We left the woman by herself, sitting against the banks of the creek, spinning the chamber of the gun, pulling the trigger. We climbed out of the creek bed and headed towards Hunter, sticking to the tree line that followed the creek. We made it to the hill outside of the town. We crouched down and watched.

The sun was setting. It was getting darker and darker.

From our vantage point we could see clearly that the dreadlocked woman was right about this town. The infected were everywhere. They completely filled the streets.

“This is not good,” Kenji said.

“There’s way too many of them,” Jack agreed. “That woman was right. We need to avoid this town. We can’t go down there.”

“Great,” Maria said. “So, we came all this way for nothing?”

“What about the Fortress?” Daniel suggested. “It has to be close by, right?”

“We don’t know that,” Kenji said. “And besides, that woman said we’d never find it.”

“I think we have to check it out,” Jack added.

“No,” Kenji said. “We stay the course. If we ration our food and water we should be fine until we locate another town.”

“Barely.”

“Yeah, I agree with Jack on this one,” Daniel said. “We’re cutting it way too close.”

“You heard the woman,” Kenji continued. “She said it was hidden. We can’t waste the time and energy looking for a place that we might never find.”

“I don’t think we have a choice,” Jack replied. “We’re out of food. We’re out of water. If we skip this town, we might not make it to the next one. We have to take a chance.”

Over the past couple of days I’d noticed that everyone was getting a whole lot more edgy and irritable. We were starting to argue and squabble whenever we had these discussions. I had to keep reminding myself it was because we were hungry and dehydrated. It was hard to think rationally. Hard to plan. We were still arguing about what to do and where to go, when all of a sudden, a gunshot erupted in the night.

The woman, she had finally done it.

The problem was, the gunshot was loud. Very loud.

Daniel swore under his breath. He knew the danger the gunshot presented us. I don’t know why we didn’t think of this before she did it. I guess we were more concerned with honoring her dying wishes to take our own safety into account. Or maybe it was because we were all starving and dehydrated; we were starting to make mistakes.

Life or death type mistakes.

“We gotta get out of this area,” Kenji said. “That gunshot will attract all kinds of attention from the town.”

“No,” Daniel said. “We need to wait for daylight. Observe the town. See how bad it is.”

“Maybe Maria’s idea of spending the night up in the trees isn’t such a bad idea after all,” I said.

“Bad idea after all?” Maria asked, surprised. “It was never a bad idea.”

Kenji shouldered his rifle and looked back down into the town. “This is bad. Very, very bad.”

“What?”

He shook his head.

I looked through the scope on my rifle as well. And that’s when I saw what Kenji was so worried about.

The infected people.

They were looking in this direction. All of them. It looked like the whole town.

Some of them had started shuffling towards us.

Some of them were running.

Kenji swore again. He was frustrated. This was our one chance to get food and water.

Daniel grabbed me by the shoulder. “We need to go!”

“Back to the creek bed,” Kenji said. “Double time.”

Another night without food or water. We were pushing our luck.

We started running. Once again, fear and adrenalin gave us a burst of energy. We made it back to the creek bed in world record time. But we still had a long, long way to go. About twenty miles. Practically a marathon. There’s no way we could run the whole way.

Throughout this journey Kenji had been quoting Sun Tzu’s, ‘The Art of War’, and some other Chinese philosophers. Lao Tzu. Or maybe someone else. I can’t remember them all. I think he was trying to motivate us, lift our spirits. One of the quotes he’d repeated a couple of times was, ‘a thousand mile journey starts with a single footstep’.

I thought about that quote as we ran through the night, back to the farmhouse. We had taken that first, single footstep what seemed like forever ago. And since then, we’d been walking and running. Yeah, a thousand mile journey starts with a single footstep, I thought. And then is quickly followed by a million more.

Next to me, Maria tripped. I caught her and helped her up. It was getting darker, harder to see where we were running. She recovered her footing and said thanks between deep, ragged breaths.

In the distance, the howling scream of the infected echoed and chased us. In our minds, they were right there, unbearably close. They were reaching out for us. They were just around the bend in the river, seconds away from emerging from the dark.

We continued to run.