Lisa
The roads were all but entirely untravellable until she was so far from Branton that she didn't know where she was. While she hadn't come across any wights, she also hadn't come across any living people. The highway was still littered with cars but bereft of much else. Finally, a road sign for Lake Harren passed overhead. The sun was quickly descending in the sky, and she knew that she was more likely to wreck the car if she kept at it in her exhausted state. A rest area appeared just off the exit for the lake, so she decided to make her camp there for the evening.
The parking lot was filled with cars, but most were wrecked or burned out. Something horrible had happened in this parking lot, but with no bodies to show for it. She slowly pulled the truck off the pavement and onto the grass, angling it towards a grassy knoll and backing it up onto it before pulling the parking brake and letting the truck stall out. She had no belongings to speak of, so she examined a few of the vehicles that had been fortunately spared from the inferno. She settled on a golf club as a weapon, looted from an MPV, along with a backpack and a Branton Kings sweater to help her fight the dropping temperature.
Inside the rest area, she found most of the stores had been looted. The vending machines were all smashed and emptied. She made do with the few things she did manage to scrounge. Her dinner would consist of a few stale chocolate bars and a bag of chips from the same MPV. She took a plastic cup from the burger joint inside and went back out to the old hand pump near the dining area. The rusted pump was old, and only meant to be used for cleaning one's feet, but a few hard pumps got the ice-cold water flowing easily. She checked the cup for rust or particulate before deciding it was safe. It was the best cup of water she'd ever had.
The best place to sleep would be indoors, with a locked door and a bed, so she searched for the closest to that situation. She spotted a large delivery truck with a sleeper cab and grasped the door handle before closing her eyes and saying a prayer. She tugged on the door handle with immeasurable hope. Her faith rewarded her by opening the door. She laughed so suddenly it nearly brought her to tears. I'm going to make it, she repeated to herself a few too many times. She climbed into the truck and closed the door behind her, locking it and then locking the passenger door. She grabbed the seatbelts and pulled them through the doors' armrests before securing them. No one would be opening the doors, she reasoned.
The bed wasn't the cleanest – it was old and smelled old, with the echoes of use from before the pandemic and apocalypse. She didn't care. She pulled off the sweater and covered the old pillow with it. Before going to sleep, she took advantage of the last bit of light to find a roadmap and unfolded it. She quickly found her current location and dropped her finger onto the paper. She slowly drew the finger north along the thickest line – the Transnational Highway – until it reached Winterfell. If she could keep the truck running and fueled, she could be there in only a few days. Otherwise...
Her head hit the pillow and within moments, she was out.