The convoy detoured around the chaotic landslide area and found another narrow mountain road, losing some time in the process.
By evening, the light in the woods faded quickly, and they still had not made it out of the mountains.
In the deepening dusk, the headlights of the lead Humvee swept across an inconspicuous wooden cabin on the leeward side of a slope.
"There's a house up ahead," Carver said from the driver's seat, spotting it first.
The convoy slowly came to a stop.
It was a typical mountain hunting cabin, built from logs and clearly old. Moss had even started growing on the roof.
The windows were intact, and the door stood slightly ajar. It looked as if it had been abandoned for a long time.
"Bossie, Daryl, check it out," Calista ordered over the radio.
Two figures got out from the second Humvee and the third car, then approached the cabin without a sound.
A moment later, Bossie's voice came through the radio. "Interior is clear. It's been empty for a long time. Dust, some animal tracks, no walkers. Structure looks stable enough."
"Clear a fifty-meter radius and set up a perimeter. We'll spend the night here."
Mike and Carver led people inside to clean up the cabin, moving scattered junk into the corners.
Bossie and Turner set up simple tripwires and warning devices outside.
Ethan and Danny began unloading the necessities from the vehicles, blankets, food, water, and a medical kit.
Merle and Daryl gathered some firewood nearby and lit a fire in the fireplace at the center of the cabin. At last, the room began to warm up.
The team sat around the fire, sharing a simple meal of compressed biscuits, jerky, and stream water treated with purification tablets.
No one complained. Finding a relatively safe shelter in this dangerous wilderness was already a huge stroke of luck.
The atmosphere gradually relaxed, and people began to talk, mostly about the lingering fear left by those terrifying mutants inside Sentinel Station.
Merle rolled a cigarette deftly with his left hand. Daryl leaned against the door, while Michonne sat a little farther away with her katana in her arms, resting with her eyes closed.
Calista, Leah, and Carver sat close to the fire.
"How's your left hand?" Leah picked up a water flask and handed it to Calista, her eyes falling on the freshly bandaged palm.
Calista took the flask and drank. "It's fine. Ethan handled it well."
She paused, her eyes reflecting the flickering flames. "It's just... that feeling is getting stronger."
Leah's gaze sharpened. "'Wildfire'?"
Calista gave a soft "Mm," but did not explain the battle instinct that had surged beyond normal limits in moments of danger.
She changed the subject, lowering her voice. "The data from Sentinel Station, and that USB drive... France. The clues point there too clearly. I suspect it may be the same force connected to Silas Norton."
Carver tore into a piece of jerky. Hearing that, he looked up, his usual joking expression fading a little. "Paris, Île-de-France. We don't exactly have a ship that can cross the Atlantic right now, Calista."
"I know." Calista's voice was calm. "That's a long-term goal. Maybe a very, very long-term one. Right now, our foundation is Rock Fortress. We need to focus on leveling up."
"Leveling up?" Leah and Carver looked confused.
"Uh, developing the base," Calista corrected smoothly.
She glanced at Bossie and Danny in the corner, where they were quietly discussing part of the technical data copied from Sentinel Station. "Technology, manpower, weapons... Those are what we need most right now."
Leah nodded, her eyes steady. "One step at a time. Let's get back first."
Their conversation was swallowed by the crackling fire and the low chatter of the other team members.
The rare peace that night almost gave them the illusion of camping outdoors back in the days of civilization.
The night deepened, and the fire kept burning.
Aside from the sentries on duty, most of the team wrapped themselves in blankets and leaned against the walls or one another, trying to sleep while they could.
Even Calista, after confirming there was no threat, closed her eyes while leaning against the still-warm stone wall beside the fireplace.
Leah leaned beside her and fell asleep as well.
Daryl and Bossie were assigned the early-morning watch.
One visible and one hidden, Daryl moved around the perimeter while Bossie took position on a rocky slope overlooking the cabin and part of the mountain road.
Deep in the forest, everything was still. Only the occasional cry of some unknown insect and the rustle of wind through the treetops broke the silence.
Just as Daryl leaned beneath an old pine tree, nearly blending into the darkness, he caught a faint sound.
It was not the dragging footsteps of walkers, nor the rustle of a wild animal.
Was that... the low hum of an engine?
And it seemed to come with a barely noticeable shift in light.
Almost at the same time, Bossie, lying on the rocky slope, raised his head. His night-vision goggles locked onto a point near the distant ridge.
Through the overlapping gaps in the tree canopy, he could faintly see a few extremely weak points of light moving.
Not firelight. More like artificial lights.
And the rumble, weakened by the mountain terrain, seemed to be coming from that direction.
"Daryl," Bossie said over the radio, "you hear that? Eleven o'clock, near the ridgeline. Something's off... Looks like lights, and an engine."
Daryl immediately focused in that direction. He, too, barely caught a faint flash of reflected light nearly swallowed by the night.
"Yeah," he replied shortly, his finger silently settling on the crossbow trigger. "Not walkers. Looks like people. Tell Calista."
Bossie immediately reported the situation to Calista, who was sleeping inside the cabin.
Calista woke almost at once and moved silently to the window.
She narrowed her eyes and looked in the direction Bossie had indicated.
In the darkness, those faint specks of light flickered like fireflies, appearing and disappearing as they moved toward them at a decent speed.
Not walkers.
Something else. Or someone.
What would be out here in the mountains, in the middle of the night, with lights and an engine?
Then, as if it had spotted something, the light source suddenly rushed toward them. The roar grew with it, expanding at an astonishing speed.
Daryl snapped his head up and looked toward the sound, his pupils shrinking sharply.
He did not even have time to give a full warning over the communicator. All he managed was a short, sharp shout.
"Above!"
Almost the next instant,
WHUMP-WHUMP-WHUMP!!!
A deafening roar slammed into everyone's ears.
A massive, shadowy UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter swept low over the valley where they were, skimming the treetops with almost brutal force.
The violent airflow stirred up by its rotors made the cabin creak, sent the trees thrashing wildly, and whipped fallen leaves and dust from the ground into the air.
The enormous noise crashed and echoed again and again through the narrow valley, swallowing every other sound.
...
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