Winter sets in.

As you work through the trauma of your ordeal with Clarence, the first frosts come and the days get even shorter. Unwilling to be alone at the cabin for a while, you and Todd make some joint hunting trips, and it feels really good to get away from the camp for a while. The exercise is a challenge and feels healthy, and it allows you an opportunity to keep your skills sharp.

Your first deer kill is almost as unpleasant as Todd's but he shows you the techniques he's learned and by the second you've improved a lot, able to take your prey down cleanly with a steady hand and a clear shot. It's also much easier for you to get the animals back to camp when working together.

Your rough and ready camp cuisine has improved too, with developing butchery and smoking skills, the ability to safely age the meat, and the usually superior flavour of a neatly-killed animal. There's some variety too, with Todd usually bringing the shotgun along and taking an occasional bird which you hang alongside the venison, and enjoy the benefit of having the aged fowl. You still are careful to take only as much as you need, unwilling to waste anything and wary of depleting the game population around the lodge, but the extra security of having two to three weeks worth of food is going to be exceedingly valuable as the cold deepens.

You and Todd agonise over one more decision: whether or not to take the car in a trip to the nearest town. You could both do with some better cold weather gear, and there are general stocks of supplies that you would probably be able to replenish from the handful of stores down there. It had seemed completely deserted when you made the trip up into the hills, and as such a sleepy little place it doesn't seem likely to be a place of significant danger, but the prospect of leaving your camp unattended, and of putting yourselves in harm's way again, feels scary.

Ultimately though, you conclude it's necessary. The danger of being underdressed in winter is inevitable, and if you plan for this trip carefully you should be able to ensure that you won't have to venture out again until the snows melt.

Equipping yourselves with a pistol each, the sawn-off in the car, and the carbine and one rifle, you're tooled up to the max for what is in all likelihood going to be a simple 'shopping' expedition. You toss your empty backpacks into the car as well, trying to maximise the amount you can carry on your supply runs. You each dress as practically as you can manage, with lightweight clothes for speed and the warmest outer layer you each possess.

You leave a sign pinned to the tree in the camp, in case somebody comes along while you're away.

PEOPLE LIVE HERE. IF YOU'RE FRIENDLY, MAKE YOURSELF COMFORTABLE. WE WILL BE BACK SHORTLY.

You hide the rest of the guns and ammunition in the kit bag under the cabin floorboards, not wanting to invite people to arm themselves at your expense and ambush you upon your return, but at the same time the chance of meeting friendly survivors isn't an impossibility. You'll likely only be gone a few hours so it's probably not going to matter.

Eventually you conclude that you're as prepared as you can be and after reconnecting the car battery and one last kiss for good luck, you set off.

It's deathly quiet in the town. At most two months have passed since you drove through it last time, but it seems almost nothing has changed. Some of the buildings have begun to show signs of dilapidation, and there's more wildlife about than you'd expect. A few families of deer roam around the streets, browsing on the vegetation that has begun to encroach into the human realm, there's lots of birds about, and you've definitely heard some coyotes. There's been a few glimpses of raccoons disappearing behind corners and fences at the sound of the car, and you wonder what the trash pandas have been eating considering the almost total cessation of human activity that created the easy sources of food they used to exploit.

As Todd eases the car into the town's Main Street, you take in the spread of shops. Not much here, by pre-apocalypse standards, but compared to your months of very basic living it seems like a goldmine. It doesn't even seem much more disturbed than when you made your way up here the first time, stopping at the grocery store in a nervous panic. The few signs of damage are most likely due to weather or animals, as the interiors of the stores themselves look pretty untouched.

Your eyes light on a little mom and pop type pharmacy and general store, the gas station down at the far end of the street, and then lastly the grocery store even though you know a lot of the stock from there is already up in your cabin. Todd parks up with the front of the car pointing out of town and you step out, empty packs on your back and weapons at the ready.

Your little 'shopping' spree is uneventful. You manage to fill the packs with all manner of useful items in the general store, raiding the secure pharmacy area (using the sawn off to blast the lock out of the door) to gather all kinds of medicine that will no doubt be handy to have - including almost two dozen boxes of birth control pills, some bottles of Vicodin, a variety of antibiotics, medicated topical steroid creams, anti-fungal meds, cystitis treatments... there's not a huge supply of many of these things but enough to give you some decent chance of treating common low-level illnesses and injuries. You gathered a load of the non-prescription stuff from the front of the store: antiseptic creams, disinfectant, rehydration pouches, sterile bandages, numerous bars of soap and every razor, toothbrush and tube of toothpaste available, with all the packs of tampons or pads you can grab. You're about to move onto the small general store section when you realise that you should take a ton of assorted vitamins and supplements to augment your limited diet, along with all the cartons of baby formula. There are numerous different sorts and you grab most of them, ending up filling both bags just with the medical supplies.

After zipping back to the car to empty out your loot so far, you return to the general store and inspect the limited clothing on offer. Fortunately there is a good stack of men's and women's outdoor clothing that will set you up far better than you have been. Most importantly there are several very thick padded coats, the kind of gear that any sensible resident of a town like this will possess, which you gratefully shrug on and immediately feel the benefit of. There's a tiny sporting goods section behind the counter with a few more boxes of the right gauge shotgun ammunition, and surprisingly a box of .45 rounds for Jim's pistol which has been very scarce until now. Most of the rest here doesn't seem that useful at the moment, but you allow yourself to grab a few armfuls of crappy paperbacks and magazines from the small selection in the store. You've read everything that was left in the cabin by now, at least three times over in many cases, and the prospect of new reading material makes you almost delirious with excitement. Everything else you leave undisturbed for now, and given how untouched the rest of the town seems to be you feel like it might all be exactly the same if you ever have to come back here.

At the gas station you find a few large fuel cans and siphon out enough to fill them. You don't anticipate using much more fuel during the winter as the snows will make driving very hazardous, but being able to use the car next year might be important. Then finally at the grocery store you review what's left from last time you were here. In your hurry, you'd only taken canned goods, and most of them. Now with a more seasoned eye you can see a lot of shelf stable items that you ignored previously which would certainly be valuable additions to your diet.

Several ten pound sacks of pasta and rice get dragged out to the car immediately. A pallet of concentrated OJ cartons too. You even find a sealed pallet of coke cans, which is too tempting an apocalypse prize even for someone who was very health conscious once upon a time. You also pilfer some bags of salt and various spices, cooking oil, vinegar, and all kinds of other useful sundries that you've had to make do without. Todd's very excited when you grab two huge tubs of instant coffee. Finally there are some gallon bottles of drinking water that you decide to take in case of emergency. You've not exactly been short of water, but it's not been so plentiful that you don't have any concerns about it.

Getting all this stuff into the car takes several trips and by the time you're finished the vehicle is stuffed full with loot. Todd grins when you observe that there's still so much stuff left here, that a town of a couple thousand which pretty much died out overnight has left ample supplies for just two people. Assuming this trip is anything to go by, it will likely remain here for when you have to make another visit on the other side of winter.

With a final look around you climb back into the car and set off for home.