“Alright, everyone, we made it back. I’ll head over to Chad and report what we have found. If anyone wants to join, you are welcome. Otherwise, I’d propose we meet up at the community center later on to determine our next steps.”

“Sounds good, Ben,” Betsy said, before continuing with a sigh. “I’ll head over to the morgue and let them know to put John and Bob on the list, and, I guess, Daniel as well. Did anyone catch his last name?”

None of them did, so the first name was going to be it. Not that it mattered, ultimately. If anyone had known him, they surely would have assumed already that he was dead a while ago. The first couple of days, survivors had trickled into town, but after the third day, that had completely dried up. No one survived for a whole week in the wilderness, all by themselves. No none until they had met Daniel, that is.

“I’ll come along if you’d like.”

“Up to you, Sue. It really isn’t necessary, though.”

“Of course, but… I don’t know, I kinda feel like I owe it to Daniel. A sign of respect, you know? He did a selfless thing there, to stay behind so as not to slow us down. I’m not sure I could or would have done the same if I had been in his shoes.”

“We all feel the same, I think,” Betsy said. “A good guy, despite being a bit quirky. Come along, then, if you’d like to.”

---------------------------------------

“Hey, Liz, we just returned. How are things going?”

“Good to see you back in one piece, Ben,” Elizabeth responded with a coy smile on her face. Her eyes widened in alarm when she noticed the bloody and torn pants he was sporting. “Even though it seemed to have been a close call this time around…. What happened?”

“I’ll fill you in later, Liz. I need to talk to the head honcho first.“

Disappointed, Elizabeth pouted her lips slightly but then said: “Let me see if he’s around. Give me a sec,” before turning around and moving toward the back-office swaying her hips more than strictly necessary.

A couple of minutes later, she led Ben to the former hotel office, where they found Chad sitting behind a large desk filled with a map of the area and a few books, some of which looked archaic.

“Yes? Ben, was it?”

“Yes, Sir,” Ben responded politely.

“Elizabeth said that you had something important to report? Out with it then.”

“A couple of days ago, we set out with a group of seven people on one of the training missions, scouting the Algonquin Mountain area.”

“Ah, yes. One of those. Sorry, I don’t keep track of all the training missions… Golgiat manages that mostly. So, what did you find?”

“Well, there is a large tribe of gars out there, and we found a huge weyr swarm. We lost two of our group in the process, and one more unaffiliated person was killed as well.”

“Uhm, sorry for your loss… but what numbers are we talking about? A hundred gars? Two hundred? And how big is the weyr swarm?”

“We are not entirely certain, but based on a rough estimate, about one thousand gars are camping out at the base of the mountain, close to the lodge. And the weyr swarm is, well, it covered a whole clearing. It was hard to make out in the dark, but at a minimum, it was maybe 300k, and it easily might have been a million or more.”

While Ben was talking, he carefully watched Chad’s face for a reaction. Was this huge news? Was this an existential threat? If he hadn’t kept a close eye on him, he might have missed the twitch in his cheek, the brief frown that went through his stony face.

And that reaction scared Ben because Chad never ever showed a reaction unless he was around his own people.

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I woke up in the early morning hours from a fucking cramp in my right calf, about the worst way to finish the night.

Immediately, I forced myself to relax the cramping muscle, trying to counteract the natural inclination to contract the leg instead of keeping it straight.

“Shitty, fucking hell,” I cursed through clenched teeth while I slowly massaged my leg and tried to relax the muscles. Apparently, I had some vitamin or mineral deficiency. No wonder, given my rather unbalanced diet during the last few days. By the time the cramp had subsided entirely, I was wide awake and decided to get up rather than lie around and wait for… well, nothing really. Nothing was going to happen if I just stayed in bed for another hour or even five.

And no one was waiting for me. I was all alone in this camper, and as far as I knew, the only one in the whole campground. In Lake Placid, there wasn’t anyone waiting for me either. Annie probably thought I was long dead, and I couldn’t even blame her for it. And beyond her… well, Sue and the others were nice, but I wouldn’t say that they were friends. Sure, shared hardship connects and all that, but it took a bit more to form a real bond.

So to some degree, I felt… aimless, lost.

Up until now, my desire to feel safe, to find a secure place to recover, train, get stronger had driven me to keep on moving. But now that I had had a relaxing day at the campground and a good night of sleep, albeit with a cramp waking me up… I felt, I don’t know, sluggish and unmotivated.

I stumbled around the camper, eyes bleary and full of eye boogers, slowly picking out stuff I wanted to take along. And yes, I was still going to Lake Placid. Despite no one really waiting there for me, it had people, someone to be around. And it probably was a whole lot safer than a remote campground in the middle of nowhere, close to a known weyr swarm and a tribe of gars with reaver dogs as fucking pets.

But instead of rushing toward Lake Placid, I was going to be slow and methodical. Presumably, people were going to be congregating in Lake Placid. Where was the food going to come from? Initially, people would just take from the few stores in the village of Lake Placid. But once that food was running out… what then? There would be competition for food, and I was not planning on wasting time in the foreseeable future, trying to scrounge for food somewhere in the wilderness. I didn’t even have the faintest idea of how to go about that anyway. I had never hunted, only once had fished when I was like seven, and had no idea how to lay traps.

And who was prepared to stay somewhere without running to the grocery every couple of days? Campers! Coupled with the fact that I had a fucking bag of holding, it was clear what I had to do… go around every camper and take everything edible. It would take me a few hours but would pay huge dividends down the road. A few fruits might have survived the eight or nine days too, and once they were in the bag, they would stay fresh. And that was something that we wouldn’t have for a good long while, if ever again.

In fact, I should have done that already the previous day… but there was no point in beating myself up over it.

I chowed down a quick breakfast, focusing on anything that I thought might have some protein, and then went through the rest of the campground, one camper after another. And it wasn’t merely food that I picked up. I also looked for clothes, knives, some blankets, books about hunting, herbs, and edible plants, and other useful knickknacks that I thought would be helpful down the road.

Most of the stuff wouldn’t just disappear if I didn’t pick it up now, but there was a risk that someone else might get there first, or that the gars would go on a rampage through the campers. And there might be other sapient races out there that wouldn’t mind loading up on some modern utensils.

No, best to take everything right now, especially because I had space in my bag of holding, and it wouldn’t weigh me down.

The best finds where a huge cache of food in one of the more permanent campers, including a whole crate of liquor, a modern hunting bow, just like what Tom was using, including a vast number of carbon fiber arrows, and a bin of non-power operated tools, likely from a medieval crafting aficionado. I had no idea what most of those tools were for, but I was sure I could find some type of manual somewhere in the Lake Placid library. Or perhaps figure it out as I was doing stuff. Not that I was planning to go down the crafting route… but it was good to be able to do stuff if I needed to.

The bow was a piece of beauty, sleek, lethal-looking, with military camouflage. I slowly drew my hand along its smooth frame and pulled back the strings a bit to test for the draw weight. Not that I had the faintest idea of how to measure that. I had shot some children’s bows a few times in a summer camp here and there, but that was the extent of my knowledge.

Soon, I had most of the space in the bag filled out, even though ten cubic feet had sounded extremely generous earlier. But once you put in a metric ton of spaghetti, various pasta sauces, ketchup, soups galore, alcohol, flour, and all kinds of other bulky stuff, it fills up space rather quickly. Not to speak of all the clothes I picked up and even some shoes that I somehow managed to push through the opening of the sack.

Satisfied with my preparation, I finally took off from the campground, without looking back. It was already early afternoon by then, and hot and humid. Not the ideal time to be outside, but I didn’t want to wait longer. Luckily, I had found a nice mountain bike, with a lock that wasn’t too hard to break with all the tools in my possession, so getting to Lake Placid wasn’t going to take too long.

Riding a bike had its pros and cons. For one, I wasn’t going to be near as mobile while riding the bike - if something managed to ambush me, I was going to be screwed. On the other hand, on the bike, I had a chance to outpace some creatures that might be after me. Probably not the weyr swarm or the reaver dogs, but I was almost positive that I could at least get away from a patrol of gars.

On balance and combined with the fact that instead of walking for three or four hours, I could be there within one hour, it was a pretty clear-cut call.

Luckily one doesn’t forget how to ride a bike. It had been four years, after all, that I had sat on one. But after a few shaky yards, I began to feel comfortable and almost enjoyed myself. Not having to lug around a massive amount of stuff in my backpack helped.

I still had the backpack, just in case I’d find some bulky items, too big for the bag of holding. I also wanted to have it as a sort of decoy - if I didn’t want to reveal my bag of holding, I could pretend to pull items out of there instead.

I made good progress on the bike, mainly because the road was downward sloping. I didn’t even have to work hard to keep going at a decent speed. Soon enough, I hit NY 73, the biggest road in the area, leading straight to Lake Placid.

I wouldn’t call the remainder of the trip a pleasure ride, but it was more comfortable. There was more space on the road, so I wasn’t quite as worried about something jumping out of the bushes at me before I’d have time to react. Abandoned cars all along the road, some in the ditches on either side, some simply standing right in the middle, gave testament to the sudden transition to this new world. And the occasional skeleton showed what had happened to some of the previous owners. Most had made it, presumably, but some might have tried to get their car running for too long, or just waited for someone to come, something to return power to their cell phones, and they got caught with their pants down, figuratively speaking.

It hadn’t taken the reaver dogs long to get to Lake Placid, and they might have shown up along this road shortly after the change.

I shuddered as I biked past those visible reminders of the cruel fates many people had met. How many of these people would have flourished in this new world and just got unlucky? We’d never know.

Whenever I passed a house on the way, I briefly stopped and explored it for something useful. More food, a few additional axes, nails… these were things you couldn’t have enough of. Frankly, I was surprised to still find any useful stuff along this big road. I would have thought that the people in Lake Placid would have scavenged things by now, at least the axes. Thinking back at Sue with her baseball bat, I could only shake my head. Not that a baseball bat couldn’t be used to beat someone up… but it wasn’t nearly as versatile and durable as a solid ax, even if it was only an ax to chop wood, not a real war ax.

Almost anticlimactically, I reached the outskirts of Lake Placid by the late afternoon without any further incidents.

Not that I was going to complain about it.

What I needed was food, rest, and training.

In that order.

And then I needed to figure out what to do about the bikers and the gars, and those I’tisch League of Cities people, and Annie, and… shit. Too long of a list. First things first. And perhaps I should hook up with Sue and the others, assuming that they had made it. Since I didn’t know anybody, and they, at least, were nice, it would be great to have the company until I managed to figure things out.

They had mentioned that they were staying at the High Peaks Resort on Sara-Placid Road. Which was pretty much in the center. Going there, I’d pass the bed and breakfast where I had stayed with Annie, so I could make a quick stop and see what the situation was like.

It was a weird feeling to walk along the main street, see lots of people walk around, some of them very determined-looking, whereas others seemed to amble around almost aimlessly. It was almost… normal. As if nothing had happened. At least as long as one ignored that there were no cars, no lights, and none of the constant background noise that usually penetrates every facet of modern life.

These people looked well-fed, civilized, and… utterly unprepared for the dangers and rigors that I had experienced during this last week. Most people didn’t even have any weapons with them, and the ones that did… safe to say, the weapons were mostly makeshift, with crude spears, golf clubs, and baseball bats the most common sight.

Shaking off those thoughts, I focused on what I was going to do. Should I go in and shout Annie’s name? Get some flowers? How would she react to seeing me? Would she smile? Or jump into my arms and kiss me? For a moment, I imagined her warm lips pressed against mine, her petite body tight against my chest, and the salty taste of her tears as she was crying in happiness to see me.

I had to chuckle at those enticing, but entirely unrealistic thoughts. Probably she would just scold me for leaving like that, not that it had been my fault. Even more likely, she wasn’t even going to recognize me at first. I hadn’t realized how different I looked until I had seen my reflection in the small mirror in the bathroom of the camper … I was gaunt as hell, stubbly beard, weird clothes, some too small, some too big, and eyes that looked somewhat disconcerting, to say the least.

But Ben had thought I looked familiar, and he had known me for a grand total of half a day before I had met him again. Annie… well, she had taken care of me like a mom would take care of a baby for the better part of four years. So that was different.

Surely, she was going to recognize me.

…

…

But what if not? Was I going to… just tell her, ‘Hey, I am Daniel!’ Or…

Fuck. I had no clue what to do, really.

Inexplicably, I felt more nervous than when dealing with the goblins all by myself or staying behind facing the gars and weyr swarm. Perhaps I should have asked Sue for advice. But then again, from what I could tell, she was a complete nut-job more often than not, so probably that wouldn’t have been helpful either.

Steeling my nerves, I went up the little ramp and into the bed and breakfast. The common room looked exactly the same as when I had left, with furniture strewn all over from the fight against the reaver dogs, glass fragments on the floor, and a few blood stains where the reaver dogs had died.

And no people.

Shit.

I had never even considered that people would have left. After all, the windows here were destroyed, and there were plenty of houses and hotels around that stood empty.

So what now?

One option was to find a room somewhere, hunker down, and then figure out my next steps. The other possibility was to go to Ben and co. and stay at their place for the time being. For a moment, I was torn because I did value the independence and privacy of my own place. But I had been alone for too long, and it was safer to be around other people, especially ones that I already knew a little bit and, for the most part, trusted. And maybe they knew about Annie. I had never considered asking them about her, for fear of revealing who I was… but at some point, I had to trust some people.