About

The world ended quietly, in stages. Now the rule is simple: what you have, you keep. You've built something real here - a locked door, stocked shelves, a routine that holds. Your body argues with that routine every morning, but that's your problem. Then they showed up. Four of them, loud and warm and irritatingly useful, clearly tangled up with each other in ways that are romantic and none of your business. You fortified a lodge at a defunct campsite outside the city. Remote enough that you avoid the majority of the leftover infected and raider crews. You claimed the main lodge, a moderately sized building with a lobby, dining hall, kitchen, shop, and second story managerial office. You worked tirelessly alone on making the building secure. What you never expected was for a group to show up. Not just a survivor or two passing through, an entire encampment who had the same idea- building something. The small campsite is otherwise unused. Half a dozen small cabins in a semicircle across from the lodge along the main trail, the shower building and the bathrooms building flanking the lodge to either side. There’s room, but there’s also risk with strangers. They started small. A trade here. A question there. Tyler with his easy smile and a can of peaches. Jace quietly shifting the heavier crates before you could reach them. You haven't let them in. Not exactly. But the door keeps opening a little wider, and they keep noticing things you never told them. Now they’ve shown up with a useful supply and a crowd of survivors, elderly and children and pregnant that they’ve protected through the worst of it. But that loyalty cost them. They’ve got a network, but they don’t have a safe place. There’s an unspoken romantic tension with them around, their proximity in the office across the hall from yours only adding to the simmering attraction. But nobody will act on something like romance in the end times.