Sure enough, it didn't take long before someone came asking about their price.Gus didn't waste time. He laid everything out, rice, flour, cooking oil, cigarettes, liquor, canned goods, gas, diesel, weapon cards, prop cards, and even the enhancement cards they'd just pulled that day.Anyone with a healing card could trade for any of it.Everything except the cigarettes and liquor counted as serious currency out here.Jake's attention locked onto those two enhancement cards specifically. Cards like that rarely circulated at all, most people used them the instant they landed in their hands.Made sense. An enhancement card built up your actual body. Out here, physical strength was survival, plain and simple.Jake wasn't the only one eyeing them either. Several people threw lingering looks at the cards, fishing around for a price without directly asking.Watching that play out, Gus and Marv let a faint, satisfied smile slip through.Everyone out here had survived long enough to see throug

The second that blue card landed in his hand, Jake couldn't hold back his excitement, the cost to get there hadn't been small, but to him, every bit of it had been worth it.His mind went straight to the rare cards.Ordinary cards wouldn't justify this kind of setup. Rare ones were a completely different equation.Trading a handful of grenades for a shot at something rare? Anyone would take that deal without blinking.It took a while to settle back down, and once he did, Jake started turning over ways to refine the process further.The standard four-second fuse delay was still too long. He needed to shorten that, it'd lock in the airburst timing and let him drop from a lower altitude for tighter accuracy."How exactly do people shorten a grenade fuse, anyway?"Jake had never served, never taken a grenade apart in his life. He genuinely had no idea where to start."Guess I'm asking one of the crazier guys in the Caravan about this."Plenty of people out here weren't just aggressive abo

For a Caravan on the move, that cloud mass didn't just bring wind and rain, it brought infected too.Infected generally avoided sunlight, sticking to cool, shaded spots during the day and only emerging in numbers once night fell.This weather shift had scrambled that pattern almost completely, flushing plenty of infected out of hiding early, adding a fresh layer of danger to an already difficult stretch of travel.No telling what else waited further down the road. Better safe, the Caravan abandoned the idea of pushing forward entirely.Given how vicious this storm was, with no way to guess when it might let up, the group had no choice but to find the highest ground available and hunker down.Flooding could easily prove fatal for a group this loaded down with vehicles.Finding a decent camp took longer than expected, the wind and rain grounded the drones entirely, costing valuable time. Two hours passed before the group finally settled.Jake spotted a house on elevated ground, parked o

Right then, Old Kessler sighed and pivoted the conversation. "Sounds like you two already know how tight things are for me and my nephew..."Both men internally rolled their eyes at that.Weren't we just told this wasn't about handouts? What's with the sob story now?"Since we're all running low on options anyway, I'll cut to it. I've got a lucrative deal on the table, and I'd like to bring you two in..."Nobody outside that room ever learned exactly how the conversation ended. All anyone knew was that when Old Kessler stepped back out, he was working hard to keep his face neutral, but there was a flicker of something sharp behind his eyes....Jake had no idea any of this was happening. He kept to his usual routine, most of his attention pointed outside, watching the storm, wondering when it might finally break, whether the flooding might drag more infected in, or whether that impossible thing from the sky might circle back.By evening, he headed downstairs again to start dinner. Out

While the fight raged on Jake's end, inside another house nearby, Sierra stood behind the curtains, sighing as she tried to talk Nikki down."You're really going to do this? Think it through. We just got ourselves settled in this Caravan. Get involved in this, and we're one bad look away from getting kicked out entirely."Beside her, Nikki had a suppressed rifle braced and ready, scope locked without a flicker, aimed straight at Marv as he pushed himself upright in the hallway across the way.Even buried under the storm, the fight between Jake and the others hadn't gone unnoticed. Gunfire and grenade blasts didn't exactly sound like thunder, no matter how hard the rain tried to cover it.Anyone living close enough to that house had caught on fast, and more than a few people were watching from behind their own windows right now.Nikki and Sierra were among them.Through a pair of high-powered binoculars, the two of them had watched most of it unfold. No idea what had started the fight