I laid it out for Rick the next morning at the edge of camp, with a stick and a patch of dirt.
"Everything in this camp is in the open. Tents, cars, kids. One loud night and the walkers find us. We need a perimeter: wrecked cars on the roadside, a rope line with cans on the woods side, and a watch rotation so nobody sleeps through it."
Rick studied my scratches in the dirt. "That's a good plan." He paused. "Where did you learn to plan like this?"
"Too many nights watching people do it wrong," I said, which was the closest to the truth I could manage.
Shane argued, of course. He said the camp had been fine for weeks and that I was spooking everyone. But Rick sided with me, and that was that. For three days the whole camp turned into a construction site. Merle and I hauled wrecked cars into position, with Merle muttering the entire time and still pulling his weight. Daryl strung a cord of cans through the trees. Dale rearranged the RV. Morales and T-Dog dug trenches. Glenn ran supplies. My Building skill made every job faster, and I finally understood why God had given me Leadership as an Advanced skill: it made people want to follow the plan.
On the third evening, the system finally chimed.
Territory established: Quarry Camp. NPC packs unlocked. Reminder: NPCs eat one ration per day, each. Rations cost 1 coin, or drop from zombies at about 1 in 10.
I opened the store. Builders, doctors, soldiers, cooks. Each pack cost 500 coins, and my wallet held 674.
I chose the Builder pack. A camp that could build its own walls was worth more than another gun. I tapped confirm, and my wallet dropped to 174.
At dawn, five people walked out of the woods at the edge of camp, carrying tools. A tired-looking man with a gray beard led them. "Name's Walt," he said. "We were in a convoy that got hit. Heard you folks were putting up a fence, so we figured you could use some help."
They weren't from a convoy, of course. I'd bought them. But it wasn't a lie the whole camp needed to hear. Walt and his builders started on a fence line before breakfast, and by lunch it looked like a real wall.
I did the math on the way back from lunch. Five NPCs meant five rations a day. At one coin a ration, I'd be spending money just to keep them fed, which meant the camp needed hunters, a garden, and a lot of dead zombies. This was a good deal, but it wasn't a free one.
Rose found me while I was thinking, holding a tin of beans. "Dad says we should help Walt."
"Dad?" I looked down. Fenrir sat at her feet, tail wagging. "Oh. You mean him."
"No," Rose said, grinning. "I mean you."
I covered my face with my hand, and she laughed for the first time since I'd found her.
The Night Shift
The cans woke me.
I was up and moving before I knew I was awake, with my rifle in one hand and Dawn already at my side. In the quarry, the rope line was clanging so loudly I could hear it over the wind. In the dark beyond the fence, dozens of shapes were moving through the trees. Then hundreds.
"Everybody up!" I shouted. "Walkers, east side!"
The camp erupted. Rick and Shane ran for the cars, Daryl was already in a tree with his crossbow, and Merle came out of his tent with a pipe and a grin that I almost liked. Walt's builders took the wall. I took the gap.
The fence held for a while. Then the walkers came through the weak spot on the north side, and I met them there with my knife and the squad, and from then on I stopped counting. Thor took a walker down by the leg. Rex hit another from the side. Dawn was a streak of yellow in the dark, and Fenrir, who never moved fast, did whatever Fenrir did to anything that came near me. With every kill, a coin clinked into my wallet, and the Z-Slayer title kept the stamina coming. I kept my eye on the camp.
Then I saw Amy.
She was on the wrong side of the wall, running back toward the camp from the outhouse, with a walker three steps behind her. I was too far away to shoot safely. I ran. I covered forty yards in what felt like four seconds and drove my shoulder into the walker's side just as it grabbed her hair. We went down together. I put my knife through its head and rolled up on one knee.
Amy looked at me, shaking, with her hand over her mouth.
"Go to Andrea," I said. "Go now."
She ran.
That was one life. I'd been so busy with Amy that I'd lost track of Ed.
He had been drunk and had sneaked out past the perimeter looking for more liquor, which was exactly the kind of idiot move I'd feared. When I found him, he was on the ground by the treeline, screaming, with four walkers on him. I killed three. The fourth took longer than it should have. When I finally pulled it off, Ed's neck was already open.
I knelt beside him, and the system flashed in front of my eyes.
Survivor lost: Ed Peletier. Penalty: −10 Z coins.
I closed the window and stood up. I'd wanted to fix Ed's life, or at least his death, but it hadn't worked out that way. Carol didn't cry. She stood over his body with her hand on Sophia's shoulder, and what I saw in her face wasn't grief. It was something heavier, and a lot closer to relief.
We held the quarry. When the sun came up, the field outside the fence was covered with dead walkers. When the last one fell, the Z-Slayer title ticked over, and I checked the wallet.
Wallet: 494 Z coins
That was close to three hundred and thirty coins from one night. It was also ammo, repairs, and a month of rations for the builders. I'd take it.
But when I turned back toward the camp, Dale was standing at the edge of the field, looking at a shovel in a man's hand. Jim, the quiet guy who had been digging graves for the dead, was sitting on a log with his sleeve pulled down over his forearm.
I checked his status through the system, and the number I saw froze me.
Jim Condition: Infected. Estimated time remaining: 31 hours.