In reply to Roberta Johnson (msg # 938):

Rod was glad and concerned. His route had supposed to be the safer, longer route. Giving a wide brith to the hordes and the raiders. Something bad happened to those folk anyways...

Then he noticed the look on Roberta's face as she asked for the magnifying glass. "What is it?" He asked.
This message was last edited by the player at 16:31, Mon 03 May 2021.

"Ah, sure." One the others said, a tall teen-aged girl who needed to wear less revealing clothes. "Here."

Roberta set the photo flat under a desk lamp and slid the magnifying lens over it at different heights until the image was smooth and clear. Her heart leapt and fell at the same time. She was thrilled at spotting john and their children in the cab of the pickup truck. But, she was horrified to know that the photo was taken in such a dangerous zone of undead activity, three days ago.

It occurred to Rod immediately. He had heard her talk about them often enough. Ivy stepped in close and almost whispered in her ear.

"Is it them?" She asked in a small hopeful voice.

"In the cab," she said, taking a breath, "that's my husband and kids."

It was a miracle she'd found them like this by happenstance.  Everything that had happened getting them to this point, these people, and this picture.  She knew where they were three days ago and where they were going.

It looked like Rod was going to get his road trip.

In reply to Roberta Johnson (msg # 941):

"No fucking way!" Rod said, in shock. He had always written off Roberta's family as dead. Walking corpses everywhere were bad enough, but nuking the city they lived in? There seemed like no chance. He always figured Roberta would come to her senses sooner or later. He supposed it was difficult for him to have that sort of hope. He had seen everyone he cared about fall to the dead.

"Are...are we sure this is a real photo?" He said, sounding dumb even to him. Who had access to photoshop these days? And even if they did, why would they fake a photo of Roberta's family?

"There's no way anyone could know what my husband looked like or have a reason to put him there," Roberta replied, taking the question seriously.  "For whatever reason, it just is."

But Rod's question sparked a problem solving section of her brain into a subconscious effort to come up with a reason why someone would try to make her turn back south.  Some reason in this chaotic existence they all fought to survive in.

Given her work in artificial intelligence and how close she knew they were, it could be some new entity at work.  Perhaps one that even created this world they now lived in.  Accidentally or purposefully for it's own logical reasons trying to erase the human species from the face of the planet.  A real Skynet or Matrix unleashed upon the world now seeking out AI specialists for its own alien purpose.

Watson run amok?  The project she'd been a part of ended the world as they knew it?  Now hunting down the few that could possibly stop it?

Than again, it was infinitely more likely the photo was real and that fate just gave her another chance at filling that gaping hole in her heart left by the world they now lived in.

"Yeah, Axel Roderick took that photo three days ago." A woman said. "At first we overlooked it. My guess is it was in the stack that Mary and Nick were sorting through. They aren't familiar with any of the people in our team that went south. They probably just thought it was locals or other refugees."

The woman looked at the annotations at the corner of the picture. She checked the coordinates on the map and them circled a location on the big map on the wall.

"They are here." She said pointed to the map but looking at Roberta. "Just outside of the town of Stevenson, Alabama. It's a rural area near the Tennessee River in Alabama, located on highway 72."

Another man spoke up, "I used to live in Jackson County, on Sand Mountain. You can drive there in like an hour or so under normal conditions. You could be there by tonight with how the word is now."

"Larry, go ask Alma about Charlie, he could fly them down there in like twenty five minutes." The woman said. Without a word the man turned and left to do just that.

Roberta's first thought was whether the Subaru would fit in the plane.  She wanted to get to her family as fast as she could, but dropped off in the middle of a hostile environment with whatever they could carry didn't sound especially good.

"How long did it take your team to get that far?" she asked.  From their earlier discussions, it sounded like it was going to be three days, but maybe they could do better with Rod's driving.

She flipped through the rest of the photos from that trip to see how dense the infected population was in the area.

Roberta flipped through the photos again. In sequence this time. Yours of tracking subtle clues in digital coding and algorithmic displays allowed her to pick up on a pattern in the photos. They were shot while flying steady, concentric orbits of an area but all the areas in question contained sizable hordes of undead. Taken a whole it simply looked as if the whole area was infested when in reality it showed the movement pattern of the hordes. And the areas not photographed at all or very little obviously sufficient undead to be worth a photograph.

(OOC: Roberta please make an Ingenuity test to realize some other information locked in the photos that has been overlooked.)

Rod checking the maps against the call logs and followed the team that lost contact. They seemed to have done much of the same type of traveling as Team Subaru, that is avoiding masses of undead or unfriendly survivors as they traveled. That meant they were going in blind. A light came on in his mind, blind, he almost laughed. The plane was following the progress of the team instead of leading it. A basic, but deadly, mistake.

In reply to GM (msg # 946):

"We need to do both." Rod said. "A team on the ground, and a plane in the sky reporting on possible threats. I can be on the ground team, I'm good behind the wheel. Who's coming with me?" He said, looking about.

"I'll drive as well," Roberta replied to Rod without looking up.  She wanted to be more than a spectator from a plane if they did spot her family again.  That and she couldn't abandon the lucky Subaru.

"The folks who took these photos," she said, holding up the stack she was looking at, "did they maybe have a tendency to take pictures of large groups of infected and skip shots that didn't look as interesting?"

Of course it would look like there were infected everywhere if they only took shots of the infected.  Shots of empty streets and buildings were boring.  Boring, but a safe route as Rod was pointing out.

OOC: Roberta Johnson rolled 10 using 3d4+2.  Ingenuity photo synthesis!

Roberta looked over the photos again. A pattern emerged. The plane was flying in overlaying orbits taking photos and making report on the movements of the undead. Quickly she began to suss out the general flow of the undead as a migration of many hordes that were all simply a group of undead following other groups of undead. The non-photographed areas would therefore be more along the lines of safe zones that were reasonably clear of undead.

She felt thrilled. It was all starting to take shape in her thoughts. Looking at the map and thinking of their on trek northward she recalled some of the areas that had been clear. Many of them were close to the areas near where her family was last sighted. But, she knew they needed to get rolling soon. They were close enough to the disaster zone of Chattanooga to be in danger.

Rod nodded, but he should of known Roberta would want to be on the ground. At risk. If she really wanted to see her family again, she should be in the air-but there was no way to get her to cooperate.

He turned to the others. "My flatbed can hold a bunch of people in the back, plus its all terrain. We need to leave the highway we can cut cross country."

Roberta took the photos and checked the route Rod had been plotting and fine tuned it to catch up with her family.

"We're leaving in an hour," she announced.  All she really wanted was that big radio installed in the Subaru and she was ready to go.  They had enough stocked up and they'd be able to top off their gas on the road.

Alma walked up to the Roberta and Rod as they made their last minute preparations. She looked pained, like she was about deliver bad news. Rod felt apprehensive and decided to busy himself by put pistol magazines into a pillow case to keep handing in the truck.

"I have some news for you. Your friend Ivy wants to stay here, with us." Alma said. "She asked me to tell you, she couldn't face you. She was afraid of hurting your feelings since you were going after you man, your kids. She had been crying for last half hour."

She sighed, saying the words had let the tension ease of. Alma looked around and then back to Roberta. "Don't be too upset with her, life is harder now. On the plus side, R.J. will be taking off in about five minutes to scout ahead for you. He asked that you paint an X on top of your vehicles with this."

She held out her hand with a spray can of luminous yellow safety paint. Rod almost felt like laughing. Safety paint, as if anything in the world was safe anymore.

"We knew Ivy was looking to split off from us," Roberta replied to Alma as she took the spray paint can.  "I'm glad she found such a good place and thank you for your help as well.

"Rod, your truck is easier to spot as it is, you should paint the X on your roof."

The Subaru had already had the indignity of being shot up, she was not going to have it tagged like an abandoned vehicle alongside the road.

In reply to GM (msg # 952):

Rod took the paint, but frowned. He knew Ivy might stay. Hell, he was thinking about staying. This was the first stable group they had found on this crazy road trip.

Still, he had wanted to say goodbye to Ivy. He had been really upset when she had gone missing. He had been really happy to find her alive and well. He had hoped she would come to the boat...although the trip there was risky.

"Ah...do me a favor. Give her this for me." He handed Alma a small set of metal dice, wielded together. "For luck. They where always lucky for me."

He then spray painted the top of the truck, and got ready to go.

The road was smooth, the big tires on the truck made that deep droning noise. Rod kept his eyes peeled but he knew what was coming; they were getting route updates every ten minutes from the scout plane. Still, at the speeds they were traveling he couldn't bring himself not look for trouble in every shadow or around each turn.

Roberta was excited, worried, and curious all at once. She couldn't wait to see her family. And her speed showed that. It still bothered her to be driving so fast these days. She was worried about them, about getting there and losing their trail. She knew the dangers they faced, that they all faced. And she was more than a little curious as to how they had managed to get so far south when she had struggled to only get this far north. It didn't matter, she told herself, anything he had done to get them here was worth it.

"Coming up on the interchange." Roy said from the plane. They could see him several miles ahead making a small orbit over were the highway disappeared as it crossed the mountain top. "There is a considerable number of those walking corpses up here. Be careful."

Trying to relax her grip on the wheel, Roberta slowed down so she wasn't riding Rod's bumper.  If he had to take evasive action, she wanted time to react.

It was quiet riding in the car alone.  She missed having Rod and Ivy as a presence beside her.  Soon enough, though, she'd have John and the kids with her.  She used to think riding with teenagers was the worst with their earbuds in and just staring out the window.  Missed opportunities she wasn't going to let get away again.

Once more, she consciously slowed down to give Rod his space.

"Got it." Rod replied to the radio message. "Rodger. Ummm...over. Whatever the thingy is." Rod focused on the road, and was trying to keep watch for sudden attacks.

The interchange was a mess. Cars blocked half of the roadway and undead shambled about in the rest of the area. There were over a dozen recently devoured corpses in the road at various points. The freshness of the grizzly scene was horrific. Very little tissue was left, even the hands and feet had been nearly stripped to clean, white bones.

Rod used the truck to push the undead aside or simply ran them over. Roberta struggled to keep the Subaru as impact free as she could following in the truck's wake, but there was the occasional bump or boink as she followed along.

They were nearly through the interchange, almost ten minutes to take a two minute trip, when they neared a service station out to the side of the highway. There was quite a gathering of undead there. Atop the awning covering the gas pumps were several people. Underneath them was a Ford Econoline Van at the pumps. There was a generator sitting next to the van that was hooked up to a pump with its cover removed.

Clever Rod thought, just bring your own power and make the pump work for you. Roberta saw the van and understood in an instant; the noise of the generator had drawn the undead faster than they could get the fuel out.

There were several undead on the ground, probably more on the other side of the van. Judging by were the van sat, they must have climbed on top and then onto the awning to hide from the undead. That was smart, out of sight is out of mind with undead.

Normally Rod would have wanted to check the place out for something useful. However, they needed to get to where they where going. The longer they took, the less likely Roberta's family would be there. He decided to keep driving, thinking they had enough fuel. If people where there, Rod would be leaving them in a lurch. So he slowed a bit, honked the horn, and lead the undead in a pointless chase after his truck. If there was anyone alive, they now had a chance to get away...and he could keep going to his destination.

"Roy, there's some people stuck at the gas station," she said into the car's new radio handset.  "Not sure which way they're headed, but you could drop some fliers on them while they're waiting for the infected to move on."

She added a few honks to Rod's as they drove past.  She would have liked to do more, but their overhead spotter had fuel constraints and they were on a clock.

The people on top of the gas station looked on as the car and truck drove by honking their horns. Many of the undead began to shamble after the vehicles as quickly as they could. Atop the station the people cheered at first, than cursed, then stood there in awestruck confusion as the plane zoomed in from the distance and bombarded them with stacks of leaflets.

As they neared the needed lane of the interchange the highway turned steeply downhill. It was a series of long straight-sways and hairpin turns that zigzagged along the side of the mountain. Sometimes only a guardrail stood between them and a dropped off a hundred to several hundred feet. But, within twenty minutes they had skirted the worst of the undead and traffic jams to get down the mountain. It occurred to them that they had just traveled this way, going in the opposite direction just days ago.

The going was quick again. And the plane kept them appraised of the road's condition. They were getting close, Roberta new it, she had memorized this part of their journey. She pushed down her feelings of angst and focused on the road.

A sign ahead advertised the Walmart in Kimball, Tennessee. She smiled, they would soon be getting off there to turn west. As they approached the exit there was an explosion. It looked as if it came from the parking lot of the Walmart, no less.

"Roy, can you see that explosion at the Walmart?" Roberta asked over the handset.  She couldn't see the plane most of the time and knew he had to do a lot of circles so she wasn't sure what he could see at any moment.

"And when do you need to turn back?" she asked, keying the mic again.

They still weren't near the last sighting of her family in Alabama heading south, so it was unlikely to be them.

In reply to Roberta Johnson (msg # 962):

Rod listened to the conversation as Roberta asked the important questions. He did wonder what the hell was going on at Wallmart. Granted, there had been times he wanted to blow the place up...but not after the dead started walking around.