No further trouble.

You don't fully relax until you're safely back through the front door of your home. Even once you're in, it takes a long while for your nerves to steady and your fingers to feel like they can let go of the shotgun. You sent Todd upstairs to keep watch out of one of the upper windows, so you should be reasonably safe to at least take a few minutes to get a breather, but the shock and adrenalin of having fired your gun in the heat of the moment for the first time is deep-rooted and hard to shift. You **** yourself to take a few sips of water and that finally starts to work to undo the tension.

As soon as it releases, you urgently stumble over to the trashcan and heave your guts into it, feeling the recoil and hearing the noise no matter what you do to try and come down from the heightened stress.

Todd comes down the stairs, concerned by the noise. He rushes over to you and places his hands on your shoulders.

"Alana are you ok? What's happening? Is this pregnancy sickness?"

The complete ignorance behind his question makes you laugh, which is exactly what you need to shake out of the state you've been in.

"Ha, Todd... Ha ha. No it's not morning sickness. That wouldn't be here for at least a couple of weeks. No, it's my nerves. The adrenalin... the fear."

"But you seemed so together! I thought you had it all under control!"

You look up at him, feeling the burden of his dependency on you, wondering what or whether to say.

He's your world now, Alana. Better start opening up.

You sigh. "Todd, I know a bit about guns and survival, that's all. I've never done _any _of this before. I told you before I'm not a pro at this. I could see that when we were out there... you needed me to hold it together. I hardly feel more prepared for this than you do."

"I understand," his voice is serious in that strange way he gets sometimes. "I promise, I will try to learn, so you can depend on me too."

You smile, and brush your fingers against his cheek. "You're sweet, Todd. I'm glad its you here with me."

He leans in and kisses you, his lips crush against yours, taking you by surprise. His tongue finds its way into your mouth and you moan into him before you get ahold of yourself and push him away.

"Later. Please hold on. We can do that later. I need you to watch the street a bit longer, make sure we haven't been followed."

He nods, reluctantly, and squares his shoulders as he turns away. You give him a naughty slap on the ass as he goes, and wink at the glance it earns you.

"I really do mean later," you promise. He smiles as he disappears back upstairs.

With Todd's inadvertant hilarity and sombre earnestness having shaken you out of your paralysis, you set to work on sorting through your gear and the new equipment.

First, you reload your shotgun. A similar set up to before. You realise though that you can keep a shell in the chamber, giving you a fourth shot at the ready. It does mean that you'll have to be exceedingly disciplined with the safety, but that's a routine that your dad and brother certainly drilled into you when you were young. Adding a third birdshot shell means you can repeat a similar tactic, which seemed to work quite well.

Looking over the bag full of professional-looking black weapons, you conclude that mostly, they will need to stay packed up for now instead of being prepared for use. The exceptions are the 9mm pistol - which you prepare along with a belt, holster and three loaded magazines, reasoning that it's yet another easier step down for Todd to handle - and the carbine, which you feel needs to be kept within arm's reach. You can be pretty confident that armed with that, you are going to be significantly better equipped than almost anybody you encounter, save for survivors from the military or possibly law enforcement. It's going to be too heavy to have it slung about your person along with your own pack and the shotgun, but looking at all the stuff you have to carry you reckon that you're going to need a vehicle to shift it all regardless. If the rifle sits in easy reach inside, you can retrieve it when needed. You load up the two magazines you grabbed, realising too late that with the weapon's fully automatic capability those two won't last long. You decide to switch the selector to 'semi' and leave it there: just having 60 rifle rounds available should be more than enough to come out on top in the kinds of encounters you're likely to find.

All of the other loot from the sheriffs station gets properly packed into the kit bag, strapped up and secured with the compression straps to make it an easier load. The bag joins the other two packs, leaning by the door, ready to move.

So. Next you'll need a vehicle. You'd previously considered just going on foot, reasoning that the sound of an engine would draw a lot of attention. That's still very much the case, but you've acquired so much extra weight that it's going to be a very tall order to haul it all over a hundred miles.

But where to get one? Most of the vehicles you've seen out in the streets are in dreadful shape, wrecked in the brief unrest that followed the dawning realisation amongst the general population that the world was ending. Even though most of those people then went on to get sick and eventually die, they had a week or two of madness that you'd only barely been able to avoid by living in a quiet neighborhood and, at the time, having your father at home to help deter any troublemakers.

You reckon that vehicles kept in garages are likely to be your best option. They will have been kept safe from prying eyes, at least to begin with, and now there's so few people left that there probably are more prized cars hidden away in this fashion than there are aspiring wasteland drivers. The more you think about it, the better the chances seem that if you snoop through your immediate area, particularly at the homes of your retired neighbors, you'll unearth some gleaming vintage rig, probably obsessively tanked up with fuel and oil, and in impeccable running order.

That will have to wait until tomorrow though. For now, it's starting to get dark, and you're getting hungry. Selecting a tin of corned beef and potatoes - one of the better items of chow on your incredibly limited menu - you take it upstairs to share with Todd along with a bottle of water and an almost empty bottle of bourbon from your Dad's liquor cabinet. It's going to be your last night at this house, so you plan to make the most of it.