad news brother."

"Didn't find anything huh?", I asked.

Zack sighed, "no, looks like you were right."

"I take no pride in such things", I confessed, "was hoping I'd be getting a big fat I told you so. Did you happen to find a large container?"

"I found a 35 gallon drum that's been beaten to death, resurrected and beaten to death again", Zack said, "looks really bad but it'll hold water, doesn't have any holes in it."

"Good", I said, "Eirren, you paying attention?"

"Always", Eirren replied me, "Nat and I will try and get a fire going. Be careful boys, last thing we need this deep in Rabid territory is a broken bone."

"We will", I told her, "be home soon."

I hung up the radio and went to rendezvous with Zack, finding him standing atop an old Ford F-150. He'd tied the drum up with a tow strap he'd likely salvaged from one of the vehicles and was hanging it over his back with one hand with a revolver in the other, little .38 from the looks of it.

"Find anything useful in the hanger?", he asked tossing the drum to me. I dropped my AR, letting the sling catch it and caught the barrel as he jumped down from the truck.

"Sadly no", I said handing it back to him, "looked like the hide out of someone who left one day and never came back. Wasn't anything of value to us in there."

"No food? Water?", Zack asked.

"Plenty of water, but it was in barrels and smelled so foul it made me upchuck straight bile", I shrugged, "at least, I think it was water, might of have been a fuel of some kind. Actually. Now that I think about it that's pretty likely, with the way it set my lungs on fire and all."

"I inhaled diesel fumes once", Zack said as we followed unnamed snow covered road that lead onto I-787, which we really shouldn't have been following. There was a layer of thin ice underneath the snow that was slippery as all hell. It forced Zack and I to walk at a painfully slow pace and at this rate I was convinced we wouldn't make it home before nightfall. Since Albany had been directly bombed, and this road was headed deeper into the city, rather than out, it was almost entirely clear. Normally it would have been the wrong way and it gave me this feeling in the pit of my stomach like the cops weren't gonna be far behind.

"We're going the wrong way", Zack snickered, "are there any cops around?"

"If there are they have better things to worry about", I said, "this is New York, where the anti gun BS was so strong not even the cops got out of it."

"I hear ya man", Zack said, "soon as I heard the bombs were coming I ripped all of the compliance shit off my AK and unpinned all my magazines."

"Where in New York did you live?", I asked.

"Upstate", Zack said, "after the bombs fell my family and I ran from various things to conserve supplies and ammunition, though a lot of the time what we ran from ended up killing one of us. Before too long, was just me and my older sister. We ended up in Greenwich."

Zack sighed.

"You don't have to continue if you don't want to", I said as we stopped at an intersection that took us off I-787 and onto Broadway street. Shortly after that turn, I saw a sign that told me I was headed in the right direction.

"No", Zack said, "We ended up in Greenwich, both of us with Critical Radiation poisoning. Obviously, only one survived, the rest, you already knew. Glad it did happen that way though, got to meet you guys and it's not often these days that animals have even a little bit of help to hand out to someone who isn't blood."

"I'm happy to have you along for the ride brother", I said, "I need all the help I can get."

Some five or six minutes later, we arrived back at camp. Eirren was laying on her stomach atop a rusted van watching the way we were approaching from with her AK at the ready, while Nat was nursing a large fire that looked like it might beable to reach the overhang of the roof and set the entire house on fire. Nero and Mya were sitting on the porch in a nest made of radiation suit parts and blankets from all of our packs. I could hear Mya talking, though I couldn't make out what she was saying.

"Back already?", Nat asked turning around as we walked up behind her and put the large barrel over the fire. Zack and I then began shoveling as much snow as we could into the thing.

"Not a whole lot of time to spend searching this godforsaken place", I shrugged, "hope you girls are packed because once Mya is clean we are hauling ass and not stopping till we get the fuck outta' this city and well clear of NYC."

"Lots of ass to haul in the next six hours", Eirren said checking her watch, "seven if we get a bit lucky."

"I know, but I'm not spending any more time in this city than I absolutely have to."

"Would be easier if we had a car that worked", Nat sighed.

"Does such a thing still exist?", Eirren asked.

"It must somewhere", I shrugged dropping a giant snow ball into the barrel. Before too long, we had half a barrel full of fresh warm water. I broke out the gloves from my first aid kit and got Mya cleaned up as best I could. Most of the tar came right out, but streaks of pitch black where left all through her light brown coat and grey underbelly, despite there being any tar there any more. Black streaks in the fur was something older dogs get a lot and I didn't think it looked very good on her, but hey, it's the apocalypse and you can't bitch too much about cosmetics. With Mya clean and the remaining water bottled after ruthlessly overturning every single one of the houses on the block, we started on our way out of the city in our usual formation. Myself out front, the girls and kids in the middle with Zack watching all our asses. How fucked we were once the sun went down came to our attention some time after leaving camp, when I spotted five or six Rabids in an apartment building literally on the other side of the road from us, watching us out of the window. They were all boys and looked like a bunch of preteens. Their jaws were coated in blood of an unknown age and they were all torn up from attacks by their prey. I was intending on leaving them alone, despite the slurred mocking and threats to eat us, until one of them decided to throw a bottle at Zack. It broke just in front of his feet, and scared him so much that he whipped around and put a bullet straight through the kid's forehead. The other Rabid kids ran off, dragging their dead friend along with them.

"Stupid fucking kids", Eirren snuffed, "wish we had a cure for Rabies."

"Every Rabid in the city just heard that gunshot", I sighed.

"Sorry", Zack shook his head, "twitch reaction."

"No one cares about the Rabid", I said, "care about the fact you just announced our presence to every Rabid within ear shot."

Zack sighed, "not much we can do about it now."

"Not shit?", Eirren said, "how many bullets you got left?"

"18 in the magazine", Zack said, "been shooting the same magazine since the bombs fell."

"Maybe go ahead and reload", I suggested, "better to have a full mag when things are going down than getting killed because you're OCD won't be satisfied."

"Yeah", Zack said changing magazines.

A time after the incident with the Rabids, we ran into familiar faces. It was the two Rabid kids from last night, same uniform, firearms and vest set ups. They were standing beside a Ford Excursion seeming to be loading up their daily haul.

"Holy shit", Zack said, "it's the guys from last night."

"I see that Zack", I noted, slowly lowering my weapon as they took notice of us and waved us over. Hesitantly, we all exchanged glances, silently agreeing to approach them. We kept our guns low, meeting them as they finished tying some spare bags to the front deer guard of their truck.

"You guys look like you've traveled a long way down a bad road", one of the kids said. He had a deep voice, but couldn't have been older than 16 or 17.

"Y'all looking a bit worse for wear yourselves", I noted, "some of those cuts could do with some stitching and I can smell the radiation on you like you got cancer or some shit."

"All the medicine but no way to take it", the Rabid said, "wouldn't happen to have an infusion kit on you would you? Free ride to a destination of your choice if you do."

"Sadly I don't, but you can take your radiation medication by soaking it into a piece of cotton, putting it on an open wound and bandaging it up. The meds will enter your system via Osmosis."

The two Rabids exchanged glances as the other one went to the passenger's side door and got in.

"Thanks...pretty sure you just saved my life", the Rabid said, "my name's Will."

"Arien."

Will offered a handshake. I accepted. We began to discuss each others plans and objectives, during which he offered me that ride where ever we needed to go. The two Rabids had turned out to be brothers, living with their Grandparents outside of Albany. They would prove to be our ticket out of the mutant infested area of the wastelands.