SO3 Loretz went up to the roof on the 20th floor with Karlson. The others were preparing to head out.

James logged the rations they took from the apartment. They’d already cleaned out the cans and packets from the stuff they ate last night, putting them aside in a box somewhere for the next guy to come up with a creative use for.

Tristan and Aurelia were out disconnecting their power banks from the solar charging stations in the neighboring apartments. Being placed away from the windows, the panels were only active for about 2 hours per day on a good day—though, this didn’t really matter much if the hideout only saw people once every three weeks. A bunch of circuits and a whole lot of sand packed around the edges kept the whole setup from overcharging, exploding the batteries, and burning down the whole building.

As for toilet business, they had a rainwater collection system that tapped into the roof’s drainage pipes. It wasn’t clean, but the greywater was enough to flush toilets.

No one knew where the blackwater actually went, though. It was somewhat of a scary thought that they’d just discover a shit-flooded basement one day that was spewing enough methane to be a real explosion hazard. James ended up giving this weird circumstance to Karlson to analyze as homework, and according to the guy’s calculations, the basement really might just end up becoming an explosive methane swamp in 10 years at this rate. It could be a resource or a liability, depending on one’s frame of mind.

By the time the apartment was cleaned up, Loretz and Karlson came down with the verdict.

“Sir, the third bridge is the only one still intact.”

Loretz showed everyone recorded footage on a tablet. James squinted, then looked to Karlson.

“Is that what I think it is?” he asked.

Karlson nodded.

“What is it?” Aurelia asked. Her superhuman eyesight could only see the individual pixels.

“Looks like there’s a checkpoint on that bridge,” James said.

“Huh? That bunch of cars on the road is?”

“Maybe I’m just seeing things, but it looks like they’ve been arranged to force attackers to zig-zag along the Pasig-side half of the bridge.”

“Won’t that just give them lots of cover, though?”

“That’s true for people on foot, but if it’s a vehicle, this would deter ramming attacks, so I’m guessing there’s a gate that we can’t see. On the other hand, our side of the bridge is still open space, so it’d be easy for snipers to pick anyone off before they even reached the cars.”

“All that from just a bunch of pixels…” Aurelia murmured.

“We still need to take a closer look, though,” James added. He looked everyone once in the eyes. “We’ll set up about a kilometer from the bridge and use the Bio-Police’s drone to check it out.”

“Should we take a vantage point, sir?” Loretz asked.

“No. The amount of manpower needed to make that kind of checkpoint is too abnormal. I don’t want to assume that they actually have spotters looking for movement in any of the buildings visible from the bridge.”

James ruffled through the hideout’s logbook.

“Plus we need to restock this place or we won’t last long out here.”

The area between them and the target bridge was mostly middle-class suburban communities. It made for a nice stroll, but it was still quite a bit nerve-wracking. There was a lot more foliage in a suburban residential area than most, making for unpleasant surprises hidden behind a natural abatis of fallen branches.

Navigation around suburban areas had always been a pain. Early in the Outbreak, Civil Defense officials thought it would be a good idea to tell people to block off streets, even showing on television the many types of barricades they could erect.

The program saw mixed success, though.

Where James and company were, there were destroyed abatises blocking some streets—bundles of large, bushy branches with their tips sharpened and pointed towards the expected offender. In a bygone era, this would have stopped an enemy from rushing in and getting poked to death, but it was evident from the bones between the broken branches that this enemy didn’t care about that.

The next most-common were wire mesh barricades, which were little more than wire fences stretched between utility posts. These were more successful, proving more durable, which was why they kept finding the damned things in every other street. Though they impeded zombie hordes, they also impeded civilian militia and the military from responding at any good speed.

Of course, they impeded the scouts, too.

It was a slog of using bolt cutters to cut away a rectangular part of the mesh, then putting the whole thing back together with some wire of their own and keychain carabiners; they weren’t real carabiners, but it was enough to lock up their improv fence “door”.

It hinged like shit, but a door is a door.

Going back to how shitty navigating suburban territory was and always will be: Loretz was tasked with tossing his micro-drone up after every other block. There wasn’t anything of note for a while, but when they came to the foot of an incline, the drone found a horde on the other side of the asphalt hill.

There were probably somewhere on the order of 500 individuals in that horde, which seemed to be traveling due east.

Needless to say, they noped out of there.

There was a good chance that the horde would clash with the checkpoint if they continued in that direction. With that in mind, they really had to find a good staging point to see what sort of defenses were about to go active on the bridge.

They ended up setting up in a house that had 5-meter walls enclosing it, even being topped by an electric fence. Compared to the nice, friendly houses around it, this one was so conspicuous for having such beefed-up security.

From afar, however, it had the same colors as the rest of the neighborhood. They probably wouldn’t be found so easily. Even if they were, this place was the most defensible in the surrounding area.

They sent the drone up.

“We’re about 800 meters from the bridge,” Loretz said, “Sir, I’m going to keep it in a holding pattern 300 meters from the bridge. The visuals should be clear enough even then.”

“Sure.”

Just as James and Karlson suspected, the bridge was well-defended. Past the impeding cars, there was a barricade of felled trees. From the front, it surely looked like felled trees, but circling around it, just stopping short of completely crossing over to the Pasig side, there were man-made structures supporting the tree trunks from behind.

There also seemed to be fighting positions nestled in windows on either side of the gate. They weren’t being obvious, but an out-of-place sandbag was an out-of-place sandbag, even if they were only momentarily spotted behind fluttering curtains. There was a good chance that those weren’t the only defenses there, either.

The horde from earlier did eventually try to cross the bridge. The fighting positions from earlier lit up with bursts of machine gun fire, the echoing of it heard from their hideout. There were actually even more machine guns that the group hadn’t spotted, so they took note of those as well.

None of the zombies even made it to the first car. That wasn’t to say that they managed to gun down all the zombies, either. The remaining zombies started to drag the bodies back, cleaning up the road of their own volition.

—It’s still so weird each time I see it.

“Hey, do either of you know why they do that?” James asked, not even turning his head.

Loretz and Io caught on that he was asking them, but even if they were highly-trained, they were still just highly-trained idiots, so they shrugged with all valor to brush it off with a Knowing things is someone else’s job.

They confirmed 4 machine gun positions and another 10 fighting positions, probably for riflemen.

That’s not something you’d casually walk up to.