Solomon trudged down the sidewalk with his head down. It wasn't because he was trying to avoid being spotted. It was to keep the rain out of his eyes.

Contrary to popular belief, the Pacific Northwest didn't see a lot of rainy days in the summer. Every now and then, though, the storm clouds would roll in and everybody would have to cancel their picnics and move inside. Solomon knew that he ought to be grateful for the rain, but it was hard to focus on the positive when water was running down the back of his neck to soak into his shirt. He could only hope that whatever discomfort he was feeling would be inflicted multiple times over on anybody standing guard.

Solomon thought that he ought to be able to get fairly close to the campus without raising any alarms, at least. He was walking down the road leading from his parents' neighborhood to the campus, and most people he saw had a similar look about them: practical clothes and a downtrodden attitude. Even the backpack he was wearing shouldn't really stand out. Plenty of people had stuffed their belongings into backpacks before they fled from the ongoing violence.

Solomon's backpack was, of course, a little different from the norm. It was his dad's old hiking pack, rigged to distribute its weight evenly across his whole upper body and stretching longer than his torso. What really made it different from the norm was the arsenal inside, of course. The rifle had fit completely into the pack, where it was keeping company with several homemade bombs. There was no sign of it from the outside, though.

Solomon still might catch the eyes of somebody looking for a target to rob, but at least he wouldn't be obviously toting a gun as he approached the campus.

The further he walked, the more people he saw walking the other direction. Solomon hunched his shoulders and picked up the pace. He was set to arrive a little after sunset, but there was no harm getting there a little early so that he could find a spot out of the rain. He could put up with an awful lot of discomfort and had the skill rating to prove it, but that didn't mean he enjoyed it.

It wasn't just the number of people walking the other direction that had him on edge. There was something in the air. People walking with panic in their eyes, people sizing up everyone around them as threats, people, in general, looking very aware of the possibility of physical violence.

Solomon glanced across the road and caught a tattered looking man studying is backpack with a little too much interest. He made sure to catch his eye and give him a hard look until he looked away. Solomon shook his head and kept walking. At least the rain let him get more or less out of sight before anybody could talk themselves into taking a crack at stealing his backpack.

The crowds thinned out as he drew within a couple blocks of downtown proper. Solomon kept pushing forward, but more slowly now. His shoes squelched with every step. He could feel it more than hear it over the sound of the rain. He did his best to put his wet socks out of his mind and focus on what was up ahead. He could have gotten a better view sighting down a gun, but he wanted to be at least a little bit subtle.

He could see where the police barricades had been from a block away. The sawhorses were still there, but most of them had been knocked around, cleared out of the way or shoved over on their sides. Of the police themselves, there was no sign.

Solomon shook his head. He could only hope that most of them were manning a new perimeter around the dungeon store instead of lying dead in the streets somewhere after getting in the way of the invaders.

He once again felt a pang at giving up yet more territory to the aliens, but he shoved it down. This wouldn't be the last square mile they gave up on their strategic retreat. He'd remember the feeling and use it to keep motivated to take the territory back, but he couldn't do anything stupid right now.

Solomon turned to walk along the street one block away from the campus, moving parallel to the campus boundary. After a block and a half he found a gas station and kept walking until he stood under the carport. He enjoyed the relief from the pouring rain, although now that he wasn't being hit by the rain he was more aware of the wind swirling around his soaked clothing.

He clenched his hand into a fist, repressing a shiver. On his left arm, a glove stuffed with cotton sat on the end of his hook, doing a reasonable impersonation of a hand. He wore the matching glove on his right hand. He would have worn them anyway for the disguise, but he found himself grateful for the fact that his hand had been protected from the rain.

From where he was standing, he could look diagonally down the street to one of the roads leading onto campus. He could make out a single guard, cutting a sorry figure in the rain. Solomon figured he likely had a partner who was keeping watch from shelter somewhere. With nothing better to do, he took a few steps to break the line of sight between himself and the guards and settled in to wait for night to fall.

Now that he didn't have anything immediate in front of him, he couldn't help but worry about Kanmi. He'd been in the clutches of the invaders for days now. Solomon could only imagine what they might have done to him. It wasn't like the aliens had signed the Geneva Conventions. They still might adhere to some kind of standard of civilized behavior, with their own kind if nothing else, but they'd hardly shown much of a kind and gentle side so far.

The X on his minimap told him that Kanmi was alive, but it didn't say anything about his physical state. Besides Solomon's concern for his friend, there was also the practical problem of how he would get him home if he had been crippled. Solomon could only hope that the invaders hadn't done any damage the system couldn't heal.

He shook his head, then squinted out toward the horizon. The sky was growing darker by the minute. Soon it would be time to make his move.