Oreo is gone for a good ten minutes before headlights appear on the road. We all shield our eyes as a vehicle significantly larger than ours pulls into the motel parking lot. The Anport Rescues command a sleek, fifteen-seater cargo can, black all over and almost new. I'm astonished they managed to find something this nice. Wakewater is the only municipality within walking or even biking distance of this area, and it's not exactly big.

The Anport Rescues pile into their vehicle, whose tail lights bathe us in blood-red as it pulls away. Ditzy pulls in quietly behind them. It's after eleven o'clock now, and we're all on edge. Ditzy's knuckles are skeletal from her grip on the steering wheel, and I can hear Calico J fiddling with the edge of his jacket. I'm doing the same with my lucky shark keychain. When I even try to stop my hands, they return the moment I stop paying attention. We're still an hour south of Wakewater, but Oreo seems prepared to drive all the way back tonight.

There's a certain peace to night driving, even in the tension of the situation. The faint halo of visibility around us shows forest, broken only occasionally by the lurking form of a house or the ominous gap of a hidden driveway. Smaller roads cross ours from time to time. Most are unsigned, but a cheerfully decorated sign announces our arrival in Plyster-Anport county less than ten minutes later. I don't know enough of Cape Morgan's geography to know how big it is.

Other than that, it's just us, the quiet whoosh of the car's ventilation, and the muted candy colours of its dashboard drawing my eyes into something more akin to hypnosis than wakefulness. Calico J stops fiddling. I glance back to find him still awake, just looking out the window. Patrick is definitely asleep. Or adept at faking it. He's fooled me before.

I fall into enough of a trance that it takes the sound of distant, rushing water to rouse me. I straighten. My hand slips automatically to my pocket, where the fins of my lucky shark keychain slip between my fingers once more, as reassuring as they are familiar.

Behind me, Calico J shifts in his seat. "What is it?" he murmurs, leaning forward.

"The river, I think."

The Baycord river runs down from roughly this direction. Brake lights flare ahead of us. My heart skips an unpleasant beat, already beating faster than it needs to. I hope the road isn't flooded. I hope this isn't some trick the Redding is pulling on us. I've never seen it manipulate water, but before yesterday, I'd never seen it in our food, either.

Then the road curves sharply, and the trees draw back like they don't want to get any closer to the river than I do. There's a bridge. It's not flooded, but Oreo still drives cautiously. All too soon, we're over the river. I grip my keychain tighter. Just three feet away, the guardrail guards a fifteen-foot drop. Below that is the water.

The Baycord river of Chesnet is unrecognizable here. Between steep banks, the water leaps and froths like a living thing, churning over hidden obstacles. There are rocks in there. The same kind that capsized me on a river trip two years ago, sending me under where the current held me for so long, I was certain I was going to drown. It's a miracle I didn't breathe water, and another that the rocks didn't wreck me. My life jacket won in the end. The man I'd been rafting with wasn't so lucky.

My backpack washed up three miles downstream, still wearing the shark keychain my sister got me in the Bahamas the year before. I've never let it leave my pocket, belt, or backpack since.

The other side of the bridge can't come fast enough. The tension that's locked up my body subsides as the sound of the water does. I slump back in my seat. I was able to return to swimming within months of the accident, but my comfort with river rapids has never recovered. It's one of the first things Calico J and I connected on. He can't swim, but it's thanks to a beach accident he had as a kid. Got caught in a riptide. Barring the odd cousin shoving him in a lake or pool, he's never ventured more than knee-deep since.

We're just hard to kill, I guess.

Like he senses my thoughts, Calico J reaches over the seat-back and squeezes my shoulder. I murmur thanks. 

It feels like we follow that van for hours. The clock has only advanced an hour and a half, though, by the time the brake lights ahead of us flash again. It's almost one in the morning. I'm almost too tired to get anxious about our imminent arrival at the Anport survivors' camp, but only almost. Oreo begins to turn down country roads: right, left, another left, two rights. Houses lurk around us for a minute, then vanish again. A municipality.

"Leomore," says Ditzy, spotting a sign. "Population 715."

There's something eerie about knowing the population. If the Anport Rescues have made their base camp anywhere around here, the population of this town has fallen to just sixteen... fifteen. Oreo said the woman whose body we found was a member. I want to pull out her journal and phone again. We're alone in the car here, and our headlights would blind anyone looking back from the van. But I don't want to risk it.

It's one-thirty when the van begins to slow again. We're in the middle of nowhere, the perfect place for a murder, when Oreo turns down one of those hidden driveways into the impenetrable woods. The road beneath us turns from asphalt to poorly maintained dirt immediately.

They camped outside of Leomore. Far outside. Something about that unsettles me. It makes a bit of sense: out here, they're less likely to run into Sleepers and accidentally say their names. Any other survivors are also less likely to find them. But this group had sixteen members when we contacted them, and they seemed eager to meet.

They want to find people, but they camped all the way out here. The prickling in my skin intensifies.

All those second thoughts occur to me just as the trail we've been bumping along opens up into what looks like a clearing. Oreo navigates to a parking spot with tire tracks so worn, it's amazing the van doesn't get stuck in them. The grass all around is overgrown. Nobody's mowed this since long before Red Thursday, but it is a yard. Hunkered ahead of us is the house that owns it. Even at this distance, our headlights are enough to make out dilapidated shutters clinging to grimy windows at odd angles, peeling paint, ragged shingles, bristling eavestroughs, and a porch that sags visibly. Small trees poke through the deck boards.

There were far nicer houses than this in Leomore just an hour away. This one is big, but I'm sure there are bigger ones in town. Or maybe the various survivors of the Anport Rescues have been chased out of all of those. Seven hundred and fifteen people isn't a lot of houses to run through. Chesnet, with its off-season population of just over five thousand, suddenly feels huge.

Oreo flashes the van's headlights in a pattern, then waits. Ditzy parks a generous distance to the side, where beaten ground still inhibits the encroachment of the grass. She lingers for a long moment, then turns off the vehicle. Mostly. Our headlights stay on, and so do the van's.

"Where are the other people?" I murmur, as much to myself as anyone.

Someone shifts behind me. Calico J unbuckles and shifts forward to join us in our view out the front window. There are no lights in the house. That's something I thought I was used to in Chesnet, where the crisp lines of roads and power lines still lent the town an air of habitability even with a fritzed electricity grid. Out here in the woods, dark windows give this house a very different feel.

It's only another minute, though, before the muted flicker of candlelight appears inside. The window to what's probably the living room glows behind thin curtains, which I notice are drawn. That would make it harder to keep watch, unless this group mounts watches elsewhere. I know it's not my place to question their decisions, but when it comes to survival, I do have more experience than most people.

Or maybe that's arrogant of me when so little of the danger in this apocalypse comes from deprivation, the type of survival crisis I'm best at mitigating. This isn't Chesnet, and Oreo has made it clear that Chesnet is a different ball game than the rest of Cape Morgan. Everything I've learned since Red Thursday may only be applicable to the town now lying some eight hours behind us. We didn't just leave our safe houses and familiar streets there. I left that knowledge and confidence that I knew what I was talking about, to whatever degree I ever did. If we have to negotiate with these people, I hope I'm not the one negotiating.

Especially since it's now 2:30 in the morning, and my brain is oatmeal. Following what someone is saying is hard enough on a good day, when I have the requisite mental energy to dedicate to it. I do not have that energy now.

Oreo appears around the front of the van and paces there, waiting for someone. At last, the house's front door opens. A dark-skinned Black woman in a grey shirt and khakis navigates the porch with the ease of experience and trots down the steps. She looks closer to Oreo's age than ours; a trace of premature grey along her hairline glows silver in our headlights, trailing back into the puff she's drawn the rest of her hair into. She looks like she could pick up and toss any one of us—a contrast to Oreo's skinny frame—but they move with identical confidence as they meet in front of the van. His co-leader.

She's definitely got a knife on her belt. So does he. I can see it now.

"Should we join them?" whispers Calico J.

"Wait for their signal."

There's an approximately 100% chance they're talking about us right now, and staying in the car brings two key advantages. It makes us look cooperative, and it means we're ready to bolt if things turn any fishier. With both their leaders present, the other Anport members finally leave the van and make their way to the house. None of them walk together. I don't think any even speak to one another, aside from an obligatory thanks for anyone who doesn't let the door swing shut behind them.

I'm still trying to dissect this, wondering if I'm making a pond from a puddle, when Oreo approaches our car and raps a knuckle on the hood. Ditzy glances at me, and I nod. She rolls down the window.

"You guys can come in," says Oreo. I search his face for any sign of the conversation he just had, but he'd be great at poker. He's unreadable. His co-leader stands not far behind him, arms crossed, but gives us a stiff nod and a warmer smile that turns to a raised eyebrow when Ditzy opens the car's butterfly doors. Ditzy looks pleased with herself. Apocalypse or otherwise, she likes impressing people with this car.

We leave the vehicle like mice in a cat's nest. I make sure my knife sheath is unsnapped. I don't care if the woman's smile looks friendly. The morose guy from before still skulks around the porch, and this is the kind of setting where any group of strangers could jump you for your resources and dump your bodies in the woods.

"You guys already met Oreo," says the woman as he returns to her side. "I'm Ember, co-lead of this little collective. Welcome to Maplegrove."

Like this chapter if you'd be hella falling asleep at this hour of the morning

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