Maly leaves after her breakfast, smothering the flames inside the pit with their own ashes, hoping the coals keep under the ashes for another fire. She peers one last time over the group, those partial strangers toiling under the sun. One of them is breaking the pipes from the organ and staking them within the earth around the church's front doors, and she wonders how the priest will feel about such things. Change is not easy, and his chapel was a static place that remained untouched by the events outside. It was a shrine to what was as much as it was a shelter for him.
Now the windows are barred with pew backrests, the door is warded with heavy spikes, and there is no going back. A physical shift that is undeniable; a continual reminder of the danger that exists for those that need it.
Maly shifts her pack onto her back, feels the weight of her machete at her hip, and ponders why people crave such constants.
She writes it off as useless almost as soon as it enters her mind. It's not a practical thought, not something she can solve, or even has the initiative to think too hard on.
As always, there are other things to be done. With the cannibals gone and the group having cleared more buildings than she was able to by herself, she can go back and scavenge what they missed.
A pair of nut colored eyes catch hers from the doorframe, a bald head peaking around the gleaming makeshift spikes dug into the dirt. She pauses just long enough to meet them steadily, unjudging and unchanged.
Father Gabriel remains inside his church, and Maly moves on.
She cannot spare much thought for the preacher. Cannot afford such a division of attention, not when she is going into a more urbanized area. Even a small town is dangerous, as everything always is when the dead roam the earth, as it was even before then.
The sounds of people continue on behind her, and she leaves them as easily as she did before. Still there is a lingering uncertainty about why she sought them in the first place, following an unknown feeling that is hard to place and harder to understand. Not something that she was ever taught, or something that can be learned. Deeper than that, a hazy thing written into her.
Instinct, maybe.
Dirt turns to gravel turns to grass and leaves, and Maly lets everything fade but awareness of the world around her. Her breaths are quiet draws of air, her feet machine like as they move, the pack heavy and solid on her back. She tastes the lean musk of charred snake meat on the back of her teeth and feels the heavy heat of the sun on her back.
A bully mix with a short snout and wiry hair pads to her left, panting in the heat, and behind it some terrier creature skitters after a grasshopper. Somewhere ahead, Meatsack slinks along as a scout, head low and ears pricked as it picks its way forward.
A breeze picks up, and as always, she smells the town before she sees it. A musk like mildew and rot, faint but definitely there. The first outlying building crops up, derelict and long since picked over by her.
Still, Maly treats it like it houses something, going the long way around to avoid any windows that might catch her. She does not know what could be hidden within, or who. Best, she knows, to be careful.
Half a mile past that, she hears her first groan. It's a weak, pitiful thing, more rasping sigh than beleaguered moan. She sees it in the distance, half withered away by time and decay. Its sex is indeterminable in this state, ribs jutting out past its sternum, poking into open air like reaching fingers. Its hungry mouth gapes at her, lips shrunken back and hair half missing from its head.
A rangy mutt whuffs at her softly, and she waits, listening for more. The dogs look to her, ears pricked as they do they same.
The bully mix moves on, and Maly does the same.
Their demeanor changes, heads dropping low and tails back as they move. Their faces shift and watch as the pace changes from a ranging trot to a purposeful stepping. Some noses lift to the air while some drop lower until they touch the ground, and Maly moves with the meat-pack, purposeful and wary as they reach the first set of her larger traps.
Out of the six clustered here, none are triggered. There are no dead to deal with or bodies to search, nothing but wood stakes and wires near a sunken pit in the ground.
She keeps going, blind to the unmoving remains of the ones she already cleaned from them all the times she checked before. The festering cadavers that litter her path to the town with split skulls are nothing to her, having taken all she need from them.
The disappearance of the soft give of the earth beneath her boots as grass turns to asphalt is noticeable, and she slips her thumb beneath the strap keeping her machete in her sheath, sacrificing walking speed and surety for the ability to draw at a moment's notice. She scans constantly as she walks, headed to a place she figures should be clear if the silencers were anything to go by.
The gun store is on main street, shattered windows grim and dirty, a decrepit sign hanging on chains overhead. The inside is dark, even during midday, the open door foreboding with its lack of light.
She wraps her krama around her nose to keep out dust and muffle some of the mold smell from inside, eyes narrowed as a canine snuffles around the edges of the gutter. She listens for a long, long moment, willing her eyes to see anything that might be amiss.
She finds nothing.
Carefully, she creeps forward, head low and chin tucked into her neck. A bead of sweat dribbles down her forehead as she slinks in, her eyes scanning.
Broken, empty shelves greet her. The cabinets are bare, display cases caved in. A torn rag rests at the edges of one, caught on a jagged shard of glass.
She leaves it be. She has no need for it.
Meticulously she combs the store over, well aware that what she seeks may be long gone. There are other ways to do what needs to be done, but this would be the most efficient. A scrap, not even a full holster or bag. Big enough to patch the hole that's been a weakness in her jacket.
No such luck. The store is barren, holding not even a speck of leather, nor any needle and thread.
She exits the way she came in, making her way toward the only thrift store in the area.
The cinderblock building is across on the other side of town, and instead of making her way through streets that still may contain the dead, she goes back the way she came to skirt the borders of it. Forever and always wary, she steps carefully, eating away the minutes for the sake of safety and stealth instead of charging her way through.
She ducks around the street corner, checking the exits before she enters the single story building. There are only two, a door in the fronts and one in the back, and without knowing any of the layout inside she is wary of such a set-up. The windows, she supposes, are also possible exits in times of need, but such wide windows are much harder to break through than people suspect.
She weighs her options, and decides she will seldom get a better chance than this.
Maly takes it.
Inside is almost untouched, save for a layer of thick, thick dust and a smell that gives away the inhabitants that must reside her. Thick and cloying, it is much different than the bloated rot of the food bank, but a decaying stench nonetheless. She goes on alert, watching and listening for the dead that may roam the building.
But the dead thing does not walk.
With cool eyes, Maly considers the corpse bound to a dresser barely any higher than kneeling height. She supposes it was an inventive way to go, strangling oneself to death by using one's own weight and bearing forward with a brace and makeshift rope. The end result, though, is a leashed cadaver with mummified hands that scrabble for purchase on the floor and find none.
She watches it for a moment, the stringy blond hair half fallen out to reveal a barren scalp, the softened flesh of its neck giving way as it strains to reach her. At one time, she thinks the woman may have been lovely, face flush and body plump. Maybe she had rosy cheeks and a cheerful smile.
Doesn't matter.
Maly hefts her machete in her hand, raises her arm back, and brings it down in a swing that twists her hips and throws the weight of her body behind the blow. She has to in order to make sure the blade sinks in deep enough.
The impact jars her fingers and wrist, but the body stills. Maly has to plant her boot on the things face and tug to get her blade free, but it is not the first time she has had to do so.
Her efforts are rewarded, though. Inside the thrift store, there are more than scraps of leather. There all whole jackets. She examines the musty things carefully, discarding a few as too soft to work as armor, and others too ornamented to work right. None, she knows, will fit, but some are stiff enough to withstand hard treatment and none of them carry the rot-stink of fetid corpse water that lingers on this one.
She changes then and there, testing the shoulders to see if they allow her to swing. It's baggy, but it will work. Pleased, she goes to put on her bag and move on, but color catches her eye.
For a moment, she simply stares at the item. She could use it but doesn't need it. Others could use it more but do not have it.
She slips over to the shelf and places the item in her pocket, noting that the ones on this jacket are a bit roomier than before, and goes to leave. It is the same as always, taking what she can use and moving on.
Maly does not consider that she only ever used to provide for the preacher, before.